by Jim Butcher
“It looks to me,” Michael said, “as if he wants you to be afraid.”
“So he threatens you?” I demanded. “That’s stupid.”
He smiled. “Do people threaten you very often?”
“Sure. All the time.”
“What happens when they do?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I say something mouthy,” I said. “Then I clean their clocks for them at the first opportunity.”
“Which is probably why our photographer here—”
“Call him Buzz,” I said. “It will make things simpler.”
“Why Buzz hasn’t bothered threatening you.”
I frowned. “So you’re saying Buzz knows me.”
“It stands to reason. It seems clear he’s trying to push you into some sort of reaction. Something he thinks you’ll do if you’re frightened.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“What do you think?” he replied.
I put my hand on the hilt of Amoracchius. The sword’s tip rested on the floorboards of the truck, between my feet.
“That would be my guess, too,” he said.
I frowned down at the blade and nodded. “Maybe Buzz figured I’d bring you the sword if you were in danger. So that . . .” I didn’t finish.
“So that I’d have some way of defending myself,” Michael said gently. “You can say it, Harry. You won’t hurt my feelings.”
I nodded at the true sword. “Sure you don’t want it?”
Michael shook his head. “I told you, Harry. That part of my life is over.”
“And what if Buzz makes good?” I asked quietly. “What if he kills you?”
Michael actually laughed. “I don’t think that’s going to happen,” he said. “But if it does ...” He shrugged. “Death isn’t exactly a terrifying proposition for me, Harry. If it was, I could hardly have borne the sword for as long as I did. I know what awaits me, and I know that my family will be taken care of.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I’m sure everything will be fine if your younger kids have to grow up without a father in their lives.”
He winced, and then he pursed his lips thoughtfully for a few moments before he replied. “Other children have,” he said finally.
“And that’s it?” I asked, incredulous. “You just surrender to whatever is going to happen?”
“It isn’t what I’d want—but a lot of things happen that I don’t want. I’m just a man.”
“The last thing I would expect from you,” I said, “is fatalism.”
“Not fatalism,” he said, his voice suddenly and unexpectedly firm. “Faith, Harry. Faith. This is happening for a reason.”
I didn’t answer him. From where I was standing, it looked like it was happening because someone ruthless and fairly intelligent wanted to get his hands on one of the swords. And worse, it looked like he was probably a mortal, too. If what Charity had said was accurate, that meant Michael didn’t have a heavenly insurance policy against the threat.
It also meant I would have to pull my punches—the First Law of Magic prohibited using it to kill a human being. There was some grey area involved with it, but not much, and it was the sort of thing that one didn’t play around with. The White Council enforced the laws, and anyone who broke them faced the very real possibility of a death sentence.
“And that’s all I need,” I muttered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Michael pulled the truck into the gravel parking lot of my apartment, in the basement of a big old boardinghouse. “I need to drop by a site before we go back to get your car. Is that all right?”
I took the sword with me as I got out of the truck. “Well,” I said, “as long as it’s all happening for a reason.”
MICHAEL’S SMALL COMPANY built houses. Years of vanishing at irregular intervals to battle the forces of evil had probably held him back from moving up to building the really expensive, really profitable places. So he built homes for the upper couple of layers of the middle class instead. He probably would have made more money if he cut corners, but it was Michael. I was betting that never happened.
This house was a new property, down toward Wolf Lake, and it had the depressing look of all construction sites—naked earth, trees bulldozed and piled to one side, and the standard detritus of any such endeavor: mud, wood, garbage discarded by the workers, and big old boot tracks all over the ground. Half a dozen men were at work, putting up the house’s skeleton.
“Shouldn’t take me long,” Michael said.
“Sure,” I said. “Go to it.”
Michael hopped down from the truck and gimped his way over to the house, moving with an energy and purpose I’d seldom seen from him. I frowned after him, and then pulled the first envelope out of my pocket and started looking at the photos inside.
The photo of Michael at a building site had been taken at this one. Buzz had been here, watching Michael.
He might still be here now.
I got out of the car and slung the sword’s belt over my shoulder, so that it hung with its hilt sticking up next to my head. Photo in hand, I started circling the site, trying to determine where Buzz had been standing when he’d taken his picture. I got some looks from the men on the job—but as I said before, I’m used to that kind of thing.
It took me only a couple of minutes to find the spot Buzz had used—a shadowed area of weeds and scrub brush behind the pile of felled trees. It was obscured enough to offer a good hiding spot, if no one was looking particularly hard, but far enough away that he had to have used a zoom lens of some kind to get those pictures. I had heard that digital cameras could zoom in to truly ridiculous levels these days.
I found footprints.
Don’t read too much into that. I’m not Ranger Rick or anything, but I had a teacher who made sure I spent my share of time hiking and camping in the rugged country of the Ozarks, and he taught me the basics—where to look, and what to look for. The showers last night had wiped away any subtle signs, but I wouldn’t have trusted my own interpretation of them in any case. I did find one clear footprint, of a man’s left boot, fairly deep, and half a dozen partials and a few broken branches in a line leading away. He’d come here, hung around for a while, then left.
Which just about anyone could have deduced from the photo, even if he hadn’t seen any tracks.
I had this guy practically captured already.
There weren’t any bubble-gum wrappers, discarded cigarettes, or fortuitously misplaced business cards that would reveal Buzz’s identity. I hadn’t really thought there would be, but you always look.
I slogged across the muddy ground back toward the truck, when the door of one of the contractors’ vans opened, and a prematurely balding thin guy with a tool belt and a two-foot reel of electrician’s wire staggered out. He had a shirt with a name tag that read CHUCK. Chuck wobbled to one side, dragging the handles of some tools along the side panel of Michael’s truck, leaving some marks.
I glanced into the van. There was an empty bottle of Jim Beam inside, with a little still dribbling out the mouth.
“Hey, Chuck,” I said. “Give you a hand with that?”
He gave me a bleary glance that didn’t seem to pick up on anything out of the ordinary about me or the big old sword hanging over my shoulder. “Nah. I got it.”
“It’s cool,” I said. “I’m going that way anyhow. And those things are heavy.” I went over to him and seized one end of the reel, taking some of the weight.
The electrician’s breath was practically explosive. He nodded a couple of times and shifted his grip on the reel. “Okay, buddy. Thanks.”
We carried the heavy reel of wire over to the house. I had to adjust my steps several times, to keep up with the occasional drunken lurch from Chuck. We took the wire to the poured-concrete slab that was going to be the garage at some point, it looked like, and dropped it off.
“Thanks, man,” Chuck said, his sibilants all mushy.
“Sure,” I s
aid. “Look, uh. Do you really think you should be working with electricity right now, Chuck?”
He gave me an indignant, drunken glare. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, you just, uh, look a little sick, that’s all.”
“I’m just fine,” Chuck slurred, scowling. “I got a job to do.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Kind of a dangerous job. In a big pile of kindling.”
He peered at me. “What?” It came out more like “Wha?”
“I’ve been in some burning buildings, man, and take it from me, this place . . .” I looked around at the wooden framework. “Fwoosh. I’m just saying. Fwoosh.”
He worked on that one for a moment, and then his face darkened into a scowl again. He turned and picked up a wrench from a nearby toolbox. “Buzz off, freak. Before I get upset.”
I wasn’t going to do anyone any favors by getting into half of a drunken brawl with one of Michael’s subcontractors. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but they were all at other parts of the house, I guessed. So I just held up one hand in front of me and said, mildly, “Okay. I’m going.”
Chuck watched me as I walked out of the garage. I looked around until I spotted the power lines running into the house, and then I followed the trench they were buried in back to the street until I got to the transformer. I looked up at it, glanced around a little guiltily, and sighed. Then I waved my hand at the thing, exerted my will, and muttered, “Hexus.”
Wizards and technology don’t get along. At all. Prolonged exposure to an active wizard has really detrimental effects on just about anything manufactured after World War II or so, especially anything involving electricity. My car breaks down every couple of weeks, and that’s when I’m not even trying. When I’m making an effort?
The transformer exploded in a humming shower of blue-white sparks, and the sound of an electric saw, somewhere on the site, died down to nothing.
I went back to the truck and sat quietly until Michael returned.
He gave me a steady look.
“It was in the name of good,” I said. “Your electrician was snockered. By the time the city gets by to repair it, he’ll have sobered up.”
“Ah,” Michael said. “Chuck. He’s having trouble at home.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s got a wife, a daughter,” Michael said. “And I know the look.”
“Maybe if he spent less time with Jim Beam,” I said, “it’d go better.”
“The booze is new,” Michael said, looking worriedly at the house. “He’s a good man. He’s in a bad time.” He glanced back at me a moment later. “Thank you. Though perhaps next time . . . you could just come tell me about it?”
Duh, Harry. That probably would have worked, too. I shook my head calmly. “That’s not how I roll.”
“How you roll?” Michael asked, smiling.
“I heard Molly say it once. So it must be cool.”
“How you roll.” Michael shook his head and started the truck. “Well. You were trying to help. That’s the important thing.”
Harry Dresden. Saving the world, one act of random destruction at a time.
“OKAY,” I SAID to Molly as I prepared to get into my car. “Just keep your wits about you.”
“I know,” she said calmly.
“If there’s any trouble, you call the cops,” I said. “This guy looks to be operating purely vanilla, but he can still kill you just fine.”
“I know, Harry.”
“If you see him, do not approach him—and don’t let your dad do it, either.”
Molly rolled her eyes in exasperation. Then she muttered a quick word and vanished. Gone. She was standing within an arm’s length of me, but I couldn’t see her at all. “Let’s see the bozo shoot this,” said her disembodied voice.
“And while we’re at it, let’s hope he isn’t using a heat-sensitive scope,” I said drily.
She flickered back into sight, giving me an arch look. “The point is that I’m perfectly capable of keeping a lookout and yelling if there’s trouble. I’ll go with Dad to softball, and you’ll be the second person I call if there’s a whiff of peril.”
I grunted. “Maybe I should go get Mouse. Let him stay with you, too.”
“Maybe you should keep him close to the swords,” Molly said quietly. “My dad’s just a retired soldier. The swords are icons of power.”
“The swords are bits of sharp metal. The men who hold them make them a threat.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed, my dad isn’t one of those men anymore,” Molly said. She tucked a trailing strand of golden hair behind one ear and frowned up at me worriedly. “Are you sure this isn’t about you blaming yourself for what happened to my dad?”
“I don’t blame myself,” I said.
My apprentice arched an extremely skeptical eyebrow.
I looked away from her.
“You wanna talk to me about it?”
“No,” I said. I suddenly felt very tired. “Not until I’m sure the swords are safe.”
“If he knew where to send the pictures,” Molly said, “then he knows where your house is.”
“But he can’t get inside. Even if he could get the doors or one of the windows to open, the wards would roast him.”
“And your wards are perfect,” Molly said. “There’s no way anyone could get around them, ever. The way you told me those necromancers did a few years ago.”
“They didn’t go around,” I said. “They went through. But I see your point. If I have to, I’ll take one of the Ways to Warden’s command center at Edinburgh and leave the swords in my locker.”
Molly’s eyes widened. “Wow. A locker?”
“Technically. I haven’t used it. I’ve got the combination written down. Somewhere. On a napkin. I think.”
“Does it hurt to be as suave as you, boss?”
“It’s agonizing.”
“Looks it.” Her smile faded. “What are you going to do after you’re sure the swords are safe?”
She hadn’t thought it through. She didn’t know what was going to happen in the next few minutes. So I gave her my best fake grin and said, “One step at a time, grasshopper. One step at a time.”
I BEGAN POURING my will into my shield bracelet about half a mile from home. That kind of active magic wasn’t good for the Beetle, but having a headless driver smash it into a building would be even worse. I fastened the buttons on my leather duster, too. The spells that reinforced the coat were fresh, and they’d once stood up to the power of a Kalashnikov assault rifle—but that was a world of difference from the power of a .50-caliber sniper round.
Buzz had missed his shot at the sword at Michael’s house. It’s really hard to tail someone without being noticed, unless you’ve got a team of several cars working together—and this had all the earmarks of a lone-gunman operation. Buzz hadn’t been tailing me today, and unless he’d given up entirely—sure, right—that could only mean he was waiting for me somewhere. He’d had plenty of time to set up an ambush somewhere he knew I’d go.
Home.
The sword was my priority. I wasn’t planning on suicide or anything, but at the end of the day, I was just one guy. The swords had been a thorn in the side of evildoers for two thousand years. In the long term, the world needed them a lot more than it needed one battered and somewhat shabby professional wizard.
As I came down the street toward my apartment, I stomped on the gas. Granted, in an old VW Beetle, that isn’t nearly as dramatic as it sounds. My car didn’t roar as much as it coughed more loudly, but I picked up speed and hit my driveway as hard as I could while keeping all the wheels on the ground. I skidded to a stop outside my front door as the engine rattled, pinged, and began pouring out black smoke, which would have been totally cool if I’d actually made it happen on purpose.
I flung myself out of the car, the sword in hand, and into the haze of smoke, my shield bracelet running at maximum power in a dome that covered me on all sides.
I rushed toward the steps leading down to the front door of my basement apartment.
As my foot was heading down toward the first step, there was a flash of light and a sledgehammer hit me in the back. It spun me counterclockwise as it flung me down, and I went into a bad tumble down the seven steps to my front door. I hit my head, my shoulder screamed, and the taste of blood filled my mouth. My shield bracelet seared my wrist. Gravity stopped working, and I wasn’t sure which way I was supposed to be falling.
“Get up, Harry,” I told myself. “He’s coming. He’s coming for the sword. Get up.”
I’d dropped my keys in the fall. I looked for them.
I saw blood all over the front of my shirt.
The keys lay on the concrete floor of the stairs. I picked them up and stared stupidly at them. It took me a minute to remember why I needed them, and then another minute to puzzle out which of the five keys on the ring went to my front door. My head was pounding and I felt sick; I couldn’t get a breath.
I tried to reach up to unlock the door, but my left shoulder wouldn’t hold my weight. I almost slammed my head against the concrete again.
I made it up to a knee. I shoved my key at the door.
He’s coming. He’s coming.
Blue sparks flew up, and a little shock lit up my arm with pain.
My wards. I’d forgotten about my wards.
I tried to focus my will again, but I couldn’t get it to gel. I tried again, and again, and finally I was able to perform the routine little spell that disarmed them.
I shoved my key into the lock and turned it. Then I leaned against the door.
It didn’t open.
My door is a heavy steel security door. I installed it myself, and I’m a terrible carpenter. It doesn’t quite line up with the frame, and it takes a real effort to get it open and closed. I had grown used to the routine bump and thrust of my shoulders and hips that I needed to open it up—but like the spell that disarmed my wards, that simple task was, at the moment, beyond me.
Footsteps crunched in the gravel.
