Side Jobs df-13

by Jim Butcher

  “Most people don’t believe in love potions, either, but you’ve got that in there.”

  I held on to a flash of bad temper. “The point,” I told Bob, “is to have an advertisement that looks solid, professional, and reliable.”

  “Yeah. Advertising is all about lying,” Bob said.

  “Hey!”

  “You suck at lying, Harry. You really do. You should trust me on this one.”

  “No monsters,” I insisted.

  “Fine, fine,” Bob said. “How about we do a positive-side spin, then? Something like, ‘Maidens rescued, enchantments broken, villains unmasked, unicorns protected.’”

  “Unicorns?”

  “Chicks are into unicorns.”

  I rolled my eyes. “It’s an ad for my investigative business, not a dating service. Besides, the only unicorn I ever saw tried to skewer me.”

  “You’re sort of missing the entire ‘Advertising is lying’ concept, Harry.”

  “No unicorns,” I said firmly. “It’s fine the way it is.”

  “No style at all,” Bob complained.

  I put on a mentally challenged accent. “Style is as style does.”

  “Okay, fine. Suppose we throw intelligence to the winds and print only the truth. ‘Vampire slayer, ghost remover, faerie fighter, werewolf exterminator, police consultant, foe of the foot soldiers of Hell.’”

  I thought about it for a minute, then got a fresh piece of paper and wrote it down. I stared at the words.

  “See?” Bob said. “That would look really hot, attract notice, and it would be the truth. What have you got to lose?”

  “This week’s gas money,” I said, finally. “Too many letters. Besides, Lieutenant Murphy would kill me if I went around blowing trumpets about how I help the cops.”

  “You’re hopeless,” Bob said.

  I shook my head. “No. I’m not in this for the money.”

  “Then what are you in it for, Harry? Hell, in the past few years you’ve been all but killed about a million times. Why do you do it?”

  I squinted up at the skull. “Because someone has to.”

  “Hopeless,” Bob repeated.

  I smiled, picked up a fresh pencil, and went back to my formulas—formulae. “Pretty much.”

  Bob sighed and fell quiet. My pencil scratched over clean white paper while the candles burned warm and steady.

  SOMETHING BORROWED

  —from My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding, edited by P. N. Elrod

  Takes place between Dead Beat and Proven Guilty

  I wrote this for the very first anthology in which I’d ever been invited to participate. I’d met Pat Elrod at a convention and thought she was quite a cool person, and when she asked me to take part in her anthology, I was more than happy to do so.

  When I wrote this story, I was thinking that the Alphas hadn’t gotten nearly enough stage time in the series thus far, and it seemed like a good opportunity to give them some more attention, while at the same time showing the progression of their lives since their college days, which I felt was best demonstrated by Billy and Georgia’s wedding.

  Inane trivia: While I was in school writing the first three books of the Dresden Files, my wife, Shannon, watched Ally McBeal in the evenings, often while I was plunking away at a keyboard. I didn’t pay too much attention to the show, and it took me years to realize I had unconsciously named Billy and Georgia after those characters in Ally McBeal.

  Who knew? TV really does rot your brain!

  Steel pierced my leg and my body went rigid with pain, but I could not allow myself to move. “Billy,” I growled through my teeth, “kill him.”

  Billy the Werewolf squinted up at me from his seat and said, “That might be a little extreme.”

  “This is torture,” I said.

  “Oh, for crying out loud, Dresden,” Billy said, his tone amused. “He’s just fitting the tux.”

  Yanof the tailor, a squat, sturdy little guy who had recently immigrated to Chicago from Outer Sloboviakastan or somewhere, glared up at me, with another dozen pins clutched between his lips and resentment in his eyes. I’m better than six and a half feet tall. It can’t be fun to be told you’ve got to fit a tux to someone my height only a few hours before the wedding.

  “It ought to be Kirby standing here,” I said.

  “Yeah. But it would be harder to fit the tux around the body cast and all those traction cables.”

  “I keep telling you guys,” I said. “Werewolves or not, you’ve got to be more careful.”

  Ordinarily, I would not have mentioned Billy’s talent for shapeshifting into a wolf in front of a stranger, but Yanof didn’t speak a word of English. Evidently, his skills with needle and thread were such that he had no pressing need to learn. As Chicago’s resident wizard, I’d worked with Billy on several occasions, and we were friends.

  His bachelor party the night before had gotten interesting on the walk back to Billy’s place, when we happened across a ghoul terrorizing an old woman in a parking lot.

  It hadn’t been a pretty fight. Mostly because we’d all had too many stripper-induced Jell-O shots.

  Billy’s injuries had all been bruises and all to the body. They wouldn’t spoil the wedding. Alex had a nasty set of gashes on his throat from the ghoul’s clawlike nails, but he could probably pass them off as particularly enthusiastic hickeys. Mitchell had broken two teeth when he’d charged the ghoul but hit a wall instead. He was going to be a dedicated disciple of Anbesol until he got to the dentist.

  All I had to remember the evening by was a splitting headache, and not from the fight. Jell-O shots are far more dangerous, if you ask me.

  Billy’s best man, Kirby, had gotten unlucky. The ghoul slammed him into a brick wall so hard that it broke both his legs and cracked a vertebra.

  “We handled him, didn’t we?” Billy asked.

  “Let’s ask Kirby,” I said. “Look, there isn’t always going to be a broken metal fence post sticking up out of the ground like that, Billy. We got lucky.”

  Billy’s eyes went flat and he abruptly stood up. “All right,” he said, his voice hard. “I’ve had just about enough of you telling me what I should and should not do, Harry. You aren’t my father.”

  “No,” I said, “but—”

  “In fact,” he continued, “if I remember correctly, the other Alphas and I have saved your life twice now.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But—”

  His face turned red with anger. Billy wasn’t tall, but he was built like an armored truck. “But what? You don’t want to share the spotlight with any of us mere one-trick wonders? Don’t you dare belittle what Kirby did, what the others have done and sacrificed.”

  I am a trained investigator. Instincts honed by years of observation warned me that Billy might be angry. “Great hostility I sense in you,” I said in a Muppety voice.

  Billy’s steady glower continued for a few more seconds, and then it broke. He shook his head and looked away. “I’m sorry. For my tone.”

  Yanof jabbed me again, but I ignored it. “You didn’t sleep last night.”

  He shook his head again. “No excuse. But between the fight and Kirby and”—he waved a vague hand—“today. I mean, today.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Cold feet?”

  Billy took a deep breath. “Well, it’s a big step, isn’t it?” He shook his head. “And after next year, most of the Alphas are going to be done with school. Getting jobs.” He paused. “Splitting up.”

  “And that’s where you met Georgia,” I said.

  “Yeah.” He shook his head again. “What if we don’t have anything else in common? I mean, good grief. Have you seen her family’s place? And I’m going to be in debt for seven or eight years just paying off the student loans. How do you know if you’re ready to get married?”

  Yanof stood up, gestured at my pants, and said something that sounded like, “Hahklha ah lafala krepata khem.”

  “I’m not seeing people right now,” I told hi
m as I took off the pants and passed them over. “Or else you’d have a shot, you charmer.”

  Yanof sniffed, muttered something else, and toddled back into the shop.

  “Billy,” I said, “you think Georgia would have fought that thing last night?”

  “Yes,” he said without a second’s hesitation.

  “She going to be upset that you did it?”

  “No.”

  “Even though some folks got hurt?”

  He blinked at me. “No.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “Because”—he shook his head—“because she won’t. I know her. Upset by the injuries, yes, but not by the fight.” He shifted to a tone he probably didn’t realize was an imitation of Georgia’s voice. “People get hurt in fights. That’s why they’re called fights.”

  “You know her well enough to answer serious questions for her when she isn’t even in the room, man,” I said quietly. “You’re ready. Keep the big picture in mind. You and her.”

  He looked at me for a second and then said, “I thought you’d say something about love.”

  I sighed. “Billy. You knob. If you didn’t love her, you wouldn’t be stressed about losing what you have with her, would you.”

  “Good point,” he said.

  “Remember the important thing. You and her.”

  He took a deep breath and let it out. “Yeah,” he said. “Georgia and me. The rest doesn’t matter.”

  I was going to mumble something vaguely supportive, when the door to the fitting room opened and an absolutely ravishing raven-haired woman in an expensive lavender silk skirt-suit came in. She might have been my age, and she had a lot of gold and diamonds, a lot of perfect white teeth, and the kind of curves that come only from surgery. Her shoes and purse together probably cost more than my car.

  “Well,” she snapped, and put a fist on her hip, glaring first at Billy and then at me. “I see you are already doing your best to disrupt the ceremony.”

  “Eve,” Billy said in a kind of stilted, formally polite voice. “Um. What are you talking about?”

  “For one thing, this,” she said, flicking a hand at me. Then she gave me a second, more evaluative look.

  I tried to look casual and confident, there in my Spider-Man T-shirt and black briefs. I managed to keep myself from diving toward my jeans. I turned aside to put them on, maintaining my dignity.

  “Your underwear has a hole,” Eve said sweetly.

  I jerked my jeans on, blushing. Stupid dignity.

  “Bad enough that you insist on this . . . petty criminal taking part in a ceremony before polite society. Yanof is beside himself,” Eve continued, speaking to Billy. “He threatened to quit.”

  “Wow,” I said. “You speak Sloboviakstanese?”

  She blinked at me. “What?”

  “Because Yanof doesn’t speak any English. So how did you know he threatened to quit?” I smiled sweetly at her.

  Eve gave me a glare of haughty anger and defended herself by pretending I hadn’t said anything. “And now we’re going to have to leave out one of the bridesmaids. To say nothing of the fact that with him standing up there on one side of you and Georgia on the other, you’re going to look like a midget. The photographer will have to be notified, and I have no idea how we’ll manage to rearrange everything at the last moment.”

  I swore I could hear Billy’s teeth grind. “Harry,” he said in that same polite, strained voice, “this is Eve McAlister. My stepmother-in-law.”

  “I do not care for that term, as I have told you often. I am your mother-in-law,” she said. “Or will be, whenever this ongoing disaster you’ve created from a respectable wedding breathes its last.”

  “I’m sure we can work something out,” Billy assured her, his tone hopeless.

  “Georgia is late and is letting the voice mail answer her phone—as though I needed something else to occupy my thoughts.” She shook her head. “I assume the lowlifes you introduced her to kept her out too late last night. Just like this one did to you.”

  “Hey, come on,” I said, careful to keep my tone as reasonable and friendly as I could. “Billy’s had a rough night. I’m sure he can help you out if you just give him a chance to—”

  She made a disgusted sound and interrupted me. “Did I say or do something to imply that I cared to hear your opinion, charlatan? Lowlifes. I warned her about folk like you.”

  “You don’t even know me, lady,” I said.

  “Yes, I do,” she informed me. “I know all about you. I saw you on Larry Fowler.”

  I narrowed my eyes at Eve.

  Billy’s expression came close to panic, and he held up both hands, palms out, giving me a pleading look. But my hangover ached, and life is too short to waste it taking verbal abuse from petty tyrants who watch bad talk shows.

  “Okay, Billy’s stepmom,” I began.

  Her eyes flashed. “Do not call me that.”

  “You don’t care to be called a stepmother?” I asked.

  “Not at all.”

  “Though you obviously aren’t Georgia’s mother. Howsabout I call you trophy wife?” I suggested.

  She blinked at me once, her eyes widening.

  Billy put his face in his hands.

  “Bed warmer?” I mused. “Mistress made good? Midlife crisis byproduct?” I shook my head. “When in doubt, go with the classics.” I leaned a little closer and gave her a crocodilian smile. “Gold digger.”

  The blood drained out of Eve’s face, leaving ugly pinkish blotches high on her cheeks. “Why, you . . . you . . .”

  I waved my hand. “No, it’s all right; I don’t mind finding alternate terms. I understand that you’re under pressure. Must be hard trying to look good in front of the old money when they all know that you were really just a receptionist or an actress or a model or something.”

  Her mouth dropped completely open.

  “We’re all having a tough day, dear.” I flipped my hand at her. “Shoo.”

  She stared at me for a second, then let out a snarled curse you’d hardly expect from a lady of her station, spun on the heel of one Italian-leather pump, and stalked from the room. I heard a couple of beeps as she crossed to the shop’s door, and then she started screeching into a cell phone. I could hear her for about ten seconds after she went outside.

  Mission accomplished. Spleen vented. Dragon lady routed. I felt pleased with myself.

  Billy heaved a sigh. “You had to talk to her like that?”

  “Yeah.” I glowered out after the departed Eve. “Once my mouth was open and my lips started moving, it was pretty much inevitable.”

  “Dammit, Harry.” Billy sighed.

  “Oh, come on, man. Sticks and stones may break her bones, but one wiseass will never hurt her. It’s not a big deal.”

  “Not for you: You don’t have to live with it. I do. So does Georgia.”

  I chewed on my lower lip for a second. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms. I suddenly felt less than mature. “Ah,” I said. “Oh. Um. Maybe I should apologize?”

  He bent his head and pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. “Oh, God, no. Things are bad enough already.”

  I frowned at him. “Is it really that important to you? The ceremony?”

  “It’s important to Georgia.”

  I winced. “Oh,” I said. “Ah.”

  “Look, we’ve got a few hours. I’ll stay here and try to sort things out with Eve,” Billy said. “Do me a favor?”

  “Hey, what’s a best man for? Other than tackling a panicked groom if he tries to run.”

  He gave me a quick grin. “See if you can contact Georgia first? Maybe she’s had car trouble or overslept or something. Or maybe she just left her phone on all night and it went dead.”

  “Sure,” I said, “I’ll take care of it.”

  I CALLED BILLY and Georgia’s apartment and got no answer. Knowing Georgia, I expected her to be at the hospital, visiting Kirby. Billy might have been the combat
leader of the merry band of college kids who had learned shapeshifting from an actual wolf, but Georgia was the manager, surrogate mom, and brains when there wasn’t any violence on.

  Kirby was on painkillers and groggy, but he told me Georgia hadn’t been there. I talked to the duty nurse and confirmed that though his family was flying in from Texas to see him, he’d had no visitors since Billy and I had left.

  Odd.

  I thought about mentioning it to Billy, but I didn’t really know anything yet, and it wasn’t as though he needed more pressure.

  “Don’t get paranoid, Harry,” I told myself. “Maybe she’s got a hangover, too. Maybe she ran off with a male stripper.” I waited to see if I was buying it, then shook my head. “And maybe Elvis and JFK are shacked up in a retirement home somewhere.”

  I went to Billy and Georgia’s apartment.

  They live in a place near the University of Chicago’s campus, in a neighborhood that missed being an ugly one by maybe a hundred yards. It still wasn’t the kind of place you’d want to hang around outside after dark. I didn’t have a key to get into the building, so I pressed buttons one at a time until someone buzzed me in, and I took the stairs up.

  As I neared the apartment door, I knew something was wrong. It wasn’t that I saw or heard anything, magical or otherwise, but when I stopped before the door, I had a nebulous but strong conviction that something bad had gone down.

  I knocked. The door rattled and fell off the lower hinge. It swung open a few inches, drunkenly, upper hinges squealing. Splits and cracks, invisible until the door moved, appeared in the wood, and the dead bolt rattled dully against the inside of the door, loose in its setting.

  I stopped there for a long second, waiting and listening. Other than the whirring of a window fan at the end of the hall and someone playing an easy-listening station on the floor above me, there was nothing. I closed my eyes for a moment and extended my wizard’s senses, testing the air nearby for any touch of magic upon it.

  I felt nothing but the subtle energy that surrounded any home, a form of naturally occurring protective magic called the threshold. Billy and Georgia’s apartment was the nominal headquarters of the Werewolves, and members came and went at all hours. It was never intended to be a permanent home—but there had been a lot of living in the little apartment, and its threshold was stronger than most. I slowly pushed the door open with my right hand.