by Butcher, Jim
I winced. I knew where this was going. I’d seen it before, when it had been me with the book and the lunch tray.
Two of the boys stood up, and they looked enough alike to make me think that they either had been born very close together or else were fraternal twins. They both had messy, sandy brown hair, long, narrow faces, and pointed chins. They looked like they might have been a year or two ahead of Irwin, though they were both shorter than the lanky boy.
They split, moving down either side of the table toward Irwin, their footsteps silent. I hunched my shoulders and watched them out of the corner of my eye. Whatever they were up to, it wouldn’t be lethal, not right here in front of half the school, and it might be possible to learn something about the pair by watching them in action.
They moved together, though not perfectly in synch. It reminded me of a movie I’d seen in high school about juvenile lions learning to hunt together. One of the kids, wearing a black baseball cap, leaned over the table and casually swatted the book out of Irwin’s hands. Irwin started and turned toward him, lifting his hands into a vague, confused-looking defensive posture.
As he did, the second kid, in a red sweatshirt, casually drove a finger down onto the edge of Irwin’s dining tray. It flipped up, spilling food and drink all over Irwin.
A bowl broke, silverware rattled, and the whole tray clattered down. Irwin sat there looking stunned while the two bullies cruised right on by, as casual as can be. They were already fifteen feet away when the other children in the dining hall had zeroed in on the sound and reacted to the mess with a round of applause and catcalls.
“Pounder!” snarled a voice, and I looked up to see a man in a white visor, sweatpants, and a T-shirt come marching in from the hallway outside the cafeteria. “Pounder, what is this mess?”
Irwin blinked owlishly at the barrel-chested man and shook his head. “I …” He glanced after the two retreating bullies and then around the cafeteria. “I guess … I accidentally knocked my tray over, Coach Pete.”
Coach Pete scowled and folded his arms. “If this was the first time this had happened, I wouldn’t think anything of it. But how many times has your tray ended up on the floor, Pounder?”
Irwin looked down. “This would be five, sir.”
“Yes it would,” said Coach Pete. He picked up the paperback Irwin had been reading. “If your head wasn’t in these trashy science fiction books all the time, maybe you’d be able to feed yourself without making a mess.”
“Yes, sir,” Irwin said.
“Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Coach Pete said, looking at the book. “That’s stupid. You can’t hitchhike onto a spaceship.”
“No, sir,” Irwin said.
“Detention,” Coach Pete said. “Report to me after school.”
“Yes, sir.”
Coach Pete slapped the paperback against his leg, scowled at Irwin—and then abruptly looked up at me. “What?” he demanded.
“I was just wondering. You don’t, by any chance, have a Vogon in your family tree?”
Coach Pete eyed me, his chest swelling in what an anthropologist might call a threat display. It might have been impressive if I hadn’t been talking to River Shoulders the night before. “That a joke?”
“That depends on how much poetry you write,” I said.
At this Coach Pete looked confused. He clearly didn’t like feeling that way, which seemed a shame, since I suspected he spent a lot of time doing it. Irwin’s eyes widened and he darted a quick look at me. His mouth twitched, but the kid kept himself from smiling or laughing—which was fairly impressive in a boy his age.
Coach Pete glowered at me, pointed a finger as if it might have been a gun, and said, “You tend to your own business.”
I held up both hands in a gesture of mild acceptance. I rolled my eyes as soon as Coach Pete turned his back, drawing another quiver of restraint from Irwin.
“Pick this up,” Coach Pete said to Irwin, and gestured at the spilled lunch on the floor. Then he turned and stomped away, taking Irwin’s paperback with him. The two kids who had been giving Irwin grief had made their way back to their original seats, meanwhile, and were at the far end of the table, looking smug.
I pushed my lunch away and got up from the table. I went over to Irwin’s side and knelt down to help him clean up his mess. I picked up the tray, slid it to a point between us, and said, “Just stack it up here.”
Irwin gave me a quick, shy glance from beneath his mussed hair, and started plucking up fallen bits of lunch. His hands were almost comically large compared to the rest of him, but his fingers were quick and dexterous. After a few seconds he asked, “You’ve read the Hitchhiker’s Guide?”
“Forty-two times,” I said.
He smiled and then ducked his head again. “No one else here likes it.”
“Well, it’s not for everyone, is it?” I asked. “Personally, I’ve always wondered if Adams might not be a front man for a particularly talented dolphin. Which I think would make the book loads funnier.”
Irwin let out a quick bark of laughter and then hunched his shoulders and kept cleaning up. His shoulders shook.
“Those two boys give you trouble a lot?” I asked.
Irwin’s hands stopped moving for a second. Then he started up again. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve been you before,” I said. “The kid who liked reading books about aliens and goblins and knights and explorers at lunch, and in class, and during recess. I didn’t care much about sports. And I got picked on a lot.”
“They don’t pick on me,” Irwin said quickly. “It’s just … just what guys do. They give me a hard time. It’s in fun.”
“And it doesn’t make you angry,” I said. “Not even a little.”
His hands slowed down, and his face turned thoughtful. “Sometimes,” he said quietly. “When they spoil my broccoli.”
I blinked. “Broccoli?”
“I love broccoli,” Irwin said, looking up at me, his expression serious.
“Kid,” I said, smiling, “no one loves broccoli. No one even likes broccoli. All the grown-ups just agree to lie about it so that we can make kids eat it, in vengeance for what our parents did to us.”
“Well, I love broccoli,” Irwin said, his jaw set.
“Hunh,” I said. “Guess I’ve seen something new today.” We finished and I said, “Go get some more lunch. I’ll take care of this.”
“Thank you,” he said soberly. “Um, Norm.”
I grunted, nodded to him, tossed the dropped food, and returned the tray. Then I sat back down at the corner table with my lunch and watched Irwin and his tormentors from the corner of my eye. The two bullies never took their eyes off Irwin, even while talking and joking with their group.
I recognized that behavior, though I’d never seen it in a child before; only in hunting cats, vampires, and sundry monsters.
The two kids were predators.
Young and inexperienced, maybe. But predators.
For the first time, I thought that Bigfoot Irwin might be in real trouble.
I went back to my own tray and wolfed down the “food” on it. I wanted to keep a closer eye on Irwin.
Being a wizard is all about being prepared. Well, that and magic, obviously. While I could do a few things in a hurry, most magic takes long moments or hours to arrange, and that means you have to know what’s coming. I’d brought a few things with me, but I needed more information before I could act decisively on the kid’s behalf.
I kept track of Irwin after he left the cafeteria. It wasn’t hard. His face was down, his eyes on his book, and even though he was one of the younger kids in the school, he stood out, tall and gangly. I contrived to go past his classroom several times in the next hour. It was trig, which I knew, except I’d been doing it in high school.
Irwin was the youngest kid in the class. He was also evidently the smartest. He never looked up from his book. Several times the teacher tried to catch him out, asking him questions. Irwin put his fing
er on the place in his book, glanced up at the blackboard, and answered them with barely a pause. I found myself grinning.
Next I tracked down Irwin’s tormentors. They weren’t hard to find, either, since they both sat in the chairs closest to the exit, as though they couldn’t wait to go off and be delinquent the instant school was out. They sat in class with impatient, sullen expressions. They looked like they were in the grip of agonizing boredom, but they didn’t seem to be preparing to murder a teacher or anything.
I had a hunch that something about Irwin was drawing a predatory reaction from those two kids. And Coach Vogon had arrived on the scene pretty damned quickly—too much so for coincidence, maybe.
“Maybe Bigfoot Irwin isn’t the only scion at this school,” I muttered to myself.
And maybe I wasn’t the only one looking out for the interests of a child born with one foot in this world and one in another.
I was standing outside the gymnasium as the last class of the day let out, leaning against the wall on my elbows, my feet crossed at the heels, my head hanging down, my wheeled bucket and mop standing unused a good seven feet away—pretty much the picture of an industrious janitor. The kids went hurrying by in a rowdy herd, with Irwin’s tormentors being the last to leave the gym. I felt their eyes on me as they went past, but I didn’t react to them.
Coach Vogon came out last, flicking out the banks of fluorescent lights as he went, his footsteps brisk and heavy. He came to a dead stop as he came out of the door and found me waiting for him.
There was a long moment of silence while he sized me up. I let him. I wasn’t looking for a fight, and I had taken the deliberately relaxed and nonconfrontational stance I was in to convey that concept to him. I figured he was connected to the supernatural world, but I didn’t know how connected he might be. Hell, I didn’t even know if he was human.
Yet.
“Don’t you have work to do?” he demanded.
“Doing it,” I said. “I mean, obviously.”
I couldn’t actually hear his eyes narrow, but I was pretty sure they did. “You got a lot of nerve, buddy, talking to an instructor like that.”
“If there weren’t all these kids around, I might have said another syllable or two,” I drawled. “Coach Vogon.”
“You’re about to lose your job, buddy. Get to work or I’ll report you for malingering.”
“Malingering,” I said. “Four whole syllables. You’re good.”
He rolled another step toward me and jabbed a finger into my chest. “Buddy, you’re about to buy a lot of trouble. Who do you think you are?”
“Harry Dresden,” I said. “Wizard.”
And I looked at him as I opened my Sight.
A wizard’s Sight is an extra sense, one that allows him to perceive the patterns of energy and magic that suffuse the universe—energy that includes every conceivable form of magic. It doesn’t actually open a third eye in your forehead or anything, but the brain translates the perceptions into the visual spectrum. In the circles I run in, the Sight shows you things as they truly are, cutting through every known form of veiling magic, illusion, and other mystic chicanery.
In this case, it showed me that the thing standing in front of me wasn’t human.
Beneath its illusion, the spindly humanoid creature stood a little more than five feet high, and it might have weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. It was naked, and anatomically it resembled a Ken doll. Its skin was a dark gray, its eyes absolutely huge, bulbous, and midnight black. It had a rounded, high-crowned head and long, delicately pointed ears. I could still see the illusion of Coach Pete around the creature, a vague and hazy outline.
It lowered the lids of its bulbous eyes, the gesture somehow exceptionally lazy, and then nodded slowly. It inclined its head the smallest measurable amount possible and murmured, in a melodious and surprisingly deep voice, “Wizard.”
I blinked a few times and waved my Sight away, so that I was facing Coach Pete again. “We should talk,” I said.
The apparent man stared at me unblinkingly, his expression as blank as a discarded puppet’s. It was probably my imagination that made his eyes look suddenly darker. “Regarding?”
“Irwin Pounder,” I said. “I would prefer to avoid a conflict with Svartalfheim.”
He inhaled and exhaled slowly through his nose. “You recognized me.”
In fact, I’d been making an educated guess, but the svartalf didn’t need to know that. I knew precious little about the creatures. They were extremely gifted craftsmen, and were responsible for creating most of the really cool artifacts of Norse myth. They weren’t wicked, exactly, but they were ruthless, proud, stubborn, and greedy, which often added up to similar results. They were known to be sticklers for keeping their word, and God help you if you broke yours to them. Most important, they were a small supernatural nation unto themselves: one that protected its citizens with maniacal zeal.
“I had a good teacher,” I said. “I want your boys to lay off Irwin Pounder.”
“Point of order,” he said. “They are not mine. I am not their progenitor. I am a guardian only.”
“Be that as it may,” I said, “my concern is for Irwin, not the brothers.”
“He is a whetstone,” he said. “They sharpen their instincts upon him. He is good for them.”
“They aren’t good for him,” I said. “Fix it.”
“It is not my place to interfere with them,” Coach Pete said. “Only to offer indirect guidance and to protect them from anyone who would interfere with their growth.”
The last phrase was as emotionless as the first, but it somehow carried an ugly ring of a threat—a polite threat, but a threat nonetheless.
Sometimes I react badly to being threatened. I might have glared a little.
“Hypothetically,” I said, “let’s suppose that I saw those boys giving Irwin a hard time again, and I made it my business to stop them. What would you do?”
“Slay you,” Coach Pete said. His tone was utterly absent of any doubt.
“Awfully sure of yourself, aren’t you.”
He spoke as if reciting a single-digit arithmetic problem. “You are young. I am not.”
I felt my jaw clench, and forced myself to take a slow breath, to stay calm. “They’re hurting him.”
“Be that as it may,” he said calmly, “my concern is for the brothers, not for Irwin Pounder.”
I ground my teeth and wished I could pick my words out of them before continuing the conversation. “We’ve both stated our positions,” I said. “How do we resolve the conflict?”
“That also is not my concern,” he said. “I will not dissuade the brothers. I will slay you should you attempt to do so yourself. There is nothing else to discuss.”
He shivered a little, and suddenly the illusion of Coach Pete seemed to gain a measure of life, of definition, like an empty glove abruptly filled by the flesh of a hand.
“If you will excuse me,” he said, in Coach Pete’s annoying tone of voice, walking past me, “I have a detention over which to preside.”
“To preside over,” I said, and snorted at his back. “Over which to preside. No one actually talks like that.”
He turned his head and gave me a flat-eyed look. Then he rounded a corner and was gone.
I rubbed at the spot on my forehead between my eyebrows and tried to think.
I had a bad feeling that fighting this guy was going to be a losing proposition. In my experience, when someone gets their kids a supernatural supernanny, they don’t pick pushovers. Among wizards, I’m pretty buff—but the world is full of bigger fish than me. More to the point, even if I fought the svartalf and won, it might drag the White Council of Wizards into a violent clash with Svartalfheim. I wouldn’t want to have something like that on my conscience.
I wanted to protect the Pounder kid, and I wasn’t going to back away from that. But how was I supposed to protect him from the Bully Brothers if they had a heavyweight on deck, ready to charge in s
winging? That kind of brawl could spill over onto any nearby kids, and fast. I didn’t want this to turn into a slugfest. That wouldn’t help Irwin Pounder.
But what could I do? What options did I have? How could I act without dragging the svartalf into a confrontation?
I couldn’t.
“Ah,” I said to no one, lifting a finger in the air. “Aha!”
I grabbed my mop bucket and hurried toward the cafeteria.
The school emptied out fast, making the same transition every school does every day, changing from a place full of life and energy, of movement and noise, into a series of echoing chambers and empty halls. Teachers and staff seemed as eager to be gone as the students. Good. It was still possible that things would get ugly, and if they did, the fewer people around, the better.
By the time I went by the janitor’s closet to pick up the few tools I’d brought with me and went to the cafeteria, my bucket’s squeaking wheels were the loudest sound I could hear. I turned the corner at almost exactly the same time as the Bully Brothers appeared from the opposite end of the hall. They drew up short, and I could feel the weight of their eyes as they assessed me. I ignored them and went on inside.
Bigfoot Irwin was already inside the cafeteria, seated at a table, writing on a piece of paper. I recognized the kid’s rigid, resigned posture, and it made my wrist ache just to see it: Coach Pete had him writing a sentence repetitively, probably something about being more careful with his lunch tray. The monster.
Coach Pete stood leaning against a wall, reading a sports magazine of some sort. Or at least, that was what he appeared to be doing. I had to wonder how much genuine interest a svartalf might have in the NBA. His eyes flicked up as I entered; I saw them go flat.
I set my mop and bucket aside and started sweeping the floors with a large dust broom. My janitorial form was perfect. I saw Coach Pete’s jaw clench a couple of times, and then he walked over to me.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Sweeping the floor,” I replied, guileless as a newborn.
“This is not a matter for levity,” he said. “No amount of it will save your life.”