by Butcher, Jim
Chapter Fifty
I surfaced from the memory, shivering, and looked around in confusion. I was still in Molly’s mindscape, on the cheesy bridge. It was silent. Completely silent. Nothing moved. The images on the screen and the various Mollys were all frozen in place like mannequins. Everything that had been happening in the battle had been happening at the speed of thought—lightning fast. There was only one reason that everything here would be stopped still like this, right in the middle of the action.
“So much for that linear-time nonsense, eh?” My voice came out sounding harsh and rough.
Footsteps sounded behind me, and the room began to grow brighter and brighter. After a moment, there was nothing but white light, and I had to hold up a hand to shield my eyes against it.
Then the light faded somewhat. I lifted my eyes again and found myself in a featureless expanse of white. I wasn’t even sure what I was standing on, or if I was standing on anything at all. There was simply nothing but white . . .
. . . and a young man with hair of dark gold that hung messily down over silver blue eyes. His cheekbones could have sliced bread. He wore jeans, old boots, a white shirt, and a denim jacket, and no youth born had ever been able to stand with such utter, tranquil stillness as he.
“You’re used to linear time,” he said. His voice was resonant, deep, mellow, with the almost musical timbre you hear from radio personalities. “It was the easiest way to help you understand.”
“Aren’t you a little short for an archangel?” I asked him.
Uriel smiled at me. It was the sort of expression that would make flowers spontaneously blossom and babies start to giggle. “Appropriate. I must confess to being more of a Star Wars fan than a Star Trek fan, personally. The simple division of good and evil, the clarity of perfect right and perfect wrong—it’s relaxing. It makes me feel young.”
I just stared at him for a moment and tried to gather my thoughts. The memory, now that I had it again, was painfully vivid. God, that poor kid. Molly. I’d never wanted to cause her pain. She’d been a willing accomplice, and she’d done it with her eyes open—but, God, I wished it hadn’t had to happen to her. She was hurting so much, and now I could see why—and I could see why the madness she was feigning might be a great deal more genuine than she realized.
That had to have been why Murphy distrusted her so strongly. Murph had excellent instincts for people. She must have sensed something in Molly, sensed the pain and the desperation that drove her, and it must have sent up a warning flag in Murphy’s head. Which would have hurt Molly badly, to be faced with suspicion and distrust, however polite Karrin might have been about it. That pain would, in turn, have driven her further away, made her act stranger, which would earn more suspicion, in an agonizing cycle.
I’d never wanted that for her.
What had I done?
I’d saved Maggie—but had I destroyed my apprentice in doing so? The fact that I’d gotten myself killed had no relative bearing on the morality of my actions, if I had. You can’t just walk around picking and choosing which lives to save and which to destroy. The inherent arrogance and the underlying evil of such a thing runs too deep to be avoided—no matter how good your intentions might be.
I knew why Molly had tried to get me to tell Thomas. She’d known, just as I had, that Thomas would try to stop me from killing myself, regardless of my motivations. But she’d been right about something else, too: He was my brother. He’d deserved more than I’d given him. That was why I hadn’t thought of him, not once since returning to Chicago. How could I possibly have remembered my brother without remembering the shame I felt at excluding him from my trust? How could I think of Thomas without thinking of the truth of what I had done?
Normally, I would never have believed that I was the sort of man who could make himself forget and overlook something rather than facing a harsh reality, no matter how painful it might be.
I guess I’m not perfect.
The young man facing me waited patiently, apparently giving me time to gather my thoughts, saying nothing.
Uriel. I should have known from the outset. Uriel is the archangel who most people know little about. Most don’t even know his name—and apparently he likes it that way. If Gabriel is an ambassador, if Michael is a general, if Rafael is a healer and spiritual champion, then Uriel is a spymaster—Heaven’s spook. Uriel covered all kinds of covert work for the Almighty. When mysterious angels showed up to wrestle with biblical patriarchs without revealing their identities, when death was visited upon the firstborn of Egypt, when an angel was sent into cities of corruption to guide the innocent clear of inbound wrath, Uriel’s hand was at work.
He was the quietest of the archangels. To my way of thinking, that probably indicated that he was also the most dangerous.
He’d taken notice of me a few years back and had bestowed a measure of power known as soulfire on me. I’d done a job or three for him since then. He’d dropped by with annoying, cryptic advice once in a while. I sort of liked him, but he was also aggravating—and scary, in a way that I had never known before. There was the sense of something . . . hideously absolute about him. Something that would not yield or change even if the universe itself was unmade. Standing in his presence, I always felt that I had somehow become so fragile that I might fly to dust if the archangel sneezed or accidentally twitched the wrong muscle.
Which, given the kind of power such a being possessed, was probably more or less accurate.
“All of this?” I asked, waving a hand generally, “was to lead me there? To that memory?”
“You had to understand.”
I eyed him and said wearily, “Epic. Fail. Because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Uriel tilted back his head and laughed. “This is one of those things that was about the journey, not the destination.”
I shook my head. “You . . . you lost me.”
“On the contrary, Harry: You found yourself.”
I eyed him. Then tore at my hair and said, “Arrrgh! Can’t you give me a straight answer? Is there some law of the universe that compels you to be so freaking mysterious?”
“Several, actually,” Uriel said, still clearly amused. “All designed for your protection, but there are still some things I can tell you.”
“Then tell me why,” I said. “Why do all this? Why sucker me into going back to Chicago? Why?”
“Jack told you,” Uriel said. “They cheated. The scale had to be balanced.”
I shook my head. “That office, in Chicago Between. It was yours.”
“One of them,” he said, nodding. “I have a great deal of work to do. I recruit those willing to help me.”
“What work?” I asked.
“The same work as I ever have done,” Uriel said. “I and my colleagues labor to ensure freedom.”
“Freedom of what?” I asked.
“Of will. Of choice. The distinction between good and evil is meaningless if one does not have the freedom to choose between them. It is my duty, my purpose in Creation, to protect and nourish that meaning.”
I narrowed my eyes. “So . . . if you’re involved in my death . . .” I tilted my head at him. “It’s because someone forced me to do it?”
Uriel waggled a hand in a so-so gesture and turned to pace a few steps away. “Force implies another will overriding your own,” he said over his shoulder. “But there is more than one way for your will to be compromised.”
I frowned at him, then said, with dawning comprehension, “Lies.”
The archangel turned, his eyebrows lifted, as though I were a somewhat dim student who had surprised his teacher with an insightful answer. “Yes. Precisely. When a lie is believed, it compromises the freedom of your will.”
“So, what?” I asked. “Captain Jack and the Purgatory Crew ride to the rescue every time someone tells a lie?”
Uriel laughed. “No, of course not. Mortals are free to lie if they choose to do so. If they could not, they would
not be free.” His eyes hardened. “But others are held to a higher standard. Their lies are far deadlier, far more potent.”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“Imagine a being who was there when the first mortal drew the first breath,” Uriel said. Hard, angry flickers of light danced around us, notable even against formless white. “One who has watched humanity rise from the dust to spread across and to change the very face of the world. One who has seen, quite literally, tens of thousands of mortal lives begin, wax, wane, and end.”
“Someone like an angel,” I said quietly.
“Someone like that,” he said, showing his teeth briefly. “A being who could know a mortal’s entire life. Could know his dreams. His fears. His very thoughts. Such a being, so versed in human nature, in mortal patterns of thought, could reliably predict precisely how a given mortal would react to almost anything.” Uriel gestured at me. “For example, how he might react to a simple lie delivered at precisely the right moment.”
Uriel waved his hand and suddenly we were back in the utility room at St. Mary’s. Only I wasn’t lying on the backboard on a cot. Or, rather, I was doing exactly that—but I was also standing beside Uriel, at the door, looking in at myself.
“Do you remember what you were thinking?” Uriel asked me.
I did remember. I remembered with perfect clarity, in fact.
“I thought that I’d been defeated before. That people had even died because I failed. But those people had never been my own flesh and blood. They hadn’t been my child. I’d lost. I was beaten.” I shook my head. “I remember saying to myself that it was all over. And it was all your fault, Harry.”
“Ah,” Uriel said as I finished the last sentence, and he lifted his hand. “Now look.”
I blinked at him and then at the image of me lying on the cot. “I don’t . . .” I frowned. There was something odd about the shadows in the room, but . . .
“Here,” Uriel said, lifting a hand. Light shone from it as though from a sudden sunrise. It revealed the room, casting everything in stark relief—and I saw it.
A slender shadow crouched beside the cot, vague and difficult to notice, even by Uriel’s light—but it was there, and it was leaning as though to whisper in my ear.
And it was all your fault, Harry.
The thought, the memory, resonated in my head for a moment, and I shivered.
“That . . . that shadow. It’s an angel?”
“It was once,” he said, and his voice was gentle—and infinitely sad. “A long, long time ago.”
“One of the Fallen,” I breathed.
“Yes. Who knew how to lie to you, Harry.”
“Yeah, well. Blaming myself for bad stuff isn’t exactly, um . . . completely uncharacteristic for me, man.”
“I’m aware—as was that,” he said, nodding at the shadow. “It made the lie even stronger, to use your own practice against you. But that creature knew what it was doing. It’s all about timing. At that precise moment, in that exact state of mind, the single whisper it passed into your thoughts was enough to push your decision.” Uriel looked at me and smiled faintly. “It added enough anger, enough self-recrimination, enough guilt, and enough despair to your deliberations to make you decide that destroying yourself was the only option left to you. It took your freedom away.” His eyes hardened again. “I attempt to discourage that sort of thing where possible. When I cannot, I am allowed to balance the scales.”
“I still don’t understand,” I said. “How does me coming back to haunt Chicago for a few nights balance anything?”
“Oh, it doesn’t,” Uriel said. “I can only act in a mirror of the offending action, I’m afraid.”
“You . . . just get to whisper in my ear?”
“To whisper seven words, in fact,” he said. “What you did . . . was elective.”
“Elective?” I asked.
“I had no direct involvement in your return. In my judgment, it needed to happen—but there was no requirement that you come back to Chicago,” Uriel said calmly. “You volunteered.”
I rolled my eyes. “Well, yes. Duh. Because three of my friends were going to die if I didn’t.”
Uriel arched an eyebrow at me abruptly. Then he reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a cell phone. He made it beep a couple of times, then turned on the speakerphone, and I heard a phone ringing.
“Murphy,” answered Captain Jack’s baritone.
“What’s this Dresden is telling me about three of his friends being hurt?”
“Dresden,” Jack said in an absent tone, as if searching his memory and finding nothing.
Uriel seemed mildly impatient. He wasn’t buying it. “Tall, thin, insouciant, and sent back to Chicago to search for his killer?”
“Oh, right, him,” Jack said. “That guy.”
“Yes,” Uriel said.
There was a guileless pause, and then Jack said, “What about him?”
Uriel, bless his angelic heart, closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep, calming breath. “Collin . . .” he said, in a reproving, parental tone.
“I might have mentioned something about it,” Jack said. “Sure. Guy’s got a lot of friends. Friends are running around fighting monsters. I figure at least three of them are going to get hurt if he isn’t there to back them up. Seemed reasonable.”
“Collin,” Uriel said, his voice touched with an ocean of disappointment and a teaspoon of anger. “You lied.”
“I speculated,” Captain Jack replied. “I got him to do the right thing, didn’t I?”
“Collin, our purpose is to defend freedom—not to decide how it should be used.”
“Everything I told him was technically true, more or less, and I got the job done,” Jack said stubbornly. “Look, sir, if I were perfect, I wouldn’t be working here in the first place. Now, would I?”
And then he hung up. On speakerphone. On a freaking archangel.
I couldn’t help it. I let out a rolling belly laugh. “I just got suckered into doing this by . . . Stars and stones, you didn’t even know that he . . . Big bad angel boy, and you get the wool pulled over your eyes by . . .” I stopped trying to talk and just laughed.
Uriel eyed the phone, then me, and then tucked the little device away again, clearly nonplussed. “It doesn’t matter how well I believe I know your kind, Harry. They always manage to find some way to try my patience.”
It took me a moment to get the laughter under control, but I did. “Look, Uri, I don’t want to say . . .”
The archangel gave me a look so cold that my words froze in my throat.
“Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden,” he said quietly—and he said it exactly right, speaking my Name in a voice of that same absolute power that had so unnerved me before. “Do not attempt to familiarize my name. The part you left off happens to be rather important to who and what I am. Do you understand?”
I didn’t. But as he spoke, I knew—not just suspected, but knew—that this guy could obliterate me, along with the planet I was standing on, with a simple thought. In fact, if what I’d read about archangels was right, Uriel could probably take apart all the planets. Like, all of them. Everywhere.
And I also knew that what I had just done had insulted him.
And . . . and frightened him.
I swallowed. It took me two tries, but I managed to whisper, “Aren’t we just Mr. Sunshine today.”
Uriel blinked. He looked less than certain for a moment. Then he said, “Mr. Sunshine . . . is perfectly acceptable. I suppose.”
I nodded. “Sorry,” I said. “About your name. I didn’t realize it was so, um . . .”
“Intimate,” he said quietly. “Sensitive. Names have tremendous power, Dresden. Yet mortals toss them left and right as though they were toys. It’s like watching infants play with hand grenades sometimes.” The ghost of a smile touched his face as he glanced at me. “Some more so than others. And I forgive you, of course.”
I nodded at him. Then, a
fter a quiet moment, I asked, “What happens now?”
“That’s up to you,” Uriel said. “You can always work for me. I believe you would find it challenging to do so—and I would have considerable use for someone of your talents.”
“For how long?” I asked. “I mean . . . for guys like Captain Jack? Is it forever?”
Uriel smiled. “Collin, like the others, is with me because he is not yet prepared to face what comes next. When he is, he’ll take that step. For now, he is not.”
“When you say what comes next, what do you mean, exactly?”
“The part involving words like forever, eternity, and judgment.”
“Oh,” I said. “What Comes Next.”
“Exactly.”
“So I can stay Between,” I said quietly. “Or I can go get on that train.”
“If you do,” Uriel said, his eyes intent and serious, “then you accept the consequences for all that you have done while alive. When judged, what you have done will be taken into account. Your fate, ultimately, will be determined by your actions in life.”
“You’re saying that if I don’t work for you, I’ll just have to accept what comes?”
“I am saying that you cannot escape the consequences of your choices,” he said.
I frowned at him for a minute. Then I said, “If I get on the train, it might just carry me straight to Hell.”
“I can’t talk to you about that,” he said. “What comes next is about faith, Harry. Not knowledge.”
I folded my arms. “What if I dig the ghost routine?”
“You don’t,” Uriel replied. “But even if you did, I would point out to you that your spiritual essence has been all but disintegrated. You would not last long as a shade, nor would you have the strength to aid and protect your loved ones. Should you lose your sanity, you might even become a danger to them—but if that is your desire, I can facilitate it.”
I shook my head, trying to think. Then I said, “It . . . depends.”
“Upon?”
“My friends,” I said quietly. “My family. I have to know that they’re all right.”
Uriel watched me for a moment and then opened his mouth to speak, shaking his head a little as he did.