The Ultimate Dresden Omnibus, 0-15

by Butcher, Jim

  If it is, I guess I can blame it on a screwed-up childhood.

  “Do you want the Sword?” I asked.

  She let out a quiet groan. “You sound like Sanya. That was the first thing he said.” She twisted her face into a stern mask wearing a big grin and mimicked his accent. “ ‘This is excellent! I have been doing too much of the work!’ ”

  I almost laughed. “Well. I must say. It looks good on you.”

  “Felt good,” she said. “Except for that pronouncement-of-doom thing. It was like someone else was using me as a sock puppet.” She shivered. “Ugh.”

  “Yeah, archangels can be annoying.” I nodded toward the hidden compartment. “There’s a space behind that panel. You ever want the Sword, check there.”

  “I’m not rushing into anything. I’ve had rebound boyfriends. Not interested in a rebound career.”

  I grunted. “So. What are you going to do?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to make any more decisions. So . . . I think I’m going to go get really drunk. And then have mindless sex with the first reasonably healthy male who walks by. Then have a really awkward hangover. And after that, we’ll see.”

  “Sounds like a good plan,” I said. And my mouth kept going without checking in with the rest of me. Again. “Do you want some company?”

  There was a sharp, heavy silence. Murphy actually stopped breathing. My heart rate sped up a little.

  I wanted to curse my mouth for being stupid, but . . .

  Why the hell not?

  Bad timing is for people who have time.

  “I . . .” She swallowed, and I could see her forcing herself to speak casually. “I suppose you exercise. It would make things simpler.”

  “Simple,” I said. “That’s me.”

  Her hand went to her hair and she forced it back down. “I want to . . .” She took a breath. “I’ll pick you up in an hour?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  She stood up, her cheeks pink. Hell’s bells, it was an adorable look on her. “An hour, then,” she said.

  Before she could leave, I caught her hand. Her hands were small and strong and just a little rough. She had bandages over a couple of burst blisters the sword had worn on her during half an hour or so of hard work. I bent over it and kissed the back of her fingers, one for each. I let her go reluctantly and said, my stomach muscles twitching with butterflies, “An hour.”

  She left and I saw her walking very quickly toward her car. Her ragged ponytail bobbed left and right with her steps.

  The only thing certain in life is change. Most of my changes, lately, hadn’t been good ones.

  Maybe this one wouldn’t be good either . . . but it didn’t have that feel to it.

  I took forty minutes shaving and putting on my nicest clothes, which amounted to jeans and a T-shirt and my old fleece-lined denim jacket. I didn’t have any cologne, so the deodorant and soap would have to do. I didn’t allow myself to think about what was going on. In a dream, if you ever start realizing it’s a dream, poof, it’s gone.

  And I didn’t want that to happen.

  After that I spent a few minutes just . . . breathing. Listening to the water around me. The ticking of the clock. The peaceful silence. Drinking in the comforting sense of solitude all around me.

  Then I said out loud, “Screw this Zen crap. Maybe she’ll be early.” And I got up to leave.

  I came out of the cabin and into the early-afternoon sun, quivering with pleasant tension and tired and haunted—and hopeful. I shielded my eyes against the sun and studied the city’s skyline.

  My foot slipped a little, and I nearly lost my balance, just as something smacked into the wall of the cabin behind me, a sharp popping sound, like a rock thrown against a wooden fence. I turned, and it felt slow for some reason. I looked at the Water Beetle’s cabin wall, bulkhead, whatever, behind me and thought, Who splattered red paint on my boat?

  Author’s Note

  When I was seven years old, I got a bad case of strep throat and was out of school for a whole week. During that time, my sisters bought me my first fantasy and sci- fi novels: the boxed set of Lord of the Rings and the boxed set of Han Solo adventure novels by Brian Daley. I devoured them all during that week.

  From that point on, I was pretty much doomed to join SF&F fandom. From there, it was only one more step to decide I wanted to be a writer of my favorite fiction material, and here we are.

  I blame my sisters.

  My first love as a fan is swords-and-horses fantasy. After Tolkien I went after C. S. Lewis. After Lewis, It was Lloyd Alexander. After them came Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Robert Howard, John Norman, Poul Anderson, David Eddings, Weis and Hickman, Terry Brooks, Elizabeth Moon, Glen Cook, and before I knew it I was a dual citizen of the United States and Lankhmar, Narnia, Gor, Cimmeria, Krynn, Amber—you get the picture.

  When I set out to become a writer, I spent years writing swords-and-horses fantasy novels—and seemed to have little innate talent for it. But I worked at my writing, branching out into other areas as experiments, including SF, mystery, and contemporary fantasy. That’s how the Dresden Files initially came about—as a happy accident while trying to accomplish something else. Sort of like penicillin.

  But I never forgot my first love, and to my immense delight and excitement, one day I got a call from my agent and found out that I was going to get to share my newest swords-and-horses fantasy novel with other fans.

  The Codex Alera is a fantasy series set within the savage world of Carna, where spirits of the elements, known as furies, lurk in every facet of life, and where many intelligent races vie for security and survival. The realm of Alera is the monolithic civilization of humanity, and its unique ability to harness and command the furies is all that enables its survival in the face of the enormous, sometimes hostile elemental powers of Carna, and against savage creatures who would lay Alera to waste and ruin.

  Yet even a realm as powerful as Alera is not immune to destruction from within, and the death of the heir apparent to the crown has triggered a frenzy of ambitious political maneuvering and infighting amongst the High Lords, those who wield the most powerful furies known to man. Plots are afoot, traitors and spies abound, and a civil war seems inevitable—all while the enemies of the realm watch, ready to strike at the first sign of weakness.

  Tavi is a young man living on the frontier of Aleran civilization—because let’s face it, swords- and-horses fantasies start there. Born a freak, unable to utilize any powers of furycrafting whatsoever, Tavi has grown up relying up on his own wits, speed, and courage to survive. When an ambitious plot to discredit the Crown lays Tavi’s home, the Calderon Valley, naked and defenseless before a horde of the barbarian Marat, the boy and his family find themselves directly in harm’s way.

  There are no titanic High Lords to protect them, no Legions, no Knights with their mighty furies to take the field. Tavi and the free frontiersmen of the Calderon Valley must find some way to uncover the plot and to defend their homes against the merciless horde of the Marat and their beasts.

  It is a desperate hour, when the fate of all Alera hangs in the balance, when a handful of ordinary steadholders must find the courage and strength to defy an overwhelming foe, and when the courage and intelligence of one young man will save the realm—or destroy it.

  Thank you, readers and fellow fans, for all of your support and kindness. I hope that you enjoy reading the books of the Codex Alera as much as I enjoyed creating them for you.

  —Jim

  Furies of Calderon, Academ’s Fury, Cursor’s Fury, Captain’s Fury,

  Princeps’ Fury, and First Lord’s Fury are available from Ace Books.

  Table of Contents

  AFTERMATH

  —original novella

  To quote a great man: ’Nuff said.

  I can’t believe he’s dead.

  Harry Dresden, Professional Wizard. It sounds like a bad joke. Like most people, at
first I figured it was just his schtick, his approach to marketing himself as a unique commodity in private investigation, a job market that isn’t ever exactly teeming with business.

  Well, that’s not entirely true. I knew better. I’d seen something that the rules of the normal world just couldn’t explain, and he was right in the middle of it. But I did what everyone does when they run into the supernatural: I told myself that it was dark, and that I didn’t really know what I had seen. No one else had witnessed anything to support me. They would call me crazy if I tried to tell anyone about it. By the time a week had passed, I had half convinced myself that I hallucinated the whole thing. A year later, I was almost certain it had been some kind of trick, an illusion pulled off by a smarmy but savvy con.

  But he was for real.

  Believe me, I know. Several years and several hundred nightmares later, I know.

  He was the real thing.

  God. I was already thinking about him in the past tense.

  “Sergeant Murphy,” said one of the lab guys. Dresden was almost one of our own, in Special Investigations. We’d pulled every string we had to get a forensics team on the site. “Excuse me, Sergeant Murphy.”

  I turned to face the forensic tech. He was cute, in a not-quite-grown, puppyish kind of way. The ID clipped to his lapel said his name was Jarvis. He looked nervous.

  “I’m Murphy,” I said.

  “Um, right.” He swallowed and looked around. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but … my boss said I shouldn’t be talking to you. He said you were on suspension.”

  I looked at him calmly. He wasn’t more than average height, but that put his head about eight and a half inches over mine. He still had that whippet thinness that some twentysomethings hang on to for a while after their teenage years. I smiled at him and tried to put him at ease. “I get it,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”

  He licked his lips nervously.

  “Jarvis,” I said, “please.” I gestured at the bloodstain on the exterior of the cabin of a dumpy little secondhand boat, the lettering on which proclaimed it the Water Beetle. “He is my friend.”

  I didn’t say was—not out loud. You don’t ever do that until you’ve found the remains. It’s professional.

  Jarvis exhaled and looked around. I thought he looked as if he might throw up.

  “The blood spatter suggests that whoever was struck there took a hit somewhere in his upper torso. It’s impossible to be sure, but”—he swallowed—“it was a heavy spray. Maybe an arterial hit.”

  “Or maybe not,” I said.

  He was too young to notice the way I was grasping at straws. “Or maybe not,” he agreed. “There’s not enough blood on the site to call it a murder, but we think most of it … We didn’t find the round. It went through the victim, and both walls of the, uh, boat there. It’s probably in the lake.”

  I grunted. It’s something I picked up over a fifteen-year career in law enforcement. Men have managed to create a complex and utterly impenetrable secret language consisting of monosyllabic sounds and partial words—and they are apparently too thick to realize it exists. Maybe they really are from Mars. I’d been able to learn a few Martian phrases over time, and one of the useful ones was the grunt that meant I acknowledge that I’ve heard what you said; please continue.

  “Smears on the deck and the guardrail suggest that the victim went over the side and into the water,” Jarvis continued, his tone subdued. “There’s a dive team on the way, but …”

  I used the Martian phrase for You needn’t continue; I know what you’re talking about. It sounded a lot like the first grunt to anyone without a Y chromosome, but I really did get it.

  Lake Michigan is jealous and protective of her dead. The water’s depth and the year-round cold temperatures that go with it mean that corpses don’t tend to produce many gasses as they decompose. As a result, they often don’t bob to the surface, like you see in all those cop shows on cable. They just lie on the bottom. No one knows how many poor souls’ earthly remains rest in the quiet cold of Michigan’s depths.

  “It hasn’t been long,” I said. “Even if he fell off the back, into the open water, he can’t have gone far.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jarvis said. “Um. If you’ll excuse me.”

  I nodded at him and shoved my hands into the pockets of my coat. Night was coming on, but it wouldn’t make a lot of difference—the lake wasn’t exactly crystal clear on the best days. The divers would have to use flashlights, day or night, even though we weren’t more than fifty yards from shore, on the docks of the marina the Water Beetle called home. That would limit the area of water they could search at any given moment. The cold would impose limits on their dive time. Sonar might or might not be useful. This close to Chicago, the lake floor was cluttered with all kinds of things. They’d have to get lucky to get a good radar hit and find him.

  If he was in there, he’d been there for several hours, and the wind had been rising the whole time, stirring the surface of the lake. Harry’s corpse would have had plenty of time to fall to the bottom and begin to drift.

  The dive team probably wasn’t going to find him. They’d try, but …

  Dammit.

  I stared hard at the lengthening shadows and tried to make my tears evaporate through sheer will.

  “I’m … very sorry, Sergeant,” Jarvis said.

  I replied with the Martian for Thank you for your concern, but at the moment I need some space. That one’s easy. I just stared forward without saying anything, and after a moment, Jarvis nodded and toddled off to continue working.

  A while later, Stallings was standing next to me, wearing his badge prominently out on his coat. After I’d been busted back to sergeant, Stallings had replaced me as the head of Special Investigations, Chicago’s unofficial monster squad. We dealt with the weird stuff no one would accept, and then lied about what we’d been doing so that everything fit neatly into a report.

  Stallings was a big, rawboned man, comfortably solid with age, his hair thinning on top. He had a mustache like Magnum’s. I’d been his boss for nearly seven years. We got along well with each other. He never treated me like his most junior subordinate—more like an adviser who had been made available to the new commander.

  The forensics boys were sealing the doors of the little boat with crime scene tape, having taken enough samples and photographs to choke a rhinoceros, before anyone spoke.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  He exhaled through his nose and said, “Hospital checks have come up with zip.”

  I grimaced. They would. When Harry got hurt, the hospital was the last place he wanted to be. He felt too vulnerable there—and he worried that the way a wizard’s presence disrupted technology could hurt or kill someone on life support, or do harm to some innocent bystander.

  But there was so much blood on the boat. If he was that badly hurt, he couldn’t have gone anywhere on his own power. And down here, anyone who had found him would have called emergency services.

  And the blood trail led to the lake.

  I shook my head several times. I didn’t want to believe it, but you can’t make fact into fiction, no matter how much denial you’ve got to draw upon.

  Stallings sighed again. Then he said, “You’re on suspension, Murphy. And this is a crime scene.”

  “Not until we know a crime’s been committed,” I said. “We don’t absolutely know anyone’s been hurt or killed. Right now, it’s just a mess.”

  “God dammit,” he said, his voice weary. “You’re a civilian now, Karrin. Get away from the fucking scene. Before someone gets word to Rudolph about this and Infernal Affairs comes down here to toss your ass in jail.”

  “On any other day, I would think you were talking sense,” I said.

  “I don’t care what you think,” he said. “I care what you do. And what you’re going to do is turn around, walk over to your car, get in it, go home, and get a good night’s sle
ep. You look like a hundred miles of bad road. Through Hell.”

  See, most women would have been a little put out by a remark like that. Especially if they were wearing slacks that flattered their hips and butt, with a darling red silk blouse and a matching silver necklace and two bracelets, studded with tiny sapphires, which they’d inherited from their grandmother. And more makeup than they usually wore in a week. And new perfume. And great shoes.

  By any measure, that kind of remark was insulting. When you were dressed for a date, it was more so.

  But Stallings wasn’t trying to piss me off. The insult was Martian, too, for something along the lines of I have so much regard for you that I went out of my way to create this insult so that we can have the fun of a mildly adversarial conversation. See how much I care?

  “John,” I replied, using his first name, “you are a sphincter douche.”

  Translation: I love you, too.

  He gave me a quiet smile and nodded.

  Men.

  He was right. There was nothing I could do here.

  I turned my back on the last place I’d seen Harry Dresden and walked back to my car.

  IT HAD BEEN a long day, starting most of two days before, including a gunfight at the FBI building—which the news was still going insane about, especially after the office building bombing a couple of days before that—and a pitched battle at an ancient Mayan temple that ended in the utter destruction of the vampires of the Red Court.

  And after that, things had gotten really dangerous.

  I’d shown up to that ratty old boat where Harry was crashing, dressed in the outfit Stallings had insulted. Harry and I were supposed to go grab a few drinks and … and see what happened.

  Instead, I’d found nothing but his blood.

  I didn’t think I would sleep, but two days plus of physical and psychological stress made it inevitable. Nightmares came to haunt me, but they didn’t make much of an impression. I’d seen worse in the real world. I did cry, though. I remember that—waking up in the middle of the night from bad dreams that were old hat by now, sobbing my eyes out in pure reaction to the events of the past two days.