by Jim Butcher
Molly didn’t look up or respond.
“Life is short,” I said. “Too short to waste it on stupid arguments. I’m not saying your mom is perfect, because God knows she isn’t. But my God, Molly, you’ve got the kind of family people like me would kill for. You think they’ll always be there later-but they might not be. Life doesn’t give you any guarantees.”
I let that sink in for a minute, and then said, “I promised your dad that I’d ask you to talk to her. I told him I’d do my best to get the two of you to work things out.”
She looked up at me, crying now, silently. More dark makeup trailed down her cheeks.
“Will you sit down with her, Molly? Talk?”
She took a shaking breath and said, “I don’t know if it will do any good. We’ve said so much…”
“I can’t force you to do it. No one can do that but you.”
She sniffled for a moment. “It won’t do any good.”
“I don’t expect miracles. Just try to talk to her. Please.”
She took a breath, and then nodded, once.
“Thank you,” I said.
She tried to smile once, and hovered outside the bathroom door for a moment more.
“Molly?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
She nodded, but she didn’t move, either.
I frowned. “Something you want to say?”
She looked up at me for just a second. “No,” she said then, and shook her head. “No, it’s nothing, really. Thank you. I won’t be long.” She stepped into the bathroom, shut the door, and locked it. The shower started a moment later.
“Wow,” Bob said from behind me, somehow inserting a leer into the word. “I didn’t realize you liked them quite that… fresh, Harry.”
I glared at him. “What?”
“Did you see the body on her? Magnificent rack! Blond Nordic babe-age, but all pierced and dressed in black, which means she’s probably into at least one kind of kink. And all tender and emotional and vulnerable to boot. Taking her clothes off right here in your room.”
“Kink? You don’t-look, there’s no way to…” I sputtered. “No, Bob. Just no. For crying out loud. She’s seventeen.”
“Better move quick, then,” Bob said. “Before anything starts to droop. Taste of perfection while you can, that’s what I always say.”
“Bob!”
“What?” he said.
“That isn’t how things are.”
“Not now,‘” Bob said. “But you go get in that shower with her and you’ve got your own personal cable TV erotic movie come true.”
I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. “Hell’s bells. The whole idea is wrong, Bob. Just… wrong.”
“Harry, even a nerd should know that it’s no coincidence when a girl shows up at a man’s hotel room. You know all she really wants is to-”
“Bob,” I snapped, cutting him off. “Even if she wanted to, which she doesn’t, nothing is happening with the girl. I’m trying to work, here. You aren’t helping.”
“I’d hate to disrupt your most recent attempt to court death and agony,” he said brightly. “You should stick me somewhere else, where I won’t distract you. On the counter in the bathroom, for example.”
I slapped open one of the empty dresser drawers and tossed the skull in there, instead. Bob sputtered a few muffled curses in ancient Greek, something about sheep and a skin rash.
I looked up from the drawer into the room’s mirror, and found myself facing not my reflection, but Lasciel’s image instead, angelic and lovely and poised. “The perverted little creep has a point, my host,” she said.
I jabbed a finger at the mirror and said, “Bob is my little creep, and the only one who gets to call him names is me. Now go away.”
“Ah,” Lasciel said, and the image faded to translucence, my own reflection appearing to replace it. “Fascinating, though,” she added, just before vanishing, “that boyfriend Nelson bears quite the striking physical resemblance to you.”
Then she was gone. Dammit. Stupid demons. Always with the last word.
Worse, she had a point. I eyed the bathroom door and reviewed the past day or so, and my interactions with the girl before that. I had always been someone her father respected and her mother disapproved of. I showed up once in a blue moon in a big black coat, usually looking roughed-up and dangerous, and I’d been doing so since she was young enough to be very impressionable. Hell, when you got right down to it, Charity’s disapproval alone might have been enough to make me seem interesting to a rebellious teenage girl.
I came to the reluctant conclusion that it was possible Molly might have certain ideas in her head. It might well explain the most recent awkward silences and halting pauses. She’d always liked me, and it wasn’t outrageous to think that it might have developed into something more-and that I’d be a right bastard to do anything that might encourage those ideas, even inadvertently. Maybe Bob and Lasciel were wrong, and in fact nothing like that was going on, but the passions of youth, its attractions and desires, were a minefield one took lightly at one’s own peril.
Magnificent rack notwithstanding, Molly was still, in every important way, a child-my friend’s child, to boot. She was hurting. It bothered me, and I wanted to help her, but I had to be aware of the fact that my sympathy could be misinterpreted. The kid had issues and she needed someone to help her work things out. She didn’t need someone who would only make her more confused.
Steam curled out from under the bathroom door. An actual hot shower. Not merely the illusion of one.
I shook my head and got back to the detection web.
As spells went, this one was pretty big, but it wasn’t complicated. I’d created a long-term version of the same basic working in the neighborhood around my apartment, in order to detect approaching mystical entities. The one I wanted for the hotel was the same thing, but I didn’t have to bother with setting it up as a long-term construct. A sunrise, or two at most, would erode the spell, but with any luck I wouldn’t need it for any longer.
I took the Play-Doh in hand, grabbed three candles in their own wooden holders, poured the sand in a circle around me, and began gathering in my power, painstakingly creating mental images of the web of energy I needed to weave between the points of the hotel I’d marked out with Play-Doh. It didn’t take me a terribly long time to set it up. Anyone with some basic skills and desire enough could have done something like this- or at least, they could have done it on a smaller scale. Weaving a web throughout the whole building took a lot of heavy lifting, magically speaking, but it wasn’t complicated, and fifteen minutes later I solidified the image of the energy patterns in my mind, and whispered, “Magius, orbius, spiritus oculus.”
I poured my will and my magic out with the words as I spoke them, and my body briefly lit up with a flood of tingling energy that raced along all of my limbs, down into the lump of Play-Doh, and swirled in tight spirals around the three candles that would serve as my ward-flames. The spell’s energy flashed, appearing as a tiny stream of faint flickers, like bursts of static electricity, and the candles each flickered to life, steady little flames born of the spell. I broke the circle of sand as I spoke, and the power blossomed out through the hotel, into the shape I’d imagined, invisible strands flickering into instant shape, like ice crystals forming in the space of a heartbeat, spreading unseen strands throughout the hotel.
My balance wobbled a bit as I finished the spell and the energy left me, submerging me in a temporary flood of fatigue. I sat there with my head down, breathing hard for a minute.
“Wow,” Murphy said, her tone less than impressed. I looked up to see her shutting the room’s door behind her. “What did you do?”
I waved around to indicate the hotel and panted, “If bad mojo shows up in the hotel, the spell will sense it.” I gestured at the three candles. “Take one with you. If you see it flare up, it means we’ve got incoming.”
Murphy frowned but nodded. “How much warning will they give us?”
“Three candles,” she said. “One for you, one for me, and…”
“I thought we’d see if Rawlins wanted one.”
“Is he here?” Murphy said.
“Gut feeling,” I said. “He seems like the kind who sees something through.”
“He also seems like the kind who’s been injured. No chance he’d get active duty here.”
“He didn’t have it at the hospital, either,” I pointed out.
“True,” Murphy said.
I caught my breath a little, and asked, “Anything at Pell’s theater?”
Murphy nodded and crossed the room to pick up two of the candles. “A lot of nothing. Place was locked up tight. Chains on the front doors, and the back door was locked. Sign on the door said they were closed until further notice.”
I grunted. “You’d think Pell would be wild to have the place open, if the convention was providing a significant amount of his income-even if he was in a hospital bed. Hell, especially if he was in a hospital bed.”
“Unless he doesn’t have anyone he trusts to run it for him.”
“But he does have someone he trusts enough to lock it up?” I said. “That doesn’t track. Pell sure as hell didn’t lock up after he was attacked.”
Murphy frowned, but she didn’t disagree with me. “I tried to call him to ask him about it, but the nurse said he was sleeping.”
I ran my fingers back through my hair, frowning over the situation. “Curiouser and curiouser,” I said. “We’re missing something here.”
“Like what?” Murphy asked.
“Another player,” I said. “Someone we haven’t seen yet.”
Murphy made a thoughtful sound. “Maybe. But imagining invisible perpetrators or hidden conspiracies veers pretty close to paranoia.”
“Maybe not another suspect, then,” I said thoughtfully. “Maybe another motive.”
“Like what?” she asked, though I could see the wheels turning in her head as she followed the logic chain from the notion.
“These phage attacks look fairly simple at first glance. Like… I don’t know. Shark attacks. Something hungry shows up to eat someone and then leaves. Natural occurrences. Or rather, typical supernatural occurrences.”
“But they aren’t random,” Murphy said. “Someone is sending them to a specific place. Someone who used magic to try to stop you when you interfered with one of the phages.”
“Which begs the obvious question…” I began.
Murphy nodded and finished the thought. “Why do it in the first place?”
I stuck my left hand out to one side of me and said, “Look over here.” Then I mimed a short jab with my right fist.
“It’s a rope-a-dope,” Murphy said, her eyes narrowing. “A distraction. But from what?”
“Something worse than homicidal, shapeshifting, supernatural predators, apparently,” I mused. “Something we’d want to stop a lot more.”
“Like what?”
I shook my head and shrugged. “I don’t know. Not yet, anyway.”
Murphy grimaced. “Leave it to you to make paranoia sound plausible.”
“It’s only paranoia if I’m wrong,” I said.
Murphy glanced over her shoulder and shivered a little. “Yeah.” She turned back to me, squared her shoulders, and took a steadying breath. “Okay. What’s the play, here? I assume you’ve got something in mind beyond having a minute or two of warning.”
“Yes,” I said.
“What?” she asked.
“It gets kind of technical,” I said.
“I’ll try to keep up,” she said.
I nodded. “Anytime something from the spirit world wants to cross into the mortal world, it has to do a number of things to cross the border. It has to have a point of origin, a point of destination, and enough energy to open the way. Then it has to cross over, summon ectoplasm from the Nevernever, and infuse it with more energy to give itself a physical body.”
She frowned. “What do you mean by points of origin and destination?”
“Links,” I told her. “Sort of like landmarks. Usually, the creature you’re calling up can serve as its own point of origin. Whoever is opening the way across is usually the destination.”
“Can anyone be the destination?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “You can’t call up anything that isn’t…” I frowned, looking for words. “You can’t call up anything that doesn’t have some kind of reflection inside you, a kind of point of reference for the spirit being. If you want evil, nasty, hungry beings, there’s got to be evil, nasty, and hunger inside of you.”
She nodded. “Does the way have to be opened from this side?”
“Generally,” I said. “It takes a hell of a lot more oomph to get it done from the other side.”
She nodded. “Go on.”
I told her about my plan to turn the phages back upon their summoner.
“I like that,” she said. “Using their own monsters against them. But what does that leave me to do?”
“You buy me time,” I said. “There will be a moment just when the phage or phages cross over, where they will be vulnerable. If you’re able to see one and distract it, it will give me more time to aim them back at their summoner. And it’s possible that my spell might not work. If it goes south, you’ll be near enough to help clear people out, maybe do them some good.”
Murphy began to speak-then she paused, turned around, and asked, “Harry. Is there someone in the shower?”
“Uh. Yeah,” I said, and rubbed at the back of my neck.
She arched a brow and waited, but I didn’t offer any explanation. Maybe it was my way of getting petty vengeance for her brutal honesty in the elevator.
“All right then,” she said, and took up the candles. “I’ll get downstairs and look for Rawlins. Otherwise, I’ll grab one of my guys from SI.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
Murphy left, while I started planning out my redirection spell. It didn’t take me long.
Mouse lifted his head suddenly, and a second later someone knocked at the door. I went over and opened it.
Charity stood on the other side, dressed in jeans, a knit tank top, and a blue blouse of light cotton. Her features were drawn with stress, her shoulders clenched in unconscious tension. When she saw me, her features became remote and neutral, very controlled. “Hello, Mister Dresden.”
It was probably the friendliest greeting I could expect from her. “Heya,” I said.
Standing beside her was an old man, a little under average height. What was left of his hair was grey, trimmed neatly, though hardly a fringe remained. He had eyes the color of robin’s eggs, spectacles, a comfortably heavy build, and wore black slacks and a black shirt. The white square of his clerical collar stood out distinctively against the shirt. He smiled when he saw me, and offered me his hand.
I shook it, smiling, and had no need to fake it. “Father Forthill. What are you doing here?”
“Harry,” he said amiably. “Lending some moral support, by and large.”
“He’s my attorney,” Charity added.
I blinked. “He is?”
“He is,” Forthill said, smiling. “I passed the bar before I entered the orders. I’ve kept my hand in on behalf of the diocese and my parishioners. I do some pro bono work from time to time, too.”
“He’s a lawyer,” I said. “He’s a priest. This does not compute.”
Forthill let out a belly laugh. “Oxymoronic.”
“Hey, did I start calling you names?” I grinned at him. “What can I do for you?”
“Molly was supposed to be waiting for us downstairs,” Charity said. “But we haven’t found her. Do you know where she is?”
The universe conspired against me. If Charity had asked the question ten seconds sooner, I would have been fine. But instead, the bathroom door opened, and Molly appeared in a swirl of steam. She had a
towel wrapped around her hair, and was holding another around her torso. Hotel towels and Molly’s torso being what they were, the towel didn’t quite get all the way around her, and barely maintained modesty. “Harry,” she said. “I left my bag out he-” She broke off suddenly, staring at Charity.
“This, uh, isn’t what it looks like,” I stammered, turning back to Charity.
Her eyes blazed with cold, righteous rage. An old Kipling axiom about the female of the species being more deadly than the male flashed through my mind, right about the time Charity introduced my chin to her right hook.
Light flashed behind my eyes and I found myself flat on my back while the ceiling spun around a little.
“Mother,” Molly said in a shocked voice.
I looked up in time to see Forthill put a firm hand on Charity’s arm, preventing her from following up the first blow. She narrowed her eyes at Forthill, but the old man’s fingers dug into her biceps until she gave him a slight nod and took a small step back into the hallway.
“Dress,” she told Molly, implacable authority in her tone. “We’re leaving.”
The kid looked like she might just start falling apart on the spot. She grabbed her bag, ducked into the bathroom, and was dressed in under a minute.
“There was nothing going on,” I mumbled. It came out sounding more like, “Mmrphg ggggh oonng.”
“I may not be able to keep you away from my husband,” Charity said, her tone cold, her diction precise. “But if you come near one of my children again, I will kill you. Thank you for calling me.”
She left, the weary Molly following her.
“There was nothing going on,” I said again, to Forthill. This time it sounded mostly like English.
He sighed, looking after the pair. “I believe you.” He gave me a smile that was one part amusement to four parts apology, and followed them.
Murphy must not have reached the elevators before Charity and Forthill had arrived. She appeared in the doorway, peering inside the room, and then back the way Charity had gone. “Ah,” she said. “You all right?”