by Jim Butcher
“He’s a sorcerer,” I said. “Middleweight talent with a cult to make him feel bigger. He’s got some form of kinetomancy I’m not familiar with, to move that fast. And some really minor mind mojo, if he’s got to pick kids to do his dirty work for him.”
“You make him sound like a small-time crook . . . like a car thief or something.”
“In the greater scheme, yeah,” I said. “He’s a petty crook. He’s Fagin.”
Fitz frowned. “From . . . from that Dickens book? Uh . . . Oliver Twist?”
I lifted my eyebrows. The kid had read. Serious readers weren’t common in the system. Those who did read mostly seemed to focus on, you know, kids’ books. Not many of them rolled around to Dickens unless they got unlucky in high school English. I would have been willing to bet that Fitz hadn’t made it past his freshman year of high school, at the very most.
He was someone who thought for himself, and he had at least a little bit of magical talent. That probably explained why he’d been put in charge of the other boys. Aside from his evident good sense, his company notwithstanding, the kid had some innate magical talent of his own. Fitz had probably been slowly learning to shake off whatever magic it was that Baldy—Aristedes—used on him. The bad guy operated in a cultleader mind-set. Anyone who wasn’t a slavish follower would be utilized as a handy lieutenant, until such time as they could be disposed of productively—or at least quietly.
I didn’t like Fitz’s chances at all.
“Something like that,” I said.
Fitz leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” he said. “I don’t even know any of those people. But he ordered it. And they were all going to do it. And I couldn’t let them just . . . just turn into murderers. They’re the only . . . They’re . . .”
“They’re yours,” I said quietly. “You look out for them.”
“Someone has to,” Fitz said. “Streets weren’t ever easy. About six months ago, though . . . they got hard. Real hard. Things came out. You could see them at night sometimes—shapes. Shadows.” He started shivering, and his voice became a whisper. “They’d take people. People who didn’t have someone to protect them would just vanish. So . . .”
“Baldy,” I said quietly.
“He killed one of them,” Fitz whispered. “Right in front of me. I saw it. It looked human, but when he was done with it . . . It just melted, man.” He shook his head. “Maybe I am crazy. God, it would almost be a relief.”
“You aren’t crazy,” I said. “But you’re in a bad place.”
The light went completely out of the kid’s eyes. “What else is new?”
“Oy,” I muttered. “Like I didn’t have enough to do already.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Look, kid. Go back to the guns at eleven tonight. That street will have gotten quieter by then. I’ll meet you.”
His dull eyes never flickered. “Why?”
“Because I’m going to help you.”
“Crazy, imaginary, invisible-voice hallucination guy,” Fitz said. “He’s going to help me. Yeah, I’ve lost it.”
There was the sudden, burring, metallic buzz of a bell, much like you’d hear in a high school or university hallway. It echoed through the entire building.
“Time for class?” I asked.
“No. Aristedes had us set it up on a timer. Says he needed the warning for his work. It goes off about five minutes before sunrise.”
I felt my back stiffen. “Five minutes?”
Fitz shrugged. “Or seven. Or two. It’s in there somewhere.”
“Hell’s bells,” I said, turning it into a swearword. “Stu was right. Time does get away from you. Be at the guns at eleven, Fitz.”
He grunted and said, in a tired monotone, “Sure, Harvey. Whatever.”
Old books and old movies. I had to help this kid.
I turned away from him and plunged through several walls and out the side of the building, clenching my teeth over snarls of discomfort. The sky had grown almost fully light. Red was swiftly brightening to orange on the eastern horizon out over Lake Michigan. Once yellow got here, I was history.
Five minutes. Or seven. Or two. That was how long I had to find a safe spot. I consulted my mental map of Chicago, looking for the nearest probable shelter, and found the only spot I thought I could get to in a couple of minutes, Nightcrawler impersonation and all.
Maybe I could get there. And maybe it would protect me from the sunrise.
I gritted my teeth, consulted the images in my memory, and, metaphorically speaking, ran for it.
I just had to hope that it wasn’t already too late.
Chapter Fourteen
One of the things a lot of people don’t understand about magic is that the rules of how it works aren’t hard-and-fast; they’re fluid, changing with time, with the seasons, with location, and with the intent of a practitioner. Magic isn’t alive in the sense of a corporeal, sentient being, but it does have a kind of anima all its own. It grows, swells, wanes, and changes.
Some facets of magic are relatively steady, like the way a person with a strong magical talent fouls up technology—but even that relative constant is one that has been slowly changing over the centuries. Three hundred years ago, magical talents screwed up other things—like causing candle flames to burn in strange colors and milk to instantly sour (which had to be hell on any wizard who wanted to bake anything). A couple of hundred years before that, exposure to magic often had odd effects on a person’s skin, creating the famous blemishes that had become known as the devil’s mark.
Centuries from now, who knows? Maybe magic will have the side effect of making you really good-looking and popular with the opposite sex—but I’m not holding my breath.
I mean, you know.
I wouldn’t be. If I still had any.
Anyway, the point is that everyone thinks that the sunrise is all about abolishing evil. It’s the light coming up out of the darkness, right?
Well, yeah. Sometimes. But mostly it’s just sunrise. It’s a part of every day, a steady mark of the passing of whirling objects in the void. Granted, there isn’t much black magic associated with the sun coming over the horizon—in fact, I’ve never even heard of any. But it isn’t a cleansing force of Good and Right.
It is, however, one hell of a cleansing force, generally speaking. Therein lay my problem.
A spirit isn’t meant to be hanging around in the mortal world unless it’s got a body to live in. It’s supposed to be on Carmichael’s El train, I guess, or in Paradise or Hell or Valhalla or something. Spirits are made of energy—they’re made of 99.9 percent pure, delicious, nutritious magic. Accept no substitute.
Spirits and sunrise go together like germs and bleach, respectively. The renewing forces flowing through the world with the new day wash over the planet like a silent, invisible tsunami, a riptide of magic that will inevitably wear away at even the strongest of mortal spells, giving them an effective shelf life if they aren’t maintained.
A wandering spirit, caught out beneath the sunrise, would be dissolved. It isn’t a question of standing in a shady spot, any more than standing in your kitchen would protect you from an oncoming tsunami. You have to get to somewhere that is actually safe, that is somehow shielded, sheltered, or otherwise lifted above the renewing riptide of sunrise.
I was a ghost, after all. So I ran for the one place I thought might shelter me, and that I could reach the quickest.
I ran for my grave.
I have my own grave, headstone already in place, the darned thing all dug out and open, just ready to receive me. It was a present from an enemy who, in retrospect, didn’t seem nearly as scary as she had been at the time. She’d been making a grand gesture in front of the seamier side of the supernatural community at large, delivering me a death threat while simultaneously demonstrating her ability to get me a grave in a boneyard with very exclusive access, convincing its management that it ought to break city ordina
nces and leave a gaping hole in the earth at the foot of my headstone. I don’t know what she’d bribed or threatened them with, but it had stayed where it was, yawning open in Chicago’s famous Graceland Cemetery, for years.
And maybe it would finally be useful as something other than a set piece for brooding.
I pulled Sir Stuart’s vanishing trick and realized that I couldn’t jump much farther than maybe three hundred yards at a hop. Still, I could do it a lot faster than running, and it didn’t seem to wear me out the way I would expect such a thing to do. It became an exercise like running itself—repeating the same process over and over to go from Point A to Point B.
I blinked through the front gate of Graceland, took a couple more hops, trying to find the right spot by this big Greek temple–looking mausoleum, and arrived, in a baseball player’s slide, at the gaping hole in the ground. My incorporeal body slid neatly over the white snow that ran right up to the edge of the grave, and I dropped into the cool, shady trench that had been prepared for me.
Sunlight washed over the world above a few heartbeats later. I heard it, felt it, the way I had once felt a minor earthquake through the soles of my shoes in Washington State. There was a harsh, clear, silvery note that hung in the air for a moment, like the after-tone of an enormous chime. I closed my eyes and scrunched up against the side of the grave that felt most likely to let me avoid obliteration.
I waited for several seconds.
Nothing happened.
It was dim and cool and quiet in my grave. It was . . . really quite restful. I mean, you see things on television and in movies about someone lying in a coffin or in a grave, and it’s always this hideous, terrifying experience. I’d been to my grave before, and it had disturbed me every time. I guess maybe I was past all that.
Death is only frightening from the near side.
I sat back against the wall of my grave, stretching my legs out ahead of me, leaning my head back against it, and closed my eyes. There was no sound but for a bit of wind in the cemetery’s trees, and the muted ambient music of the living, breathing city. Cars. Horns. Distant music. Sirens. Trains. Construction. A few birds that called Graceland home.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt so . . .
Peaceful. Content.
And free. Free to do nothing. Free to rest. Free to turn away from horrible, black things in my memory, to let go of burdens for a while.
I left my eyes closed for a time, and let the contentment and the quiet fill me.
“You’re new,” said a quiet, calm voice.
I opened my eyes, vaguely annoyed that my rest had been interrupted after only a few moments—and looked up at a sky with only a hint of blue still in it. Violet twilight was coming on with the night.
I sat up, away from the wall of my grave, startled. What the hell? I’d been resting for only a minute or two. Hadn’t I? I blinked up at the sky several times and pushed myself slowly to my feet. I felt heavy, and it was harder to rise than it should have been, as if I’d been covered in wet, heavy blankets or one of those lead-lined aprons they use around X-ray machines.
“I always like seeing new things being born,” said the voice—a child’s voice. “You can guess what they’re going to become, and then watch and see if it happens.”
My grave was about six feet deep. I’m considerably over six feet tall. As I stood, my eyes were a few inches above the top of half a foot of snow that covered the ground at that spot. So it wasn’t hard to see the little girl.
She might have been six years old and looked small, even for her age. She wore a nineteenth-century outfit, an almost ridiculously frilly, ornate dress for a child who would probably have it splattered with dirt or food within the hour. Her shoes looked handmade and had little buckles on them. Over one shoulder she was carrying a tiny, lacy parasol that matched her dress. She was pretty—like most children—and had blond hair and bright green eyes.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hello,” she said, with a little Shirley Temple curtsy. “It is a pleasure to meet you, the late Mr. Harry Dresden.”
I decided to be careful. What were the odds she was really a little girl, as she appeared? “How did you know my name?”
She folded the little parasol closed and tapped it against the headstone. It was made of white marble. Letters had been inscribed upon it in gold, or at least something goldlike, and it still gleamed despite about a decade of exposure. It had a pentacle inscribed beneath its simple legend: HERE LIES HARRY DRESDEN. Beneath the pentacle, it continued: HE DIED DOING THE RIGHT THING.
For a moment, there was a strange, sweet taste in my mouth, and the scent of pine needles and fresh greenery filled my nose. A frisson rippled up and down my spine, and I shivered. Then the taste and scent were both gone.
“Do you know me?” she asked. “I’m famous.”
I squinted at her for a moment. Then I made an effort of will and vanished from the bottom of the grave, reappearing beside the child. I was facing the wrong direction again, and I sighed as I turned to face her and then glanced around me. In Graceland there’s a statue of a small girl, a child known as Inez. It’s been there for going on two centuries, and every few years stories circulate about how the statue will go missing—and how visitors to the graveyard have reported encounters with a little girl in a period dress.
The statue was gone from its case.
“You’re Inez,” I said. “Famous ghost of Graceland.”
The little girl laughed and clapped her hands. “I have been called so.”
“I heard they debunked you a couple of years ago. That the statue was just there as advertising for some sculptor or something.”
She opened the parasol again and put it over a shoulder, spinning it idly. “Goodness. People confused about things that happened hundreds of years before they were born. Who would have imagined.” She looked me up and down and said, “I like your coat.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I like your parasol.”
She beamed. “You’re so courteous. Sometimes I think I shall never again meet anyone who is properly polite.” She looked at me intently and then said, “I think . . . you shall be”—she pursed her lips, narrowed her eyes, and nodded slowly—“a monster.”
I frowned. “What?”
“All newborn things become something,” said Inez.
“I’m not a newborn.”
“But you are,” she said. She nodded down at my grave. “You have entered a new world. Your old life is no more. You cannot be a part of it any longer. The wide universe stretches before you.” She looked around the cemetery calmly. “I have seen many, many newborns, Mr. Dresden. And I can see what they are going to become. You, young shade, are quite simply a monster.”
“Am not,” I said.
“Not at the moment, perhaps,” she said. “But . . . as time goes by, as those you care about grow old and pass on, as you stand helpless while greater events unfold . . . you will be. Patience.”
“You’re wrong.”
Her dimples deepened. “Why are you so upset, young shade? I really don’t see anything wrong with being a monster.”
“I do,” I said. “The monster part?”
“Oh,” the girl said, shaking her head. “Don’t be so simple. People adore monsters. They fill their songs and stories with them. They define themselves in relation to them. Do you know what a monster is, young shade? Power. Power and choice. Monsters make choices. Monsters shape the world. Monsters force us to become stronger, smarter, better. They sift the weak from the strong and provide a forge for the steeling of souls. Even as we curse monsters, we admire them. Seek to become them, in some ways.” Her eyes became distant. “There are far, far worse things to be than a monster.”
“Monsters hurt people. I don’t.”
Inez burst out in girlish giggles. She turned in a circle, parasol whirling, and in a singsong voice said, “Harry Dresden, hung upon a tree. Afraid to embrace his des-tin-y.” She looked me up and down again,
her eyes dancing, and nodded firmly. “Monster. They’ll write books about you.”
I opened my mouth, but no words came out. I didn’t know what to say.
“This little world is so small,” she continued. “So dull. So dreary.” She gave me a warm smile. “You aren’t shackled here, Mr. Dresden. Why remain?”
I shivered. A cold feeling swelled up in the pit of my stomach. It began to spread. I said nothing.
“Ahh,” Inez murmured—a sound of satisfaction. Her eyes went to my gravestone and she tilted her head to one side. “Did you?” she asked brightly.
I shook my head. “Did I what?”
“Did you die doing the right thing?”
I thought about it for a moment. And for a moment more. Then I said, quietly, “I . . . No. I didn’t.”
She tilted her head the other way. “Oh?”
“They had . . . a little girl,” I said quietly. It took me a moment to realize that I was speaking the words out loud and not just hearing them in my head. “They were going to hurt her. And I pulled out all the stops. To get her back. I . . .”
I suddenly felt sick again. My mind flashed back to the image of Susan’s death as her body fought to change into a monstrous form, locking her away forever as a prisoner of her own blood thirst. I felt her fever-hot skin beneath my lips where I had kissed her forehead. And I felt her blood spray as I cut her throat, triggering the spell that wiped out every murdering Red Court son of a bitch on the same planet with my little girl.
It had been the only way. I had no choice.
Didn’t I?
Maybe not at that point. But it was the choices I’d made up until that moment that had shaped the event. I could have done things differently. It might have changed everything. It might have saved Susan’s life.
I shuddered as another memory struck me. Complete, lifeless numbness in my legs. Aching pains of the body. The helpless fury I’d felt when I realized that a fall from a ladder had broken my spine—that I was paralyzed and helpless to do anything for my daughter. I remembered realizing that I was going to have to do something I would never have considered before that point.