by Butcher, Jim
“Heil, Harry,” Thomas said, his tone a bit sullen. But I knew he’d do it.
“Hair?” I asked Charity.
She passed me an unmarked white envelope, her expression a mask.
“Thank you.” I took it and headed for my apartment, the two of them following after me. “I’ll be working downstairs. The two of you should stay in the living room. Please be as quiet as you can and don’t walk around too much.”
“Why?” Charity asked.
I shook my head tiredly and waved a hand. “No, no questions right now. I’ll need everything I’ve got to find where they took Molly, and I’m already rushing this thing. Let me concentrate. I’ll explain it later.” If I survive it, I thought.
I felt Charity’s eyes on me, and I glanced back at her. She gave her head a brief, stiff nod. I took down the wards and we went inside. Mister came over and rammed his shoulder against my legs, then wound his way around between Thomas’s legs, accepting a few token pats from my half brother. Then he surprised me by giving Charity the same treatment.
I shook my head. Cats. No accounting for taste.
Charity looked around my apartment, frowning, and said, “It’s very well kept up. I had expected more…debris.”
“He cheats,” Thomas said, and headed for the refrigerator.
I ignored them. There wasn’t time for the full ritual cleansing and meditation, but my day had exposed me to all kinds of stains, external and otherwise, and I considered the shower to be the most indispensable portion of the preparation. So I went into my room, stripped, lit a candle, and got into the shower. Cool water sluiced over me. I scrubbed my skin until it was pink, and washed my hair until it got sore.
The whole while I sought out a quiet place in my mind, somewhere sheltered from pain and guilt, from fear and anger. I pushed out every sensation but for the bathing, and without conscious effort my motions took on the steady rhythm of ritual, something commonplace transformed into an act of art and meditation, like a Japanese tea ceremony.
I longed for my bed. I longed for sleep. Warmth. Laughter. I pinned down those longings one at a time and crucified them, suspending them until such time as my world was a place that could afford such desires. One last emotion was too big for me, though. Try though I might, I could not keep fear from finding a way to slither into my thoughts. Little Chicago’s maiden run was an enormous unknown quantity. If I’d done it all right, I would have myself one hell of a tool for keeping track of things in my town.
If I’d made even a tiny mistake, Molly was dead. Or worse than dead. And I’d get to find out what the light at the end of the long tunnel really was.
I couldn’t escape the fear. It was built in to the situation. So instead I tried to make my peace with it. Fear, properly handled, could be turned into something useful. So I made a small, neat place for its use in my head, a kind of psychic litter box, and hoped that the fear wouldn’t start jumping around at the worst possible moment.
I got out of the shower, dried, and slipped into my white robe again. I kept my thoughts focused, picked up my backpack and the white envelope, and went down to the basement lab. I shut the door behind me. If Little Chicago went nova, preventative spells I’d laid to keep energies from escaping the lab should mitigate the damage significantly. It wasn’t a perfect plan, by any means, but I’m only human.
Which was a disturbing thought as I stared at the model on the table. Even a tiny mistake. Only human.
I set the envelope at the edge of the table, my backpack on a shelf, and went around the basement lighting candles with a match. A spell would have been faster and neater, but I wanted to save every drop of power for managing the divination. So I made lighting each candle a ritual of its own, focusing on my movements, on precision, on nothing but the immediate interplay of heat and cold, light and darkness, fire and shadow.
I lit the last candle and turned to the model city.
The buildings shone silver in the candlelight, and the air quivered with the power I’d built into the model. Some tiny voice of common sense in my head told me that this was a horribly bad idea. It told me that I was making decisions because I was in pain and exhausted, and that it would be far wiser to get some sleep and attempt the spell when I stood a reasonable chance of pulling it off.
I crucified that little voice, too. There was no room for doubts. Then I turned to the table, and to the elongated circle of silver I’d built into its surface.
Lasciel appeared between me and the table, in her usual white tunic, her red hair pulled back into a tight braid. She held up both hands and said, quietly, “I cannot permit you to do this.”
“You,” I said in a quiet, distant voice, “are almost as annoying as a sudden phone call.”
“This is pointless,” she said. “My host, I beg you to reconsider.”
“I don’t have time for you,” I said. “I have a job to do.”
“A job?” she asked. “Evading your responsibilities, you mean?”
I tilted my head slightly. In my current mental state, the emotions I felt seemed infinitely far away and all but inconsequential. “How so?”
“Look at yourself,” she replied, her voice that low, quiet, reasonable tone one uses around madmen and ugly drunks. “Listen to yourself. You’re tired. You’re injured. You’re wracked by guilt. You’re frightened. You will destroy yourself.”
“And you with me?” I asked her.
“Correct,” she said. “I do not fear the end of my existence, my host, but I would not be extinguished by one too self-deluded to understand what he was about.”
“I’m not deluded,” I said.
“But you are. You know that this effort shall probably kill you. And once it has done so, you will be free from any onus of what happened to the girl. After all, you heroically died in the effort to find her and retrieve her. You won’t have to attend her funeral. You won’t have to explain yourself to Michael. You won’t have to tell her parents that their daughter is dead because of your incompetence.”
I did not reply. The emotions grew a little closer.
“This isn’t anything more than an elaborate form of suicide, chosen during a moment of weakness,” Lasciel said. “I do not wish to see you destroy yourself, my host.”
I stared at her.
I thought about it.
She might be right.
It didn’t matter.
“Move,” I murmured. “Before I move you.” Then I paused and said, “Wait a minute. What am I thinking? It isn’t as though you can stop me.” Then I simply stepped through Lasciel’s image to the table, and reached for the white envelope.
The white envelope began to spin in place on the table, and abruptly became dozens of envelopes, each identical, each whirling like a pinwheel.
“But I can,” Lasciel said quietly. I looked up to find her standing on the opposite side of the table from me. “I witnessed the birth of time itself. I watched the mortal coil spring forth from perfect darkness. I watched the stars form, watched this world coalesce, watched as life was breathed into it and as your kind rose to rule it.” She put both hands on the table and leaned toward me, her blue eyes cold and hard. “Thus far, I have behaved as a guest ought. But do not mistake propriety for weakness, mortal. I beg you not to oblige me to take further action.”
I narrowed my eyes and reached for my Sight.
Before I could use it, my left hand exploded into flame.
Pain, pain, PAIN. Fire, scorching, parboiling my hand as I tried to hold it back with my shield bracelet. The memory of my injury in that vampire-haunted basement came rushing back to me in THX, and my nerve endings were listening.
I fought down a scream, breathing, my teeth snapping together so suddenly and sharply that a fleck of one of my molars chipped away.
It was an illusion, I told myself. A memory. It’s a ghost, nothing more. It cannot harm you if you do not allow it to do so. I pushed hard against that memory, turning the focus of my will against it.
&nbs
p; I felt the illusion-memory wobble, and then the pain was gone, the fire out. My body pumped endorphins into my bloodstream a heartbeat later, and I drifted on them as my focus started to collapse. I leaned hard against the table, my left hand held close to my chest in pure reflex, my right supporting my weight. I turned my attention to the envelopes and forced my will against them until the illusions grew translucent. I picked up the real envelope.
Lasciel regarded me steadily, her beautiful face unyielding, determined.
“Sooner or later I’ll push through anything you throw,” I panted. “You know that.”
“Yes,” she said. “But you will not be able to focus on the divination until you are quit of me. I may force you to exhaust yourself resisting me, in which case you will not attempt the divination. Even if I only delay you until dawn, there will be no need for you to attempt it.” She lifted her chin. “Whatever happens, the divination will not be successful.”
I let out a low chuckle, which made Lasciel frown at me. “You missed it,” I said.
“Missed what?”
“The loophole. I can kill myself trying it while you rock the boat. And after all, this entire exercise is nothing more than a suicide attempt in any case. Why not go through with it?”
Her jaw clenched. “You would murder yourself rather than yield to reason?”
“More manslaughter than murder, I’d say.”
“You’re mad,” the fallen angel said.
“Get me some Alka-Seltzer and I’ll foam at the mouth, too.” This time I hit Lasciel with the hard look. “There’s a child out there who needs me. I’d rather die than let her down. I’m doing the spell, period. So fuck off.”
She shook her head in frustration and looked away, frowning. “You are quite likely to die.”
“Broken record much?” I asked. I got out the lock of baby-fine hair, set my knife down on the table, and lit the ceremonial candles there. The fallen angel was correct, dammit. The fear stirred dangerously inside me, and my fingers shook hard enough to break the first kitchen match instead of kindling it to life.
“If you must do this,” Lasciel said, “at least attempt to survive it. Let me help you.”
“You can help me by shutting the hell up and going away,” I told her. “Hellfire isn’t going to be any use to me here.”
“Perhaps not,” Lasciel said. “But there is another way.”
There was a shimmer of light in the corner of my eye, and I turned to see a slowly pulsing silver glow upon the floor in the middle of my summoning circle. Two feet beneath it lay the Blackened Denarius where the rest of Lasciel was imprisoned.
“Take up the coin,” she urged me. “I can at least protect you from a backlash. I beg you not to throw your life away.”
I bit my lip.
I didn’t want to die, dammit. And the thought of failing to save Molly was almost worse than death. The holder of one of the thirty ancient silver coins had access to tremendous power. With that kind of boost, I could probably pull the spell off, and even if it went south I could survive it under Lasciel’s protection. Somehow, I knew that if I chose to do it I could get the coin out from under the concrete in only a moment, too.
I stared at the silver glow for a moment.
Then I rolled my eyes and said, “Are you still here?”
Lasciel’s face smoothed into an emotionless mask, but there was a subtle, ugly tone of threat in her voice. “You are much easier to talk to when you are asleep, my host.”
And she was gone.
Fear rattled around inside me. I tried to calm it, but I couldn’t regain my earlier detachment—not until I thought of young Daniel, mangled beneath my wizard Sight, wounded defending his family from something I had sent after them.
I thought of Molly’s brothers and sisters. I thought of her mother, her father. I thought of the laughter, the sheer, joyous, rowdy life of Michael’s family.
Then I pinked my fingertip with my ritual knife, touched the lock of baby hair to it, and laid it down within Little Chicago. I used a second drop of blood and an effort of will to touch the circle on the tabletop, closing it up and beginning the spell. I closed my eyes, focusing, murmuring a stream of faux Latin as I reached out to the model and brought it to life.
My senses blurred, and suddenly I was standing on the tabletop, at the model of my own boardinghouse. I thought the silver-colored model had grown to life size at first, then realized that the inverse was more accurate. I had shrunk to scale with Little Chicago, my awareness now within the spell rather than in my own body, which stood over the table like Godzilla, murmuring the words of the spell.
I closed my eyes and thought of Molly, my blood touched upon her lock of hair, and to my utter surprise I shot off down the street with no more effort than it took to peddle a bicycle. The streets beneath me and the buildings around me glowed with white energy, the whole of the place humming like high-power tension lines.
Stars and stones, Little Chicago worked. It worked well. A surge of jubilation went through me, and my speed increased in proportion. I flashed through the streets, seeing faint images of people, like ghosts, the unsteady reflections of those now moving through the real Chicago around me. But then the spell wavered, and I found myself moving in a circle like a baffled hound trying to pick up a scent trail.
It didn’t work.
I made an effort and stood back in my own body, staring down at Little Chicago, badly fatigued.
Exhausted, I reached for my backpack, sat down, and fumbled Bob into my lap.
His eyes lit up at once and he said, “Don’t get me wrong, big guy, I like you. But not that way.”
“Shut up,” I growled at him. “Just tried to use Little Chicago to find Molly’s trail. It fizzled.”
Bob blinked. “It worked? The model actually worked? It didn’t explode?”
“Obviously,” I said. “It worked fine. But I used a simple tracking spell, and it couldn’t pick up her trail. So what’s wrong with the damned thing?”
“Put me on the table,” Bob said.
I reached up and did so. He was quiet for a minute before he said, “It’s fine, Harry. I mean, it’s working just fine.”
“Like hell,” I growled. “I’ve done that tracking spell hundreds of times. It must be the model.”
“I’m telling you, it’s perfect,” Bob said. “I’m looking at the darn thing. If it wasn’t your spell, and it wasn’t the model…Hey, what did you use to focus the tracking spell?”
“Lock of her hair.”
“That’s baby hair, Harry.”
“So?”
Bob let out a disgusted sound. “So it won’t work. Harry, babies are like one big enormous blank slate. Molly has changed quite a bit since that lock was taken. She doesn’t have much to do with the person it got snipped from. Naturally the spell couldn’t track her.”
“Dammit!” I snarled. I hadn’t thought of that, but it made sense. I hadn’t ever used a lock of baby hair in the spell before, except once, to find a baby. “Dammit, dammit, dammit.”
A tiny mistake.
I was only human.
And I had failed Molly.
Chapter Thirty-four
I turned away from the table and hauled myself laboriously up the ladder to my living room.
Charity sat on the edge of the couch with her head bowed, her lips moving. As I emerged, she stood up and faced me, tension quivering through her. Thomas, who had a kettle on my little wood-burning stove, glanced over his shoulder.
I shook my head at them.
Charity’s face went white and she slowly sat down again.
I went to the kitchen, found my bottle of aspirin, and chewed up three of them, grimacing at the taste. Then I drank a glass of water. “You make those calls?” I asked Thomas.
“Yeah,” he said. “In fact, Murphy should be here in a minute.”
I nodded at him and walked over to settle into one of the easy chairs by the fireplace with my glass of water, and told Charity, “I
thought I could find her. I’m sorry. I…” I shook my head and trailed off into silence.
“Thank you for trying, Mister Dresden,” she said quietly. She didn’t look up.
“It was the baby hair,” I said to Charity. “It didn’t work. Hair was too old. I couldn’t…” I sighed. “Just too tired to think straight, maybe,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Charity looked up at me. I expected fear, anger, maybe a little bit of contempt in her features. But none of that was there. There was instead something that I’d seen in Michael when the situation was really, really bad. It was a kind of quiet calm, a surety totally at odds with the situation, and I could not fathom its source or substance.
“We will find her,” she told me quietly. “We’ll bring her home.” Her voice held the solid confidence of someone stating a fact as simple and obvious as two plus two is four.
I didn’t quite break out into a bitter laugh. I was too tired to do that. But I shook my head and stared at the empty fireplace.
“Mister Dresden,” she said quietly. “I don’t pretend to know as much about magic as you do. I’m quite certain you have a great deal of power.”
“Just not enough,” I said. “Not enough to do any good.”
In the corner of my eye, I saw Charity actually smile. “It’s difficult for you to realize that you are, at times, as helpless as the rest of us.”
She was probably right, but I didn’t say as much out loud. “I made a mistake, and Molly might be hurt because of it. I don’t know how to live with that.”
“You’re only human,” she said, and there was a trace of pensive reflection in her voice. “For all of your power.”
“That answer isn’t good enough,” I said quietly. I glanced at her, to find her watching me, her dark eyes intent. “Not good enough for Molly.”
“Have you done all that you can to help her?” Charity asked me.
I racked my brain for a useless moment and then said, “Yeah.”
She spread her hands. “Then I can hardly ask you for more.”