by Jim Butcher
“The source of the attacks wasn’t an attack at all,” I said. “Ben Yardly’s job had exposed him to some pretty bad things—memories and images that wouldn’t go away. Some of you who fought in the war know what I’m talking about.”
McKenzie, Ilyana, and a few others gave me sober nods. “Kat Yardly was the eldest daughter of her mother, a fairly gifted sensitive. She was twelve years old.”
“Damn,” McKenzie said, his eyes widening in realization.
“Yes, of course,” Ilyana said. The other students turned to look at her. “The eldest daughter was a sensitive, too—perhaps a skilled one. She had picked up on those images in her uncle’s mind and was having nightmares about them.”
“What about the little girl?” I asked.
McKenzie took over. “Kat must have been a pusher, too,” he said, using the slang for someone who could broadcast thoughts or emotions to others. “She was old enough to be a surrogate mother to the younger daughter. They were probably linked somehow.”
“Exactly, Warden McKenzie,” I said quietly. “All the pieces were in front of me, and I just didn’t put them together. I figured the situation for a simple boogeyman infestation. I set up Megan to do the heavy lifting because I thought it would be relatively safe and would work out the best for the family. I was wrong.”
“But it did work out,” Ilyana said, something tentative in her voice for the first time that day.
“You kidding?” I asked. “That big boggart inflicted mental trauma on Megan that took her most of a year to recover from. She had her own nightmares for a while.” I sighed. “I went back to her and gave her and her daughter some exercises to do that would help insulate them both. Kat’s problems improved, and everything worked out fine—but it almost didn’t. If Yardly had panicked and used his gun, if someone had broken the circle, or if Megan Yardly hadn’t bought my lie about the boggart pushing a falsehood on her, it might have ripped out her sanity altogether. I might have put three kids into the foster care system.
“Arrogance,” I said quietly, and wrote it on the board, beneath the rest. “That’s the fifth A. We carry it around with us. It’s natural. We know a lot more than most people. We can do a lot more than most people. There’s a natural and understandable pride in that. But when we let that pride get in the way and take the place of truly seeing what is around us, there can be horrible consequences. Watch out for that fifth A, children. The Yardlys turned out all right mostly out of pure luck. They deserve better from me. And from you.
“Always keep your eyes open. Learn all that you can—and then try to learn some more.”
I took a deep breath and then nodded. “Okay. We’ll break for lunch, and then we’ll look at another case I didn’t screw up quite as badly. Back here in an hour. Dismissed.” The young Wardens got up and dispersed—except for McKenzie and Ilyana. The two came down to stand beside me.
“Commander,” McKenzie said. “This girl, Kat. Most of the talented mortals only demonstrate a single talent. She demonstrated at least two.”
“I’m aware,” I said.
“This girl,” Ilyana said. “Her talents were born in trauma and fear. This is one of the warning signs of a potential warlock.”
“Yeah,” I said. My talents had started in a similar fashion. “I heard that once.”
“So … She is under surveillance?” Ilyana asked.
“I drop in on her once in a while,” I said.
“That poor kid,” McKenzie said. “What do we do?”
I spread my hands. “It’s an imperfect world, Wardens. We do what we always do.” I smiled at them lopsidedly. “Whatever we can.”
They both looked down, frowning, concerned—concerned for a little girl who had no idea of what might be waiting for her.
Excellent.
The lesson hadn’t been wasted. “Okay, guys,” I said. “Burger King?” That perked them both up, though Ilyana, benighted soul that she was, didn’t react with joy at the utterance of the holy name of the Mount Olympus of fast food. We left together.
You do whatever you can.
This next story, set around the same time as Dead Beat in the main Dresden Files story line, was written as part of correcting the injustice of not having considered Bigfoot sufficiently in my previous world building. For that reason alone, it was a totally necessary story.
But I also wanted to try a tale that was a little less smash-action-figures-together-y, which is a fair assessment of several of my short stories. So I plotted out this one, where the motives are perhaps a little less sinister and a little bit more dangerously human than a simple case of attacker versus defender, and to force Dresden to deal with a situation other than directly confronting some brand of bully.
Also, I wanted to show Irwin growing up as well—and particularly the effect Dresden had had on his life. The idea of the consequences of your actions coming back to you in the future is ingrained into the fabric of the Dresden Files—and both your terrible choices and your more inspired ones engender consequences that will eventually come home to roost.
There are times when, as a professional wizard, my vocation calls me to the great outdoors, and that night I was in the north woods of Wisconsin with a mixed pack of researchers, enthusiasts, and, well, nerds.
“I don’t know, man,” said a skinny kid named Nash. “What’s his name again?”
With a stick I poked the small campfire I’d set up earlier and pretended that they weren’t standing less than ten feet away from me. The forest made forest sounds like it was supposed to. Full dark had fallen about half an hour before.
“Harry Dresden,” said Gary, a plump kid with a cell phone, a GPS unit, and some kind of video-game device on his belt. “Supposed to be a psychic or something.” He was twiddling deft fingers over the surface of what they call a smartphone, these days. Hell, the damned things are probably smarter than me. “Supposed to have helped Chicago PD a bunch of times. I’d pull up the Internet references, but I can’t get reception out here.”
“A psychic?” Nash said. “How is anyone ever supposed to take our research seriously if we keep showing up with fruitcakes like that?”
Gary shrugged. “Dr. Sinor knows him or something.”
Dr. Sinor had nearly been devoured by an ogre in a suburban park one fine summer evening, and I’d gotten her out in one piece. Like most people who have a brush with the supernatural, she’d rationalized the truth away as rapidly as possible—which had led her to participate in such fine activities as tonight’s Bigfoot expedition in her spare time.
“Gentlemen,” Sinor said impatiently. She was a blocky, no-nonsense type, grey-haired and straight-backed. “If you could help me with these speakers, we might actually manage to blast a call or two before dawn.”
Gary and Nash both hustled over to the edge of the firelight to start messing about with the equipment the troop of researchers had packed in. There were half a dozen of them altogether, all of them busy with trail cameras and call-blasting speakers and scent markers and audio recorders.
I pulled a sandwich out of my pocket and started eating it. I took my time about it. I was in no hurry.
For those of you who don’t know it, a forest at night is dark. Sometimes pitch-black. There was no moon to speak of in the sky, and the light of the stars doesn’t make it more than a few inches into a mixed canopy of deciduous trees and evergreens. The light from my little campfire and the hand held flashlights of the researchers soon gave the woods all the light there was.
Their equipment wasn’t working very well—my bad, probably. Modern technology doesn’t get on well with the magically gifted. For about an hour, nothing much happened beyond the slapping of mosquitoes and a lot of electronic noises squawking from the loudspeakers.
Then the researchers got everything online and went through their routine. They played primate calls over the speakers and then dutifully recorded the forest afterward. Everything broke down again. The researchers soldiered on, repairing things, and
eventually Gary tried wood knocking, which meant banging on trees with fallen limbs and waiting to hear if there was a response.
I liked Dr. Sinor, but I had asked to come strictly as a ride-along and I didn’t pitch in with her team’s efforts.
The whole “let’s find Bigfoot” thing seems a little ill planned to me, personally. Granted, my perspective is different from that of nonwizards, but marching out into the woods, looking for a very large and very powerful creature by blasting out what you’re pretty sure are territorial challenges to fight (or else mating calls) seems … somewhat unwise.
I mean, if there’s no Bigfoot, no problem. But what if you’re standing there, screaming, “Bring it on!” and find a Bigfoot?
Worse yet, what if he finds you?
Even worse, what if you were screaming, “Do me, baby!” and he finds you then?
Is it me? Am I crazy? Or does the whole thing just seem like a recipe for trouble?
So, anyway, while I kept my little fire going, the Questionably Wise Research Variety Act continued until after midnight. That’s when I looked up to see a massive form standing at the edge of the trees, in the very outskirts of the light of my dying fire.
I’m in the ninety-ninth percentile for height, but this guy was tall. My head might have come up to his collarbone, barely, assuming I had correctly estimated where his collarbone was under the long, shaggy, dark brown hair covering him. It wasn’t long enough to hide the massive weight of muscle he carried on that enormous frame or the simple, disturbing, very slightly inhuman proportions of his body. His face was broad and blunt, with a heavy brow ridge that turned his eyes into mere gleams of reflected light.
Most of all, there was a sense of awesome power granted to his presence by his size alone, chilling even to someone who had seen big things in action before. There’s a reaction to something that much bigger than you, an automatic assumption of menace that is built into the human brain: Big equals dangerous.
It took about fifteen seconds before the first researcher—Gary, I think—noticed and let out a short gasp. In my peripheral vision, I saw the entire group turn toward the massive form by the fire and freeze into place. The silence was brittle crystal.
I broke it by bolting up from my seat and letting out a high-pitched shriek.
Half a dozen other screams joined it, and I whirled as if to flee, only to see Dr. Sinor and crew hotfooting it down the path we’d followed into the woods, back toward the cars.
I held it in for as long as I could, and only after I was sure that they wouldn’t hear it did I let loose the laughter bubbling in my chest. I sank back onto my log by the fire, laughing, and beckoning the large form forward.
“Harry,” rumbled the figure in a very, very deep voice, the words marked with the almost indefinable clippings of a Native American accent. “You have an unsophisticated sense of humor.”
“I can’t help it,” I said, wiping at tears of laughter. “It never gets old.” I waved to the open ground across the fire from me. “Sit, sit. Be welcome, big brother.”
“Appreciate it,” rumbled the giant, and he squatted down across the fire from me, touching fingers the size of cucumbers to his heart in greeting. His broad, blunt face was amused. “So. Got any smokes?”
It wasn’t the first time I’d done business with the Forest People. They’re old-school. There’s a certain way one goes about business with someone considered a peer, and Strength of a River in His Shoulders was an old-school kind of guy. There were proprieties to be observed.
So we shared a thirty-dollar cigar, which I’d brought, had some s’mores, which I made, and sipped from identical plastic bottles of Coca-Cola, which I had purchased. By the time we were done, the fire had burned down to glowing embers, which suited me fine—and I knew that River Shoulders would be more comfortable in the near-dark, too. I didn’t mind being the one to provide everything. It would have been a hassle for River Shoulders to do it, and we’d probably be smoking, eating, and drinking raw and unpleasant things if he had.
Besides, it was worth it. The Forest People had been around long before the great gold rushes of the nineteenth century, and they were loaded. River Shoulders had paid my retainer with a gold nugget the size of a golf ball the last time I’d done business with him.
“Your friends,” he said, nodding toward the disappeared researchers. “They going to come back?”
“Not before dawn,” I said. “For all they know, you got me.”
River Shoulders’s chest rumbled with a sound that was both amused and not entirely pleased. “Like my people don’t have enough stigmas already.”
“You want to clear things up, I can get you on the Larry Fowler show anytime you want.”
River Shoulders shuddered—given his size, it was a lot of shuddering. “TV rots the brains of people who see it. Don’t even want to know what it does to the people who make it.”
I snorted. “I got your message,” I said. “I am here.”
“And so you are,” he said. He frowned, an expression that was really sort of terrifying on his features. I didn’t say anything. You just don’t rush the Forest People. They’re patient on an almost alien level, compared to human beings, and I knew that our meeting was already being conducted with unseemly haste by River Shoulders’s standards. Finally, he swigged a bit more Coke, the bottle looking tiny in his vast hands, and sighed. “There is a problem with my son. Again.”
I sipped some Coke and nodded, letting a little time pass before I answered. “Irwin was a fine, strong boy when I last saw him.”
The conversation continued with contemplative pauses between each bit of speech. “He is sick.”
“Children sometimes grow sick.”
“Not children of the Forest People.”
“What, never?”
“No, never. And I will not quote Gilbert and Sullivan.”
“Their music was silly and fine.”
River Shoulders nodded agreement. “Indeed.”
“What can you tell me of your son’s sickness?”
“His mother tells me the school’s doctor says he has something called mah-no.”
“Mono,” I said. “It is a common illness. It is not dangerous.”
“An illness could not touch one born of the Forest People,” River Shoulders rumbled.
“Not even one with only one parent of your folk?” I asked.
“Indeed,” he said. “Something else must therefore be happening. I am concerned for Irwin’s safety.”
The fire let out a last crackle and a brief, gentle flare of light, showing me River Shoulders clearly. His rough features were touched with the same quiet worry I’d seen on dozens and dozens of my clients’ faces.
“He still doesn’t know who you are, does he?”
The giant shifted his weight slightly, as if uncomfortable. “Your society is, to me, irrational and bewildering. Which is good. Can’t have everyone the same, or the earth would get boring.”
I thought about it for a moment and then said, “You feel he has problems enough to deal with already.”
River Shoulders spread his hands, as if my own words had spotlighted the truth.
I nodded, thought about it, and said, “We aren’t that different. Even among my people, a boy misses his father.”
“A voice on a telephone is not a father,” he said.
“But it is more than nothing,” I said. “I have lived with a father and without a father. With one was better.”
The silence stretched extra long.
“In time,” the giant responded very quietly. “For now, my concern is his physical safety. I cannot go to him. I spoke to his mother. We ask someone we trust to help us learn what is happening.”
I didn’t agree with River Shoulders about talking to his kid, but that didn’t matter. He wasn’t hiring me to get parenting advice, about which I had no experience to call upon, anyway. He needed help looking out for the kid. So I’d do what I could to help him. “Where can I find Irwin?�
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“Chicago,” he said. “St. Mark’s Academy for the Gifted and Talented.”
“Boarding school. I know the place.” I finished the Coke and rose. “It will be my pleasure to help the Forest People once again.”
The giant echoed my actions, standing. “Already had your retainer sent to your account. By morning, his mother will have granted you the power of a turnkey.”
It took me a second to translate River Shoulders’s imperfect understanding of mortal society. “Power of attorney,” I corrected him.
“That,” he agreed.
“Give her my best.”
“Will,” he said, and touched his thick fingertips to his massive chest.
I put my fingertips to my heart in reply and nodded up to my client. “I’ll start in the morning.”
IT TOOK ME most of the rest of the night to get back down to Chicago, go to my apartment, and put on my suit. I’m not a suit guy. For one thing, when you’re NBA sized, you don’t exactly get to buy them off the rack. For another, I just don’t like them. But sometimes they’re a really handy disguise, when I want people to mistake me for someone grave and responsible. So I put on the grey suit with a crisp white shirt and a clip-on tie, and headed down to St. Mark’s.
The academy was an upper-end place in the suburbs north of Chicago, and was filled with the offspring of the city’s luminaries. They had their own small, private security force. They had wrought-iron gates and brick walls and ancient trees and ivy. They had multiple buildings on the grounds, like a miniature university campus, and, inevitably, they had an administration building. I started there.
It took me a polite quarter of an hour to get the lady in the front office to pick up the fax granting me power of attorney from Irwin’s mom, the archaeologist, who was in the field somewhere in Canada. It included a description of me, and I produced both my ID and my investigator’s license. It took me another half an hour of waiting to be admitted to the office of the dean, Dr. Fabio.