by Jim Butcher
“Sure.”
“If you see my dad again … could you tell him … could you tell him I did good?”
“Of course,” I said. “I think what you did will make him very proud.”
That all but made the kid glow. “And … and tell him that … that I’d like to meet him. You know. Someday.”
“Will do,” I said quietly.
Bigfoot Irwin nodded at me. Then he turned and made his gangly way over to the waiting car and slid into it. I stood and watched until the car was out of sight. Then I rolled my bucket of ice back into the school so that I could go home.
This next story is set just after the events, I believe, of Proven Guilty, where Harry Dresden has become impressed with the need to instruct the younger wizards around him. I can just barely remember the actual writing of this tale, which probably means it happened around a move. I find moving homes to be among the more hideous experiences in life, and I tend to block out several days around the experience, just to be safe. If I was writing during that window, then I imagine that the story was likely late as well and absolutely needed to be finished. So once again, I met with Inspiration at the corner of Late and Hurry Up.
I wanted to write a story that began to show Dresden in his role as a teacher and mentor to the younger wizards, showing him taking on more responsibility in his community and becoming more of a leader as he grew as a wizard and as a person. He had added responsibilities now, including an apprentice of his own, and wasn’t ever really going to be able to go back to the carefree days of being a roaming knight errant. So here he’s trying to impress upon the younger wizards the danger of arrogance—something, let’s face it, that Dresden has flirted with upon multiple occasions, often to his chagrin.
But this is a story in which we see Dresden beginning to grow into new roles and new responsibilities, while simultaneously catching a glimpse of his past.
The first thing I thought, looking at the roomful of baby Wardens, was, They all look so darned young. The close second was, My God, am I getting old?
“Okay, children,” I said, closing the door behind me. I had rented an alleged conference center in a little Chicago hotel not too far from the airport, which amounted to a couple of rooms big enough for twenty or thirty people—if they were friendly—plus a few dozen chairs and several rickety old folding tables.
They didn’t even provide a cooler of water—just directions to their vending machines.
After my fellow Warden-Commander in the United States, Warden Ramirez, and I had gotten done learning the little Warden-kind up on their mayhem, for the sake of getting them killed in a war as quickly as possible, we thought it might be nice to give them a little instruction in other things, too. Ramirez was going to cover the course on relations with mortal authorities, which made sense; Ramirez got on just fine with the cops in LA, and hadn’t been shot by nearly as many law-enforcement personnel as I had.
The kids had all come to Chicago to learn about independent investigation of supernatural threats from me, which also made sense, because I’d done more of that, relative to my tender years, than any other wizard on the planet.
“Okay, okay,” I said to the room. The young Wardens became silent and attentive at once. No shock there—the disruptive ones who didn’t pay attention during lessons had mostly been killed and maimed in the war with the Red Court. Darwin always thought that it paid to be a quick learner. The war had simply made the penalty for not learning quite a bit steeper.
“You’re here,” I said, “to learn about investigating supernatural threats on your own. You’ll learn about finding and hunting warlocks from Captain Luccio, whenever the Reds give us enough time for it. Warlocks, our own kind gone bad, aren’t the most common opponent you’ll find yourself facing. Far more often, you’re going to run up against other threats.”
Ilyana, a young woman with extremely pale skin and ice-blue, nearly white eyes, raised her hand and spoke in a clipped Russian accent when I nodded to her. “What kinds of threats?” she asked. “In the practical sense. What foes have you faced?”
I held up my hands and flipped up a finger for each foe. “Demons, werewolves, ghosts, faeries, fallen angels, Black Court vampires, Red Court vampires, White Court vampires, cultists, necromancers”—I paused to waggle one foot, standing with three limbs in the air—“zombies, specters, phobophages, half-blood scions, jann …” I waved my hands and foot around a bit more. “I’d need to borrow a few people to do the whole list. Get the picture?” A few smiles had erupted at my antics, but they sobered up after a moment’s consideration.
I nodded and stuck my hands into my pockets. “Knowledge is quite literally power and will save your life. When you know what you’re facing, you can deal with it. Walk into a confrontation blind, and you’re begging to get your families added to the Wardens’ death-benefits list.” I let that sink in for a few seconds before continuing. “You can’t ever be sure what you’re going to come up against. But you can be sure about how to approach the investigation.”
I turned to the old blackboard on the wall behind me and scribbled on it with the stub of a piece of chalk. “I call it the Four As,” I said, and wrote four As down the left side of the board. “Granted, it doesn’t translate as neatly to other languages, but you can make up your own native-tongue mnemonic devices later.” I used the first A to spell ascertain.
“Ascertain,” I said, firmly. “Before you can deal with the threat, you’ve got to know that it exists, and you’ve got to know who the threat’s intended target is. A lot of times, that target is going to cry out for help. Whatever city you’re based in, it’s going to be your responsibility to work out how best to hear that scream. But sometimes there’s no outcry. So keep your eyes and ears open, kids. Ascertain the threat. Become aware of the problem.”
MY CAR DIDN’T make it all the way to Kansas City. It broke down about thirty miles short of town, and I had to call a wrecker. I had planned on being there before dark, but between walking eleven miles to find an increasingly rare pay phone, dumping most of my cash into a tow-truck driver’s pocket, and the collapse of an office computer network that delayed picking up a rental car for an extra hour and a half, I wound up pulling to the curb of a residential address a couple of minutes before nine in the evening.
I’d gotten the address from a contact on the Paranet—the organization made up mostly of men and women who didn’t have enough magical power to be accepted into the ranks of the White Council or to protect themselves from major predators, but who had more than enough mojo to make them juicy targets. For the past year, I and others like me had been working hard to teach them how to defend themselves—and one of the first things they were to do was notify someone upstream in the Paranet’s organization that they were in trouble.
One such call had been bucked up to me, and here I was, answering. Before I had closed the door of the car, a spare, tense-looking man in his forties came out of the house and walked quickly toward me.
“Harry Dresden?” he called.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You’re late.”
“Car trouble,” I said. “Are you Yardly?” He stopped across the hood of the car from me, frowning severely. He was average height, and wore most of a business suit, including the tie. His black hair was cut into a short brush. He looked like the kind of guy who solved his problems through ferocious focus and mulish determination, and who tolerated no nonsense along the way.
“I’m Yardly,” he said. “Can you show me some ID?”
I almost smiled. “You want to see my American Association of Wizards card?”
Yardly didn’t smile. “Your driver’s license will do.”
“If I were a shapeshifter,” I said, passing him the license, “this wouldn’t help.”
Yardly produced a little UV flashlight and shone it onto the license. “I’m more concerned about a simple con man.” He passed me the license back. “I’m not really into my sister’s group. Whatever they are.
But she’s had it rough lately and I’m not going to see her hurt anymore. Do you understand?”
“Most big brothers stop making threats about their little sisters after high school.”
“I must be remedial,” Yardly said. “If you abuse Megan in any way, you’ll answer to me.”
I felt my mouth lift up on one side. “You’re a cop.”
“Detective Lieutenant,” he said. “I asked Chicago PD for their file on you. They think you’re a fraud.”
“And you don’t?”
He grunted. “Megan doesn’t. I learned a long time ago that a smart man doesn’t discount her opinion out of hand.”
He stared at me with hard and opaque eyes, and I realized, in a flash of insight, that the man was tense because he was operating on unfamiliar ground. You couldn’t read it in his face, but it was there if you knew what to look for. A certain set of the shoulders, a twitch along the jawline, as if some part of him was ready to whirl around and sink his teeth into a threat that he could feel creeping up behind him.
Yardly was afraid. Not for himself, maybe, but the man was terrified.
“Megan says shrinks can’t help with this one,” he said quietly. “She says maybe you can.”
“Let’s find out,” I said.
“SECOND A,” I said to the Wardenlets, writing on the chalkboard as I did. “Analysis.”
“How do you get an ogre to lie down on the couch, Harry?” called a young man with the rounded vowels of a Northern accent in his speech. The room quivered with the laughter of young people.
“That’s enough out of you, there, McKenzie, you hoser,” I shot back, in a parody of the same accent. “Give me a break here, eh?”
I got a bigger laugh than the heckler. Which is how you make sure the heckler doesn’t steal the show from you. “Pipe down,” I said, and waited for them to settle. “Thank you. Your second step is always analysis. Even when you know what you’re dealing with, you’ve got to know why it’s happening. If you’ve got an angry ghost, it’s generally angry for a reason. If a new pack of ghouls has moved in down the block, they’ve generally picked their spot for a reason.”
Ilyana raised her hand again and I pointed at her. “What does it matter?” she asked. “Ghost or ghoul is causing problem, still we are dealing with them, yes?” She pointed her finger like a gun and dropped her thumb like the weapon’s hammer on the word dealing.
“If you’re stupid, yeah,” I said.
She didn’t look pleased at my response.
“I used to have a similar attitude,” I said. I held up my left hand. It was a mass of old scars, and not the pretty kind. It had been burned, and badly, several years before. Wizards heal up better than regular folks, over the long term. I could move it again, and I had feeling back in parts of all the fingers. But it still wasn’t a pretty picture. “An hour or two of work would have told me enough about the situation I was walking into to let me avoid this,” I told them. It was the truth. Pretty much. “Learn everything you possibly can.”
Ilyana frowned at me.
McKenzie raised his hand, frowning soberly, and I nodded at him.
“Learn more. Okay. How?”
I spread my hands. “Never let yourself think you know all the ways to learn,” I said. “Expand your own knowledge base. Read. Talk to other wizards. Hell, you might even go to school.”
That got me another laugh. I went on before it gathered much momentum.
“Warden Canuck there was onto something earlier, too. People are people. Learn about what makes them tick. Monsters are the same way. Find ways to emulate their thinking”—I wasn’t even going to try a phrase like Get into their heads, thank you—“and you’ll have insight into their actions and their probable intentions.
“Information-gathering spells can be darned handy,” I continued, “but if you’ll forgive the expression, they aren’t magic. The information you get from them can be easily misread, and it will almost never let you see past one of your own blind spots. You can seek answers from other planes, but if you go bargaining with supernatural beings for knowledge, things can get dangerous fast. Sometimes what you get from them is invaluable. Most of the time, it could be had another way. Approach that particular well with extreme caution.”
To emphasize those last two words, I stared slowly around the room in pure challenge, daring anyone to disagree with me. The young people dropped their eyes from mine. Eye contact with a wizard is tricky—it can trigger a soulgaze, and that isn’t the kind of thing you want happening to you casually.
“Honestly,” I said into the silence, letting my voice become gentler, more conversational, “the best thing you can do is communicate. Talk to the people involved. Your victims, if they can speak to you. Their family. Witnesses. Friends. Most of the time, everything you need is something they already know. Most of the time, that’s the fastest, safest, easiest way to get it.”
McKenzie raised his hand again, and I nodded. “Most of the time?” he asked.
“That’s the thing about people,” I said quietly, so they would pay attention. “Whether it’s to you or to everyone or just to themselves, people lie.”
MEGAN YARDLY WAS a single mother of three. She was in her early thirties and looked it, had gorgeous red hair and bright green eyes. She and her children lived in a suburb that was more sub than urb, southeast of KC, named Peculiar. Peculiar, Missouri. You can’t make these things up. Megan opened the door, nodded to her brother, looked up at me, and said, “You’re him. You’re the wizard.” Her eyes narrowed. “Your … your car broke down. And you think the name of our town is a bad joke.” She nodded, like a musician who has picked up on a beat and a chord progression. “And you think this probably isn’t a supernatural problem.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “You’re one hell of a sensitive.”
She nodded. “You were expecting someone who was good at cold reading.”
“A lot of professional psychics are,” I said. I smiled. “So are you.”
She arched an eyebrow at me.
“There’s at least a fair chance that, if someone is late to what is perceived as an important appointment, that car trouble is to blame, particularly if they show up in a rental car. Most people who hadn’t grown up around a town named Peculiar would think the name was odd.” I grinned at her. “And gosh. A lot of professional investigators are just a tad cynical.”
Her expression broke and she laughed. “Apparently.” She turned from me and kissed her brother on the cheek.
“Ben.”
“Meg.”
“Child services was here again today,” she said, her tone neutral.
“Dammit,” Yardly said. “How’s Kat?”
She waggled a hand in the air, but her face suddenly aged ten years. “The same.”
“Meg, the doctors—”
“Not again, Ben,” she said, closing her eyes briefly. She shook her head once, and Yardly shut his jaws with an audible click. Megan looked down at the ground for a moment and then up at me. “So. Harry Dresden. High Mucketymuck of the White Council.”
“Actually,” I said, “I’m a fairly low mucketymuck. Or maybe a mucketymuck militant. High mucketymucks—”
“Wouldn’t come to Peculiar?”
“You’re really into interruption, aren’t you?” I said, smiling. “I was going to say, they wouldn’t have a problem with their car.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “I think I like you.”
“Give it time,” I said.
She nodded slowly. Then she said, with gentle emphasis, “Please come into my home.” She stepped back, and I came into the little house, crossing over the threshold, the curtain of gentle, powerful energy that surrounds every home. Her invitation meant that the curtain parted for me, letting me bring my power with me. I exhaled slowly, tightening my metaphysical muscles and feeling my power put a silent, invisible strain on the air around me. Megan inhaled suddenly, sharply, and took a step back from me.
“Ah,” I said. “
You are a sensitive.”
She shook her head once, and then held up her hand to forestall her brother. “Ben, it’s fine. He’s …” She looked at me again, her expression pensive, fragile. “He’s the real deal.”
We sat down in the little living room. It was littered with children’s toys. The place didn’t look like an animal pit—just busy and well-loved. I sat in a comfy chair. Megan perched at the edge of her couch. Yardly hovered, evidently unable to bring himself to sit.
“So,” I said quietly. “You think something is tormenting your daughters.”
She nodded.
“How old are they?”
“Kat is twelve. Tamara is four.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Tell me about what happens.”
Sometimes I seem to have the damnedest sense of timing. No sooner had I asked the question than a high-pitched scream cut the air, joined an instant later by another one.
“Oh, God,” Megan said, and flew up to her feet and out of the room.
I followed her, but more slowly, as the screaming continued. She hurried down a short hallway to a room with a trio of large cartoon girl figures I didn’t recognize. They had freaking huge eyes, though. Megan emerged a moment later, carrying a dark-haired moppet in pink-and-white-striped footie pajamas. The little girl was clinging to her mother with all four limbs and kept screaming, her eyes squeezed tight shut.
The sound was heart wrenching. She was terrified. I had to stop short as Megan immediately took two quick steps toward me and plunged through the next doorway. This one had a poster of a band of young men on it I didn’t recognize. One looked rebellious and sullen, one wacky and lighthearted, one sober and stable, and one handsomely vogue. Another Monkees reincarnation, basically.
I went to the door and saw Megan, with her clinging moppet, sit down on the bed and start gently shaking the shoulder of a girl with hair like her mother’s—presumably Kat. She was screaming, too, but she broke out of it a moment later, the instant her eyes fluttered open.