by Jim Butcher
I swept clean a place with my foot, set down my blasting rod, got out my chalk, and drew a circle on the ground. Rudolph approached me, his head jerking back and forth between grisly corpses and splashes of blood. “You. My God. What are you doing?”
I slapped the Snoopy down in the middle of the circle, then smeared the beast’s blood over its eyes and mouth, over its ears and nose. “Thaumaturgy,” I said.
“Wha—?”
“Magic,” I clarified grimly. “Make a symbolic link between a little thing,” I nodded at the Snoopy doll, “and a big thing. Make it happen on the smaller scale and it happens on the larger scale, too.”
“Magic,” Rudolph echoed.
I glanced up at him. “Go downstairs. Send the emergency people up here, Rudy. Go on. Send them up here to help the wounded.”
The kid twitched his eyes from the bloody Snoopy back to me and jerked his head in a nod. Then he turned and fled down the hallway.
I turned my attention back to the spell I was working. I had to keep the rage and anger I felt away from the working of my magic. I couldn’t afford to flood my spirit with grief, fury, and thoughts of vengeance for the dead men, for their deaths, for the pain that would be visited on their families. But God as my witness, I wanted nothing more than to try to set that thing on fire and hear it burn somewhere outside.
I tried to remind myself that it wasn’t MacFinn’s fault. He was under a curse, and not to blame. Killing him wouldn’t bring back any of the dead men in these bloody hallways. But I could keep any more men from dying tonight.
And I could do that without killing him.
In retrospect, it was just as well that I didn’t try to murder MacFinn. Magic like that takes a lot of energy—certainly more than I had. I would probably have killed myself in the effort to finish off the loup-garou. Not to mention that the Council would get their feathers ruffled by the concept—even though technically, MacFinn wasn’t a human being at the moment. Killing monsters isn’t nearly as much of an issue with the Council. They don’t hold with equal-opportunity mercy.
Instead, as my vision started to fade, I began to chant nonsense syllables in a low, musical refrain, focusing the energy I would need inside the circle I had closed around me. It wasn’t until later that I would realize that I was babbling a chant of “Ubriacha, ubrius, ubrium,” to the Peanuts theme music. I tore off a strip of my own bloodied jumpsuit and bound it across the Snoopy’s eyes, its ears. I bound up the ends of its fuzzy, cute little paws. Then its mouth, as though muzzling it.
I felt the spell grow and prepare itself, and when it was ready, I released the power and broke the circle, feeling it flow out into the night, following the blood back to the loup-garou, winding itself about the creature, blinding its eyes, fouling its ears, lashing around its jaws and forcing them shut, crippling its taloned paws. The spell would hamper and confuse the beast, hopefully drive it to ground where no one could disturb it, keep it from venting its rage upon the people of the city. And it would last until dawn. The energy flowed out of me, left me feeling empty, exhausted, dizzy.
And then people were all around me, emergency folk in uniforms, cops and paramedics and firemen, oh my. I stood up from my circle, grabbed my blasting rod, and shambled off blindly.
I walked past Carmichael’s corpse, stunned. Murphy was rocking back and forth over it, weeping, shaking, while a man tried to slide a blanket over her shoulders. She didn’t notice me. Carmichael looked relaxed in death. I wondered for a minute if he had a family, a wife who would miss him. He’d died saving Murphy from the beast. He’d died a hero.
It seemed so empty to me, at that moment. Meaningless to be a hero. I felt burned on the inside, as though the fire I had hurled at the creature had scoured away all the gentle feelings that had been there and left a fallow ground behind where only red emotions could flourish. I stumbled past Murphy and Carmichael and turned to walk out of the building, dimly realizing that in the confusion I might actually have fair odds of making it back outside where Tera and Susan would be waiting in the car. No one tried to stop me.
The stairs were tough, and for a minute I thought I might just lie down and die on the first landing, but a helpful old fire-man lent me a hand down to the first floor, asking me several times if I needed a doctor. I assured him that I was fine and prayed that he didn’t notice the handcuffs still dangling from either wrist. He didn’t. He was as wide around the eyes as everyone else, stunned.
Outside was chaos. Police were struggling to establish some sort of order. I saw a couple of news vans rolling up the street, while other people crowded around, trying to see. I stood in the door, dismayed, trying to remember how to walk down the steps.
And then someone warm and gentle was at my side, taking some of my weight. I let her have it, and closed my eyes. I smelled Susan’s hair when I inhaled, and it made me want to wail and hold on to her, to try to explain what I had seen, to try to clean the stains from inside my head. All that came out was a little choking sound.
I heard Susan speak to someone else, and another person got on the other side of me, helped me down the stairs. Tera, I thought. I dimly remember them guiding me through the hectic area in front of the police station, around ambulances and shouting men, around policemen who were trying to get the bystanders to move away. I heard Susan explain to someone that I was drunk.
Finally there was quiet, and then we were moving among cars in a parking lot, cool light gleaming on cool metal shapes, cool rain coming down on my head, my hair. I tilted my face up to feel the rain, and everything swam crazily.
“I’ve got you, Harry,” Susan murmured against my ear. “Just relax. I’ve got you. Just relax.”
And so I did.
Chapter Twenty
I awoke in a dark place. It was like the inside of a warehouse, or a big, underground garage, all black, with a smooth, even floor, and a pool of bleak, sterile radiance in the middle of it that came from a source I could not see or identify. I felt like hell, and looked down to see myself covered in scratches, bruises, welts, blood, bandages, and ill-fitting clothing. I wore none of my implements or devices, and there was a curious sense of distance between me and the pain of my injuries—I was more than aware of them, but they seemed to be something that was merely noted in passing, and unimportant to my life as a whole.
I stood just outside the circle of light, and it seemed to me proper that I move forward into it. I did. And as I did, there appeared in the circle opposite me . . . me. Myself. Only better groomed, dressed in a mantled duster of black leather, not the sturdy, if styleless canvas that I wore. My double’s pants and boots and shirt were all black as well, and they fit him as though tailor-made, rather than off-the-rack. His eyes were set deep, overshadowed by severe brows, and glittering with dark intelligence. His hair was neatly cut, and the short beard he wore emphasized the long lines of his face, the high cheekbones, the straight slash of his mouth, and the angular strength of his jaw. He stood as tall as I, as long limbed as I, but carried with him infinitely more confidence, raw knowledge, and strength. A faint whiff of cologne drifted over to me, cutting through my own sour sweat and blood smells.
My double tilted his head to one side, looked me up and down for a long minute, and then said, “Harry, you look like hell.”
“And you look like me,” I said, and limped toward him, peering.
My double rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Hell’s bells, you make me sick with how thick skulled you are, sometimes.” He took steps toward me, mirroring my own movements. “I don’t look like you. I am you.”
I blinked at him for a few seconds. “You are me. How does that work?”
“You’re unconscious, moron,” my double said to me. “We can finally talk to one another.”
“Oh, I get it,” I said. “You’re Evil Harry, lurking inside Good Harry. Right? And you only come out at night?”
“Give me a break,” my double said. “If you were that simple, you’d be so insufferably bor
ing you’d probably blow your own head off. I’m not Evil Harry. I’m just Subconscious Harry. I’m your inner voice, bub. Your intuition, your instinct, your basic, animal reactions. I make your dreams, and I decide which nightmares to pop in the old psychic VCR at night. I come up with a lot of the good ideas, and pass them along to you when you wake up.”
“So you’re saying you’re wiser than me? Smarter than me?”
“I probably am, in a lot of ways,” my double said, “but that’s not my job, and it’s not why I’m here.”
“I see. So what are you doing here, then? You’re going to tell me how I’m going to meet three spirits of Harry Past, Present, and Future?” I asked.
My double snorted. “That’s good. That really is, the banter thing. I can’t do the banter very well. Maybe that’s why you’re in charge. Of course, if I was in charge more often, you’d get laid a lot more—but no, that’s not it, either.”
“Can we speed this along? I’m too tired to keep on guessing, ” I complained.
“No joke, jerk. That’s why you’re asleep. But we don’t have long to talk, and there are some issues we need to work through.” He said “issues” in the British manner, iss-ewwws.
“Issues to work through?” I said. “What, am I my own therapist, now?” I turned my back on my double and started stalking out of the lighted circle. “I’ve had some weird dreams, but this has got to be the stupidest one yet.”
My double slipped around me and got in my way before I could leave the circle of light. “Hold it. You really don’t want to do this.”
“I’m tired. I feel like shit. I’m hurt. And what I really don’t want is to waste any more time dreaming about you.” I narrowed my eyes at my double. “Now get out of my way.” I turned to my right and started walking toward the nearest edge of the circle.
My double slipped in front of me again, apparently without needing to cross the intervening space. “It isn’t that simple, Harry. No matter where you go, there you are.”
“Look, I’ve had a long night.”
“I know,” my double said. “Believe me, I know. That’s why it’s important to get some of this out now, before it settles in. Before you blow a gasket on your sanity, man.”
“I’ve not worried about that,” I lied. “I’m as solid as a brick wall.”
My double snorted. “If you weren’t getting pretty close to crazy, would you be talking to yourself right now?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Shrugged. “Okay. You’ve got a point.”
“I’ve got more than that,” my double said. “Things have been happening to you so quickly that you haven’t had time to think. You need to work through some of this, and then you need to do some hard thinking, fast.”
I sighed and rubbed at my eyes. “All right, then,” I said. “What do you want to hear?”
My double gestured, and there was Murphy as she had appeared in the hallway of the police station, the flesh of her bicep tented out by the broken bone, her face pale, spotted with blood, and streaked with tears and hopeless anguish.
“Murph,” I said, quietly, and knelt down by the image. “Stars above. What have I done to you?” The image, the memory, didn’t hear me. She just wept silent, bitter tears.
My double knelt on the other side of the apparition. “Nothing, Harry,” he said. “What happened at the police station wasn’t your fault.”
“Like hell it wasn’t,” I snarled. “If I’d have been faster, gotten there sooner, or if I’d told her the truth from the beginning—”
“But you didn’t,” my double interjected. “And you had some pretty damned compelling reasons not to. Ease up on yourself, man. You can’t change the past.”
“Easy for you to say,” I snarled.
“No, it isn’t,” my double said quietly. “Concentrate on what you will do, not what you should have done. You’ve been trying to protect Murphy all along, instead of making her able to protect herself. She’s going to be fighting these kinds of things, Harry, and you won’t always be there to babysit her. Instead of trying to play shepherd, you need to play coach, and get her into shape to do what she needs to do.”
“But that means—”
“Telling her everything,” my double said. “The White Council, the Nevernever, all of it.”
“The Council won’t like it. If I tell her and they hear about it, they might consider her a security risk.”
“And if you don’t make her able to understand what she’s fighting, something’s going to eat her face some dark night. Murphy’s a big girl. The Council had better be careful if they decide to go messing with her.” My double considered Murphy for a moment. “You should ask her out sometime, too.”
“I should what?” I said.
“You heard me. You’re repressing big time, man.”
“This is all getting way too Freudian for me,” I said, and stood up, intending to walk away again. I was confronted with an image of Susan, as she had appeared on the steps to the police station, tall in her heels and dress suit, elegant and beautiful, her face stretched with worry.
“Think she’s going to get a good story out of this?” my double asked.
“Oh, that’s below the belt. That’s not why she’s seeing me.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But you’re asking yourself that question, aren’t you?” My double gestured to himself and to me, demonstratively. “Shouldn’t that make you ask a few more questions?”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Like how come you don’t trust anyone,” my double said. “Not even someone like Susan who has been going out on a limb for you tonight.” He lifted a long-fingered hand and stroked at the short beard with his fingertips. “I’m thinking this has to do with Elaine. How about you?”
And then there she was, a girl of elegant height, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age—gawky and coltish, all long legs and arms, but with the promise of stunning beauty to add graceful curves to the lean lines of her body. She was dressed in a pair of my blue jeans, cut off at the tops of her muscled thighs, and my own T-shirt, tied off over her abdomen. A pentacle amulet, identical to my own, if less battered, lay over her heart, between the curves of her modest breasts. Her skin was pale, almost luminous, her hair a shade of brown-gold, like ripe wheat, her eyes a startling, storm-cloud grey in contrast. Her smile lit up her face, made her eyes dance with secret fires that still, even after all the years, made me draw in a sharp breath. Elaine. Beautiful, vital, and as poisonous as any snake.
I turned my back on the image, deliberately—before I could see it change into the Elaine that I had last seen—naked, festooned in swirling paints that lent a savage aura to her skin. Her lips had been stained brilliant, wet red, curving around twisting, rolling phrases as she chanted in the midst of her circle, its sigils meant to focus pain and fury into tangible power that had been used to hold a foolish young man helpless while his mentor offered him one last chance to sip from a chalice of fresh, hot blood.
“That’s been over for a long time,” I said, my voice shaking.
My double answered me quietly, “It isn’t over. It isn’t over yet, Harry. As long as you hold yourself responsible for Justin’s death and Elaine’s fall, it still colors everything you think and do.”
I didn’t answer myself.
“She’s still alive,” my double said. “You know she is.”
“She died in the fire,” I said. “She was unconscious. She couldn’t have lived through it.”
“You’d have known if she died. And they never found a second set of bones.”
“She died in the fire!” I screamed. “She’s dead.”
“Until you stop pretending,” my double said, appearing before me, “and try to face reality, you’re not going to be able to heal. You’re not going to be able to trust anyone. Which reminds me . . .”
My double gestured, and Tera West appeared as I had seen her crouched behind the garbage bin at the rear of the gas station, naked, her body lean, fe
ral, leaves and bits of bracken in her hair, her amber eyes gleaming with cold, alien intelligence. “Why in the hell are you trusting her?”
“I haven’t had much choice,” I snapped. “In case you haven’t noticed, things have been sort of desperate lately.”
“You know she’s not human,” my double said. “You know she was at the scene of the crime, at Marcone’s restaurant, where Spike was torn up. You know she has some kind of hold on a group of young people, the favorite targets of the creatures of the Nevernever. In fact, you can be pretty damn sure that she is a shape-shifter of one kind or another, who isn’t telling you the whole truth, but still comes asking for your help.”
“Like I can throw stones for not telling the whole truth,” I said.
Hngh, my double said in answer. “But you haven’t confronted her about what she isn’t telling you. Those kids. Who the hell were they, and what were they doing? What is she getting them into? And why was she keeping it a secret from MacFinn? He didn’t recognize the names when you dropped them.”