by Jim Butcher
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.”
“You grossly underestimate the power of laughter,” I said. “But if there’s some kind of violent altercation between students, any janitor in the world would find it his honor-bound duty to report it to the administration.”
Coach Pete made a growling sound.
“Go ahead,” I said. “Let your kids loose on him. I saw how they behaved in their classrooms. They’re problem cases. Irwin’s obviously a brilliant student and a good kid. When the administration finds out the three of them were involved in a fight, what do you think happens to the Troublemaker Twins? This is a private school. Out they go. Irwin is protected—and I won’t have to lift a finger to interfere.”
Coach Pete rolled up the magazine and tapped it against his leg a couple of times. Then he relaxed, and a small smile appeared upon his lips. “You are correct, of course, except for one thing.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“They will not be exiled. Their parents donate more funds to the school than any ten other families—and a great deal more than Irwin’s mother could ever afford.” He gave me a very small, very Gallic shrug. “This is a private school. The boys’ parents paid for the cafeteria within which we stand.”
I found myself gritting my teeth. “First of all, you have got to get over this fetish for grammatically correct prepositions. It makes you sound like a prissy twit. And second of all, money isn’t everything.”
“Money is power,” he replied.
“Power isn’t everything.”
“No,” he said, and his smile became smug. “It is the only thing.”
I looked back out into the hallway through the open glass wall separating it from the cafeteria. The Bully Brothers were standing in the hall, staring at Irwin the way hungry lions stare at gazelles.
Coach Pete nodded pleasantly to me and returned to his original place by the wall, unrolling his magazine and opening it again.
“Dammit,” I whispered. The svartalf might well be right. At an upper-class institution such as this, money and politics would have a ridiculous amount of influence. Whether aristocracies were hereditary or economic, they’d been successfully buying their children out of trouble for centuries. The Bully Brothers might well come out of this squeaky clean, and they’d be able to continue to persecute Bigfoot Irwin.
Maybe this would turn out to be a slugfest after all.
I swept my way over to Irwin’s table and came to a stop. Then I sat down across from him.
He looked up from his page of scrawled sentences, and his face was pale. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“How you doing, kid?” I asked him. When I spoke, he actually flinched a little.
“Fine,” he mumbled.
Hell’s bells. He was afraid of me. “Irwin,” I said, keeping my voice gentle, “relax. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Okay,” he said, without relaxing a bit.
“They’ve been doing this for a while now, haven’t they?” I asked him.
“Um,” he said.
“The Bully Brothers. The ones staring at you right now.”
Irwin shivered and glanced aside without actually turning his head toward the window. “It’s not a big deal.”
“It kind of is,” I said. “They’ve been giving you grief for a long time, haven’t they? Only lately it’s been getting worse. They’ve been scarier. More violent. Bothering you more and more often.”
He said nothing, but something in his lack of reaction told me that
I’d hit the nail on the head.
I sighed. “Irwin, my name is Harry Dresden. Your father sent me to help you.”
That made his eyes snap up to me, and his mouth opened. “M-my … my dad?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He can’t be here to help you. So he asked me to do it for him.”
“My dad,” Irwin said, and I heard the ache in his voice, so poignant that my own chest tightened in empathy. I’d never known my mother, and my father died before I started going to school. I knew what it was like to have holes in my life in the shape of people who should have been there.
His eyes flicked toward the Bully Brothers again, though he didn’t turn his head. “Sometimes,” he said quietly, “if I ignore them, they go away.” He stared down at his paper. “My dad … I mean, I never … You met him?”
“Yeah.”
His voice was very small. “Is … is he nice?”
“Seems to be,” I said gently.
“And … and he knows about me?”
“Yeah,” I said. “He wants to be here for you. But he can’t.”
“Why not?” Irwin asked.
“It’s complicated.”
Irwin nodded and looked down. “Every Christmas there’s a present from him. But I think maybe Mom is just writing his name on the tag.”
“Maybe not,” I said quietly. “He sent me. And I’m way more expensive than a present.”
Irwin frowned at that and said, “What are you going to do?”
“That isn’t the question you should be asking,” I said.
“What is, then?”
I put my elbows on the table and leaned toward him. “The question, Irwin, is what are you going to do?”
“Get beat up, probably,” he said.
“You can’t keep hoping they’ll just go away, kid,” I said. “There are people out there who enjoy hurting and scaring others. They’re going to keep doing it until you make them stop.”
“I’m not going to fight anyone,” Irwin all but whispered. “I’m not going to hurt anyone. I … I can’t. And besides, if they’re picking on me, they’re not picking on anyone else.”
I leaned back and took a deep breath, studying his hunched shoulders, his bowed head. The kid was frightened, the kind of fear that is planted and nurtured and which grows over the course of months and years. But there was also a kind of gentle, immovable resolve in the boy’s skinny body. He wasn’t afraid of facing the Bully Brothers. He just dreaded going through the pain that the encounter would bring.
Courage, like fear, comes in multiple varieties.
“Damn,” I said quietly. “You got some heart, kiddo.”
“Can you stay with me?” he asked. “If … if you’re here, maybe they’ll leave me alone.”
“Today,” I said quietly. “What about tomorrow?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Are you going away?”
“Can’t stay here forever,” I replied. “Sooner or later you’re going to be on your own.”
“I won’t fight,” he said. A droplet of water fell from his bowed head to smear part of a sentence on his paper. “I won’t be like them.”
“Irwin,” I said. “Look at me.”
He lifted his eyes. They were full. He was blinking to keep more tears from falling.
“Fighting isn’t always a bad thing.”
“That’s not what the school says.”
I smiled briefly. “The school has liability to worry about. I only have to worry about you.”
He frowned, his expression intent, pensive. “When isn’t it a bad thing?”
“When you’re protecting yourself, or someone else, from harm,” I said. “When someone wants to hurt you or someone who can’t defend themselves—and when the rightful authority can’t or won’t protect you.”
“But you have to hurt people to win a
fight. And that isn’t right.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t. But sometimes it is necessary.”
“It isn’t necessary right now,” he said. “I’ll be fine. It’ll hurt, but I’ll be fine.”
“Maybe you will,” I said. “But what about when they’re done with you? What happens when they decide that it was so much fun to hurt you, they go pick on someone else, too?”
“Do you think they’ll do that?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s how bullies work. They keep hurting people until someone makes them stop.”
He fiddled with the pencil in his fingers. “I don’t like fighting. I don’t even like playing Street Fighter.”
“This isn’t really about fighting,” I said. “It’s about communication.”
He frowned. “Huh?”
“They’re doing something wrong,” I said. “You need to communicate with them. Tell them that what they’re doing isn’t acceptable, and that they need to stop doing it.”
“I’ve said that,” he said. “I tried that a long time ago. It didn’t work.”
“You talked to them,” I said. “It didn’t get through. You need to find another way to get your message through. You have to show them.”
“You mean hurt them.”
“Not necessarily,” I said quietly. “But guys like those two jokers only respect strength. If you show them that you have it, they’ll get the idea.”
Irwin frowned harder. “No one ever talked to me about it like that before.”
“I guess not,” I said.
“I’m … I’m scared of doing that.”
“Who wouldn’t be?” I asked him. “But the only way to beat your fears is to face them. If you don’t, they’re going to keep on doing this to you, and then others, and someday someone is going to get hurt bad. It might even be those two jackasses who get hurt—if someone doesn’t make them realize that they can’t go through life acting like that.”
“They aren’t really bad guys,” Irwin said slowly. “I mean, to anyone but me. They’re okay to other people.”
“Then I’d say that you’d be helping them as well as yourself, Irwin.”
He nodded slowly and took a deep breath. “I’ll … I’ll think about it.”
“Good,” I said. “Thinking for yourself is the most valuable skill you’ll ever learn.”
“Thank you, Harry,” he said.
I rose and picked up my broom. “You bet.”
I went back to sweeping one end of the cafeteria. Coach Pete stood at the other end. Irwin returned to his writing, and the Bully Brothers came in.
They approached as before, moving between the tables, splitting up to come at Irwin from two sides. They ignored me and Coach Pete, closing in on Irwin with impatient eagerness.
Irwin’s pencil stopped scratching when they both were about five feet away from him, and without looking up he said in a sharp, firm voice, “Stop.”
They did. I could see the face of only one of them, but the bully was blinking in surprise.
“This is not cool,” Irwin said. “And I’m not going to let you do it anymore.”
The brothers eyed him, traded rather feral smiles, and then each of them lunged at Irwin and grabbed an arm. They hauled him back with surprising speed and power, slamming his back onto the floor. One of them started slapping at his eyes and face while the other produced a short length of heavy rubber tubing, jerked Irwin’s shirt up, and started hitting him on the stomach with the hose.
I gritted my teeth and reached for the handle of my mop—except it wasn’t a mop that was poking up out of the bucket. It was my staff, a six-foot length of oak as thick as my circled thumb and forefinger. If this was how the Bully Brothers started the beating, I didn’t even want to think about what they’d do for a finale. Svartalf or not, I couldn’t allow things to go any further before I stepped in.
Coach Pete’s dark eyes glittered at me from behind his sports magazine, and he crooked a couple of fingers on one hand in a way that no human being could have. I don’t know what kind of magical energy the svartalf was using, but he was good with it. There was a sharp crackling sound, and the water in the mop bucket froze solid in an instant, trapping my staff in place.
My heart sped up. That kind of magical control was a bad, bad sign. It meant that the svartalf was better than me—probably a lot better. He hadn’t used a focus of any kind to help him out, the way my staff would help me focus and control my own power. If we’d been fighting with swords, that move would have been the same as him clipping off the tips of my eyelashes without drawing blood. This guy would kill me if I fought him.
I set my jaw, grabbed the staff in both hands, and sent a surge of my will and power rushing down its rune-carved length into the entrapping ice. I muttered, “Forzare,” as I twisted the staff, and pure energy lashed out into the ice, pulverizing it into chunks the size of gravel.
Coach Pete leaned forward slightly, eager, and I saw his eyes gleam. Svartalves were old-school, and their culture had been born in the time of the Vikings. They thought mortal combat was at least as fun as it was scary, and their idea of mercy embraced killing you quickly as opposed to killing you slowly. If I started up with this svartalf, it wouldn’t be over until one of us was dead. Probably me. I was afraid.
The sound of the rubber hose hitting Irwin’s stomach and the harsh breathing of the struggling children echoed in the large room.
I took a deep breath, grabbed my staff in two hands, and began drawing in my will once more.
And then Bigfoot Irwin roared, “I said no!”
The kid twisted his shoulders in an abrupt motion and tossed one of the brothers away as if he weighed no more than a soccer ball. The bully flew ten feet before his butt hit the ground. The second brother was still staring in shock when Bigfoot Irwin sat up, grabbed him by the front of his shirt, and rose. He lifted the second brother’s feet off the floor and simply held him there, scowling furiously up at him.
The Bully Brothers had inherited their predatory instinct from their supernatural parent.
Bigfoot Irwin had gotten something else.
The second brother stared down at the younger boy and struggled to wriggle free, his face pale and frantic. Irwin didn’t let him go.
“Hey, look at me,” Irwin snarled. “This is not okay. You were mean to me. You kept hurting me. For no reason. That’s over. Now. I’m not going to let you do it anymore. Okay?”
The first brother sat up shakily from the floor and stared agog at his former victim, now holding his brother effortlessly off the floor.
“Did you hear me?” Irwin asked, giving the kid a little shake. I heard his teeth clack together.
“Y-yeah,” stammered the dangling brother, nodding emphatically. “I hear you. I hear you. We hear you.”
Irwin scowled for a moment. Then he gave the second brother a push before releasing him. The bully fell to the floor three feet away and scrambled quickly back from Irwin. The pair of them started a slow retreat.
“I mean it,” Irwin said. “What you’ve been doing isn’t cool. We’ll figure out something else for you to do for fun. Okay?”
The Bully Brothers mumbled something vaguely affirmative and then hurried out of the cafeteria.
Bigfoot Irwin watched them go. Then he looked down at his hands, turning them over and back as if he’d never seen them before.
I kept my grip on my staff and looked down the length of the cafeteria at Coach Pete. I arched an eyebrow at him. “It seems like the boys sorted this out on their own.”
Coach Pete lowered his magazine slowly. The air was thick with tension, and the silence was its hard surface.
Then the svartalf said, “Your sentences, Mr. Pounder.”
“Yessir, Coach Pete,” Irwin said. He turned back to the table and sat down, and his pencil started scratching at the paper again.
Coach Pete nodded at him, then came over to me. He stood facing me for a moment, his expression blank.
“I didn’t intervene,” I said. “I didn’t try to dissuade your boys from following their natures. Irwin did that.”
The svartalf pursed his lips thoughtfully and then nodded slowly. “Technically accurate. And yet you still had a hand in what just happened. Why should I not exact retribution for your interference?”
“Because I just helped your boys.”
“In what way?”
“Irwin and I taught them caution—that some prey is too much for them to handle. And we didn’t even hurt them to make it happen.”
Coach Pete considered that for a moment and then gave me a faint smile. “A lesson best learned early rather than late.” He turned and started to walk away.
“Hey,” I said in a sharp, firm voice.
He paused.
“You took the kid’s book today,” I said. “Please return it.”
Irwin’s pencil scratched along the page, suddenly loud.
Coach Pete turned. Then he pulled the paperback in question out of his pocket and flicked it through the air. I caught it in one hand, which probably made me look a lot cooler and more collected than I felt at the time.
Coach Pete inclined his head to me, a little more deeply than before. “Wizard.”
I mirrored the gesture. “Svartalf.”
He left the cafeteria, shaking his head. What sounded suspiciously like a chuckle bubbled in his wake.
I WAITED UNTIL Irwin was done with his sentences, and then I walked him to the front of the building, where his maternal grandmother was waiting to pick him up.
“Was that okay?” he asked me. “I mean, did I do right?”
“Asking me if I thought you did right isn’t the question,” I said.
Irwin suddenly smiled at me. “Do I think I did right?” He nodded slowly. “I think … I think I do.”
“How’s it feel?” I asked him.
“It feels good. I feel … not happy. Satisfied. Whole.”
“That’s how it’s supposed to feel,” I said. “Whenever you’ve got a choice, do good, kiddo. It isn’t always fun or easy, but in the long run it makes your life better.”
He nodded, frowning thoughtfully. “I’ll remember.”