by Jim Butcher
A group of noisy children in private-school uniforms came trooping by, and Maggie flinched and withdrew into herself until they’d passed. After that, she stared grimly at the busy entrance to the zoo, looking for all the world like someone a great deal older who badly needed a cup of coffee. Then she sighed, squared her shoulders, and said, “Okay. Let’s see some animals.”
So we did.
THERE WAS A spectacularly good showing from the animals in their various enclosures. The otters played with bombastic fervor. The tigers prowled back and forth at the very front of their pen. One of the polar bears stood up on his hind legs, and a sun bear enthusiastically tore apart a log just as we came walking up. I mean, if I hadn’t known better, I would think they were putting on a show.
Maggie was enchanted, her little face stretching into one quiet smile after another, though she rarely stepped far enough away from the dog beside her to cease being in physical contact with him.
The lion actually roared, a sound that shook the air and sent a dozen people scurrying a few steps back. But not Maggie. Though she flinched whenever anyone walked too close to her, she regarded the lion with an intent gaze, as the beast finished his pronouncement and shook his mane with lazy majesty.
“Awesome,” she said after, and her smile was a sunbeam.
“Yeah,” I said, quietly. “Awesome.”
The actual lion’s roar had been a little too much. There was no way all the animals would be showing off like this without some kind of intervention, and I knew I hadn’t done it. I eyed Mouse with some suspicion.
The dog noticed and dropped his jaws open into a guileless canine grin, panting happily and wagging his tail. I arched an eyebrow at him and shook my head. The beastie was full of incompletely understood yet helpful magic, but he couldn’t play poker to save his life.
Get it? The dog. Playing poker. That’s an art joke.
I may not know humor, but I know what I like.
We had just turned to head toward the gorilla house when my day started getting complicated.
I felt it at first as a series of flickering sensations against my forehead. It reminded me of a moth fluttering against a lit wall—constant and random flutters, somehow conveying confusion, frustration, and fear. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and a quick check around showed me at least three different people who were suddenly perplexed that their electronic devices had started malfunctioning.
Magic was in the air—and it wasn’t coming from me.
“Um. Dad?” Maggie asked me.
I eyed her. She was looking at me in mild confusion. Then I saw her eyes widen as she had some kind of realization, and she moved to stand with Mouse on one side of her and me on the other. “Is there something bad?”
I felt my shoulders tighten into iron bands. Dammit. This day was supposed to go smoothly—just dad-and-daughter time, where Maggie knew that she was the most important thing in the world to me.
God knew I’d been away from her long enough.
The last thing I needed was for her to think I took my job more seriously than I took her. But at the same time, wizarding work wasn’t the kind of thing that came with regular hours. Or dental insurance. Also, there was the minor issue that the moral obligation to do the right thing didn’t suddenly go away due to inconvenience.
“Maybe,” I said. I looked at her. “Maybe nothing. I don’t know. I need to look around and see what’s going on. I need to put you in a safe spot before I do that.”
Maggie stared at a spot in the middle distance, chewing on her lower lip. “It’s important, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” I said. I nodded toward the café that served the zoo. “How about we go get a booth and order some food? You and Mouse sit, and I’ll go look around and be back before the food gets there.”
Maggie’s arms tightened around the dog’s neck. She looked at him, then at me, and nodded her little chin firmly. “Yeah. I guess that’s okay.”
“How about it, Mouse?” I asked. “Can you behave yourself around food?”
My dog was staring out across the park, in what would have been considered a pensive expression had we all been cartoon characters. He made a noise in his chest that was part whine and part rumble.
“Trouble, boy?” I asked. It wasn’t cliché dialogue. Mouse was better than me at sensing trouble coming, and had proved it on multiple occasions.
He stayed staring for a minute, then exhaled slowly and looked up at me. His ears perked up and he wagged his tail. I took that to mean that all was well. “All right,” I said, and wagged my finger at him. “Be good.”
“Whuff,” Mouse said.
“He’s always good,” Maggie said, and kissed his ear. She had to lean down only a little to do it, and he lifted his head obligingly.
“Okay,” I said.
We got seats in the restaurant, and I ordered some French fries and left Maggie with a twenty to pay for more if she needed it. I made sure she was comfortable, got Mouse settled in at her feet, and strode briskly outside, carefully opening my wizard’s senses.
Magic is a living, breathing force, but nothing makes it stir and swirl as much as human beings, and especially human emotion. Based on what a given person is feeling and how strong an emotion they are experiencing, magic can quiver and pulse like the cover to a rock-concert speaker, vibrating hard against the senses of anyone born with the ability to sense it. More people have that than you’d think: folks who get unexpectedly creeped out in the woods, who sense that something seems particularly ominous about a darkened parking garage, who sometimes feel something in the air that grates against them and makes them abruptly cross the street for no particular reason—they’re mostly gifted with sensitivity. If they trust their instincts, such senses can help them avoid no end of possible trouble.
For example, I could, with a little concentration, feel an intense and unpleasant sense of unease off to my right, along one of the park’s paths. Even as I watched, I saw half a dozen people either swerve off to one side, apparently distracted by something else, or else simply change their minds and not follow the path. Their instincts were serving them well.
My instincts frequently roll their eyes at the decisions my brain makes. I walked firmly, directly, into the unpleasant energy and started looking for trouble.
I found it within fifty yards, in the shadiest part of the path, where the park’s trees and bushes and the walls of the various buildings and enclosures hoarded a cluster of shadow that shouldn’t have been quite as dim as it was.
A young man in a black hoodie stood in the shade, hands thrust deep into his pockets. The air around him pulsed with anger and a fear that was near panic. The air around him thrummed with tension and energy, far more of it than a vanilla mortal should be able to emit. He was slender, and though I could only see a bit of his face in profile, the acne was visible enough.
Stars and stones.
A warlock.
Magic sort of bursts onto the scene with most youngsters, who find themselves in possession of talents and powers that must seem as if they simply emerged from a beloved series of children’s novels. Ideally, word of such gifts gets to the White Council, who dispatches someone to make sure the emerging talent receives training appropriate to prevent them from doing any harm with their powers.
The ideal was too rare, and getting rarer. As the population increased, more and more gifted children were emerging, and it was just possible that the group of three-hundred-year-olds who commanded the White Council were … somewhat slow to adapt to changing conditions among mortal kind. When a child fell through the (widening) cracks, their talents could emerge in frightening, even violent ways, often to such a degree that they were forced to flee their homes and communities. Those kids were then forced to cope with life alone and their emerging talents all at once.
A lot of them used their gifts in the worst ways. Unforgiveable ways. Kids like that were known as warlocks, and the Council dealt with them harshly and permanentl
y.
I stared at the kid for a while.
I’d been that kid for a while.
Then I did something I don’t do very often: I turned my back and walked away.
“WHAT WAS IT?” Maggie asked me when I got back. She looked nervous, and wiggled a bit in her seat.
I debated whether to play it down. She didn’t need to be any more anxious than she already was. But … Enough time in the saddle as a wizard had taught me that there are bad repercussions when I keep people in my life in the dark, even when I’m only trying to protect them.
I looked down at her open, earnest face and her huge eyes.
Yeah.
I didn’t need to start off my relationship with my daughter by repeating some of my classic mistakes.
“A warlock,” I said quietly. “A young wizard whose power is not in control. Dangerous.”
Her eyes widened. “Did you fight it?”
“Him,” I said. “No.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because most of the time, they never meant to do anything bad,” I said. “They don’t even understand what’s happening to them. No one has warned them what will happen if they break the rules.”
“That’s not fair,” Maggie said.
“No,” I said. “But that doesn’t make them any less dangerous.”
“Can’t you help?”
“Sometimes,” I said very quietly. “I’m not sure.”
She picked up a French fry and dipped it in a large mound of mustard. Not ketchup.
What?
She licked the mustard off the fry thoughtfully and then said, “But I’m here.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And you’re more important to me.”
She darted a look up at my eyes and smiled a little. Then she said, “They just get powers?”
I nodded. “Born to it, yeah.”
She nodded again and asked, “Am I going to get powers?”
“Maybe,” I said. “There’s no way to know for sure.”
“Weird,” she said. She passed the French fry to Mouse, who snapped it up. She picked up another fry, dipped it in mustard, and began to repeat what was obviously a well-rehearsed cycle. “If I do, will you teach me stuff? So no one gets hurt?”
“If you want me to,” I said.
She chewed her lip, looking intently at her fingers. “If … something happens to you, who is going to teach me?”
An invisible boxer socked me in the gut. “Nothing’s going to happen to me,” I said.
“It could,” Maggie said quietly. For those two words, her voice sounded older. Way too old for the little body it came from. “And maybe there wouldn’t be anyone. Maybe I’d be a warlock.”
I took a deep breath. She’d seen her foster family murdered. Horribly. And maybe she’d seen even worse. She knew what the world could be like sometimes. She’d probably seen worse than that kid in the black hoodie.
“Maybe,” I said.
“That could be me.” She nodded to herself several times and took a deep breath, as if getting ready to hold it. Then she looked up at me. “I can eat more French fries. Mouse will keep me company.”
“You sure?” I asked her. “It could … cut today kind of short.”
“If someone needs your help, you help them,” Maggie said simply. “Even when it’s really hard. Miss Molly told me that about you.”
Her eyes were searching, studying. I’ll be damned if the kid wasn’t assessing me warily, watching for my reaction. So young yet so cynical.
She must get it from her mother’s side.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling my face stretch into a smile. “Yeah. That’s right.”
I WENT BACK down the dark path, walking briskly. The thing about warlocks is that they really are damned dangerous. Without even knowing what they’re doing, they can turn their wills to the pursuit of black magic, and that has a degenerative, addictive effect on their psyches. Warlocks, caught in the grip of black magic, did the kinds of things that give coroners and psychologists nightmares. They don’t absolutely have to go completely off the rails, but most did. People in that frame of mind suddenly confronted by the White Council’s Wardens rarely chose to put up their hands and come quietly.
I remembered when the Wardens had come for me. Scary guys. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I’d have been just one more warlock slain while resisting arrest.
Maybe this kid was a dangerous monster. The sheer malice radiating from him was convincing enough.
Or maybe he was just a terrified kid.
I walked up to him quietly, my footsteps audible, cleared my throat, and said, “Hi.”
Hoodie turned to me, gave me half a glance, and snarled, “Get out of here.”
There was the force of magic in his voice, subtle power that tugged at my ear, made me want to lift my foot, pivot, and go the other way.
It wasn’t a very coherent compulsion. I waved it off with a defensive gesture of the fingers of my left hand. “Whoa, kid,” I said. “Save it for the tourists. You and I need to talk.”
That got his attention, pronto. His spine stiffened and he spun toward me on one heel, his shoulders tightening. He wasn’t tall, maybe five-six, and his shoulders were almost comically narrow, hunched up like that.
I sidled up and leaned a hip on the railing a few feet out of arm’s reach in front of him, crossing my arms. “When did it happen? Year ago? Year and a half?”
He had that wary poise of a wild animal, balanced and waiting to see which way would be the best to flee. His eyes were focused on the center of my chest. “Who are you?”
“Someone who had the same thing happen,” I said. “One day, things changed, and everything got weird. I thought I was going insane. So did my teachers.”
“You a cop?” the kid asked, his voice suddenly sharp.
“Kind of,” I said.
“I didn’t do nothin’,” he said.
I barked out a quick laugh. “Wow, are you not good at this. People who are innocent don’t have to walk around saying it.”
His face reddened and darkened at the same time. “You’d better be careful, asshole.”
“Or what?” I asked.
“Or something bad is going to happen to you.”
“Nah,” I said. “Won’t turn out like that.”
That ticked the kid off. His jaw clenched so hard that I thought he might crack some of his teeth. His fists clenched with audible popping sounds.
At the same time, the air grew thicker and tighter and more threatening, and there was a sudden rippling sensation against my skin, as if someone had abruptly torn a long strip out of the fabric of my blue jeans. Then there was a sound in the greenery, and my skin began to crawl on the back of my neck. I came on balance in an instant.
Remember those instincts I was talking about earlier? Mine were telling me that something dangerous had just come into the world.
The kid staggered suddenly and dropped to his knees, panting. Then his head came up, his eyes wide and everywhere. “Oh no,” he breathed. “Oh no, no, no, no.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I muttered, understanding what had happened.
The kid had a strong magical talent, and a gift for summoning. Magic is mostly in your head, and unfortunately for anyone who’s got to deal with us, human beings’ heads are murky, conflicted places. All kinds of things are going on in there, a lot of them under the surface, a lot of them not entirely in our own control.
Hoodie’s subconscious had gathered up all that anger and fear he’d been feeling and sent it spiking out of him like a kind of spiritual beacon; a beacon that had attracted the attention of something from the spiritual world—something that had just crossed into the shadows of the walkway.
The spirit world is the home of an unlimited variety of supernatural beings—but I was going to take a wild guess and assume that this one wasn’t a placid herbivore.
“Right here? In the park?” I demanded of the warlock in an aggrieved tone. “Hell’s bel
ls, kid.”
Hoodie just stared at me with frightened, confused eyes. That spiritual dinner bell he’d just unconsciously rung had taken a lot out of him. “I didn’t mean to. I never mean to!” Then his eyes widened. “You have to get out of here. Run!”
“First lesson,” I said. I took a couple of steps back from the kid and peered around the thick greenery, relying more on my wizard’s senses than on sight or hearing. “Running away from your problems rarely gets them solved.”
“You don’t get it,” Hoodie babbled. “It’s coming. It’s coming for you.”
“You don’t get it, kid,” I responded. “I—”
I had a second’s warning, maybe a little more. It came through the greenery, staying in the heaviest shadow it could. It erupted from the dark and took Hoodie’s legs out from under him as it went by. I had the flickering impression of a wolverine’s squat, powerful legs; a head too wide to be anything from this world; a thrashing, scaled tail; and crocodilian teeth. It went through the kid and straight for me, bounding for my throat.
I was already moving as it came. I swept my arm up in a vertical line, fingers locked and rigid like claws as I channeled my will into them and barked, “Aparturum!”
My fingers peeled back reality as they swept up, tearing open the veil between the mortal world and the world of spirit. The berserk whatever-it-was from the Nevernever, the spirit world, let out an abrupt, abbreviated shriek of frustration as it hurtled directly into the opening, passing from the mortal world and back into the spirit realm again.
“Instaurabos!” I shouted, whipping my hand back down along the rend, this time inverting my will and sealing closed the opening before the vicious little thing could turn and leap back out again. I could feel the normality rushing back in to seal over the rend in the veil, and could faintly sense several thumping protestations from the hungry spirit creature as it found itself sealed away from the mortal world again.
After a few seconds, the shadows seemed less thick, and the sun emerged from behind the clouds, sending golden shafts streaming onto the path.
Hoodie lay on the ground where he’d fallen, staring up at me in silence, his mouth open.
I walked over to him and dropped down to squat on my heels, resting my hands on my knees. “As I was saying,” I said. “You don’t get it, kid. I’m the guy who is ready for it. I’m a wizard.” I offered him my hand.
