by Jim Butcher
But I couldn’t do that. Even among the strongest wizards on the planet, I’m no lightweight. I don’t have the finesse and class and experience that a lot of the older practitioners do, but when it comes to raw metaphysical muscle, I rank in the top thirty or forty wizards alive. I had a ton of strength, but I didn’t always have the fine control to go with it—that’s why I had to use specially prepared articles such as my bracelet and my ring to focus that power. Even with them, it wasn’t always easy to be precise. The last time I had surrendered my self-control and really cut loose with my power, I burned as many as a dozen people to scorched skeletons.
I had a responsibility to keep that destructive strength in check; to use it to help people, to protect them. It didn’t matter that I still felt terrified. It didn’t matter that my hand was screaming with pain. It didn’t matter that my car had been mutilated yet again, or that someone had tried to kill one of the few people in town I considered a real friend.
I had to hold back. Be careful. Think clearly.
“Harry?” Butters asked after a minute. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Just give me a minute.”
“I don’t understand this,” he said. His voice didn’t sound any too steady either. “What just happened?”
“You don’t want to know,” I said.
“Yes, I do.”
“Trust me,” I said. “You don’t want to be involved in this kind of business.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll get hurt. Or killed. Don’t go looking for trouble.”
He let out a frustrated neighing sound. “Those people came for me. I didn’t go looking for them. They were looking for me.”
He had a point, but even so, Butters was not someone I would want to see involved in a conflict between people like Grevane and his dead men and his liver-skinned partner. Mortals usually didn’t fare too well when it came to tangling with preternatural bad guys. In my day I’d seen dozens of men and women die from it, despite everything I did to help them.
“This is unreal,” Butters said. “I know you and Murphy have talked about this black-magic supernatural stuff a lot. And I’ve seen some things that are tough to explain. But…I never imagined something like this could happen.”
“You’re happier that way,” I said. “Hell, if I could do it, I might want to forget I ever found out about any of it.”
“I’m happier being scared?” he asked almost timidly. “I’m happier wondering if maybe my bosses were right the whole time, and I really am insane? I’m happier being in danger, and having no idea what to do about it?”
I didn’t have a quick answer for that one. I stared at my hands. The trembling had almost stopped.
“Help me understand this, Harry,” he said. “Please.”
Well, dammit.
I raked the fingers of my right hand through my hair. Grevane had been after Butters, specifically. He had backup waiting outside, and he trashed Butters’s truck to make sure the little guy couldn’t escape. He openly said that he needed Butters, and needed him in one piece to boot.
All of which meant that Butters was in very real—and very serious—danger. And by now I’ve learned that I can’t always protect everyone. I screw up sometimes, like everyone else. I make stupid mistakes.
If I kept quiet, if I forced Butters to wear blinders, he wouldn’t be able to do jack to protect himself. If I made a bad call and something happened to him, it would be my fault that he didn’t have every chance to survive. His blood would be on my hands.
I couldn’t take that choice away from him. I wasn’t his father or his guardian angel or his sovereign king. I wasn’t blessed with the wisdom of Solomon, or with the foresight of a prophet. If I chose Butters’s path for him, in some ways it would make me no different from Grevane, or any number of other beings, human and nonhuman alike, who sought to control others.
“If I tell you this,” I said quietly, “it could be bad for you.”
“Bad how?”
“It could force you to keep secrets that people would kill you for knowing. It could change the way you think and feel. It could really screw up your life.”
“Screw up my life?” He stared at me for a second and then said, deadpan, “I’m a five-foot-three, thirty-seven-year-old, single, Jewish medical examiner who needs to pick up his lederhosen from the dry cleaners so that he can play in a one-man polka band at Oktoberfest tomorrow.” He pushed up his glasses with his forefinger, folded his arms, and said, “Do your worst.”
The words were light, but there was both fear and resolve just under the surface of them. Butters was smart enough to be scared. But he was also a fighter. I could respect him for both.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s talk.”
Chapter
Six
Butters hadn’t taken time to collect his coat when he left, and the last time the Beetle’s heater had worked was before the demolition of the Berlin Wall. I ducked into the store, got us each a cup of coffee, then untwisted the wire that holds down the lid of the storage trunk. I dug out a worn but mostly clean blanket that I kept in the trunk to cover the short-barreled shotgun I stored in the event that I would ever need to give Napoleon’s charging hordes a taste of the grape. Given the way the night was going, I got the shotgun, too, and slipped it into the backseat.
Butters accepted the blanket and the coffee gratefully, though he shivered hard enough to slop a little of the drink over the side of the cup. I sipped a little coffee, slipped the cup into the holder I’d rigged on the car’s dashboard, and got moving again. I didn’t want to wait around in the same place for too long.
“All right,” I told Butters. “There are two things you have to accept if you want to understand what’s going on.”
“Hit me.”
“First the tough one. Magic is real.”
I could feel him looking at me for a moment. “What do you mean by that?”
“There’s an entire world that exists alongside the everyday life of mankind. There are powers, nations, monsters, wars, feuds, alliances—everything. Wizards are a part of it. So are a lot of other things you’ve heard about in stories, and even more you’ve never heard of.”
“What kind of things?”
“Vampires. Werewolves. Faeries. Demons. Monsters. It’s all real.”
“Heh,” Butters said. “Heh, heh. You’re joking. Right?”
“No joke. Come on, Butters. You know that there are weird things out there. You’ve seen the evidence of them.”
He pushed a shaking hand through his hair. “Well, yes. Some. But, Harry, you’re talking about something else entirely here. I mean, if you want to tell me that people have the ability to sense and affect their environment in ways we don’t really understand yet, I can accept that. Maybe you call it magic, and someone else calls it ESP, and someone else calls it the Force, but it’s not a new idea. Maybe there are people whose genetic makeup makes them better able to employ these abilities. Maybe it even does things like make them reproduce their DNA more clearly than other people so that they can live for a very long time. But that is not the same thing as saying that there’s an army of weird monsters living right under our noses and we don’t even notice them.”
“What about those corpses you analyzed?” I said. “Humanoid but definitely not human.”
“Well,” Butters said defensively, “it’s a big universe. I think it’s sort of arrogant to assume that we’re the only thinking beings in it.”
“Those corpses were the bodies of vampires of the Red Court, and you don’t want to meet a living one. There were a lot of them in town at one point. There aren’t so many now, but there are plenty more where they came from. They’re only one flavor of vampire. And vampires are only one flavor of supernatural predator. It’s a jungle out there, Butters, and people aren’t anywhere near the top of the food chain.”
Butters shook his head. “And you’re telling me that nobody knows about it?”
“Oh, lots of peo
ple know about it,” I said. “But the ones who are in the know don’t go around talking about it all that much.”
“Why not?”
“Because they don’t want to get locked up in a loony bin for three months for observation, for starters.”
“Oh,” Butters said, flushing. “Yeah. I guess I can see that. What about regular people who see things? Like sightings and close encounters and stuff?”
I blew out a breath. “That’s the second thing you have to understand. People don’t want to accept a reality that frightening. Some of them open their eyes and get involved—like Murphy did. But most of them don’t want anything to do with the supernatural. So they leave it behind and don’t talk about it. Don’t think about it. They don’t want it to be real, and they work really hard to convince themselves that it isn’t.”
“No,” Butters said. “I’m sorry. I just don’t buy that.”
“You don’t need to buy it,” I said. “It’s true. As a race, we’re an enormous bunch of idiots. We’re more than capable of ignoring facts if the conclusions they lead to make us too uncomfortable. Or afraid.”
“Wait a minute. You’re saying that a whole world, multiple civilizations of scientific study and advancement and theory and application, all based around the notion of observing the universe and studying its laws is…what? In error about dismissing magic as superstition?”
“Not just in error,” I said. “Dead wrong. Because the truth is something that people are afraid to face. They’re terrified to admit that it’s a big universe and we’re not.”
He sipped coffee and shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Come on, Butters,” I said. “Look at history. How long did the scholarly institutions of civilization consider Earth to be the center of the universe? And when people came out with facts to prove that it wasn’t, there were riots in the streets. No one wanted to believe that we all lived on an unremarkable little speck of rock in a quiet backwater of one unremarkable galaxy. The world was supposed to be flat, too, until people proved that it wasn’t by sailing all the way around it. No one believed in germs until years and years after someone actually saw one. Biologists scoffed at tales of wild beast-men living in the mountains of Africa, despite eyewitness testimony to the contrary, and pronounced them an utter fantasy—right up until someone plopped a dead mountain gorilla down on their dissecting table.”
He chewed on his lip and watched the streetlights.
“Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don’t want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.”
“You’re saying that the entire human race is in denial,” he said.
“Most of the time,” I replied. “It’s not a bad thing. It’s just who we are. But the weird stuff doesn’t care about that—it keeps on happening. Every family’s got a ghost story in it. Most people I’ve talked to have had something happen to them that was impossible to explain. But that doesn’t mean they go around talking about it afterward, because everyone knows that those kinds of things aren’t real. If you start saying that they are, you get the weird looks and jackets with extra-long sleeves.”
“For everyone,” he said, voice still skeptical. “Every time. They just keep quiet and try to forget it.”
“Tell you what, Butters. Let’s drive down to CPD and you can tell them how you were just attacked by a necromancer and four zombies. How they nearly outran a speeding car and murdered a security guard who then got up and threw your desk across the room.” I paused for a moment to let the silence stretch. “What do you think they’d do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. He bowed his head.
“Unnatural things happen all the time,” I said. “But no one talks about it. At least, not openly. The preternatural world is everywhere. It just doesn’t advertise.”
“You do,” Butters said.
“But not many people take me seriously. For the most part even the ones who accept my help just pay the bill, then walk out determined to ignore my existence and get back to their normal life.”
“How could someone do that?” Butters asked.
“Because it’s terrifying,” I said. “Think about it. You find out about monsters that make the creatures in the horror movies look like the Muppets, and that there’s not a damned thing you can do to protect yourself from them. You find out about horrible things that happen—things you would be happier not knowing. So rather than live with the fear, you get away from the situation. After a while you can convince yourself that you must have just imagined it. Or maybe exaggerated it in the remembering. You rationalize whatever you can, forget whatever you can’t, and get back to your life.”
I glanced down at my gloved hand and said, “It’s not their fault, man. I don’t blame them.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But I don’t see how things that hunt and kill human beings could be there among us without our knowing.”
“How big was your graduating class in high school?”
Butters blinked. “What?”
“Just answer me.”
“Uh, about eight hundred.”
“All right,” I said. “Last year in the U.S. alone more than nine hundred thousand people were reported missing and not found.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You can check with the FBI. That’s out of about three hundred million, total population. That breaks down to about one person in three hundred and twenty-five vanishing. Every year. It’s been almost twenty years since you graduated? So that would mean that between forty and fifty people in your class are gone. Just gone. No one knows where they are.”
Butters shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “So?”
I arched an eyebrow at him. “So they’re missing. Where did they go?”
“Well. They’re missing. If they’re missing, then nobody knows.”
“Exactly,” I said.
He didn’t say anything back.
I let the silence stretch for a minute, just to make the point. Then I started up again. “Maybe it’s a coincidence, but it’s almost the same loss ratio experienced by herd animals on the African savannah to large predators.”
Butters drew his knees up to his chest, huddling farther under the blanket. “Really?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Nobody talks about this kind of thing. But all those people are still gone. Maybe a lot of them just cut their ties and left their old lives behind. Maybe some were in accidents of some kind, with the body never found. The point is, people don’t know. But because it’s an extremely scary thing to think about, and because it’s a lot easier to just get back to their lives they tend to dismiss it. Ignore it. It’s easier.”
Butters shook his head. “It just sounds so insane. I mean, they’d believe it if they saw it. If someone went on television and—”
“Did what?” I asked. “Bent spoons? Maybe made the Statue of Liberty disappear? Turned a lady into a white tiger? Hell, I’ve done magic on television, and everyone not screaming that it was a hoax was complaining that the special effects looked cheap.”
“You mean that clip that WGN news was showing a few years back? With you and Murphy and the big dog and that insane guy with a club?”
“It wasn’t a dog,” I said, and shivered a little myself at the memory. “It was a loup-garou. Kind of a superwerewolf. I killed him with a spell and a silver amulet, right on the screen.”
“Yeah. Everyone was talking about it for a couple of days, but I heard that they found out it was a fake or something.”
“No. Someone disappeared the tape.”
“Oh.”
I stopped at a light and stared at Butters for a second. “When you saw that tape, did you believe it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He took a breath. “Well, because the picture quality wasn’t very good. I mean, it was really dark—”
“Where most scary supernatural stuff tends to happen,” I said.
“And the picture was all jumpy—”
“The woman with the camera was terrified. Also pretty common.”
Butters made a frustrated sound. “And there was an awful lot of static on the tape, which made it look like someone had messed with it.”
“Sort of like someone messed with almost all of my X-rays?” I shook my head, smiling. “And there’s one more reason you didn’t believe it, man. It’s okay; you can say it.”
He sighed. “There’s no such things as monsters.”
“Bingo,” I said, and got the car moving again. “Look, Butters. You are your own ideal example. You’ve seen things you can’t explain away. You’ve suffered for trying to tell people that you have seen them. For God’s sake, twenty minutes ago you got attacked by the walking dead. And you’re still arguing with me about whether or not magic is real.”
Seconds ticked by.
“Because I don’t want to believe it,” he said in a quiet, numb voice.
I exhaled slowly. “Yeah.”
Dead silence.
“Drink some coffee,” I told him.
He did.
“Scared?”
“Yeah.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s smart.”
“Well, then,” he murmured. “I’m-must be the smartest guy in the whole world.”
“I know how you feel,” I said. “You run into something you totally don’t get, and it’s scary as hell. But once you learn something about it, it gets easier to handle. Knowledge counters fear. It always has.”
“What do I do?” Butters asked me.
“I’m taking you somewhere you’ll be safe. Once I get you there, I’ll figure out my next move. For now, ask me questions. I’ll answer them.”
Butters took a slower sip of his coffee and nodded. His hands looked steadier. “Who was that man?”