by Jim Butcher
A few seconds later, LeBlanc stopped moving.
Murphy reloaded again and kept the gun trained on the corpse.
“Nice shootin’, Tex,” I said. I checked out Maroon. He was still breathing.
“So,” Murphy said, “problem solved?”
“Not really,” I said. “LeBlanc was no practitioner. She can’t be the one who was working the whammy.”
Murphy frowned and eyed Maroon for a second.
I went over to the downed man and touched my fingers lightly to his brow. There was no telltale energy signature of a practitioner. “Nope.”
“Who, then?”
I shook my head. “This is delicate, difficult magic. There might not be three people on the entire White Council who could pull it off. So . . . it’s most likely a focus artifact of some kind.”
“A what?”
“An item that has a routine built into it,” I said. “You pour energy in one end, and you get results on the other.”
Murphy scrunched up her nose. “Like those wolf belts the FBI had?”
“Yeah, just like that.” I blinked and snapped my fingers. “Just like that!”
I hurried out of the little complex and up the ladder. I went to the tunnel car and took the old leather seat belt out of it. I turned it over and found the back inscribed with nearly invisible sigils and signs. Now that I was looking for it, I could feel the tingle of energy moving within it. “Hah,” I said. “Got it.”
Murphy frowned back at the entry to the Tunnel of Terror. “What do we do about Billy the Kid?”
“Not much we can do,” I said. “You want to try to explain what happened here to the Springfield cops?”
She shook her head.
“Me, either,” I said. “The kid was LeBlanc’s thrall. I doubt he’s a danger to anyone without a vampire to push him into it.” Besides, the Reds would probably kill him on general principles, anyway, once they found out about LeBlanc’s death.
We were silent for a moment, then stepped in close to each other and hugged gently. Murphy shivered.
“You okay?” I asked quietly.
She leaned her head against my chest. “How do we help all the people she screwed with?”
“Burn the belt,” I said, and stroked her hair with one hand. “That should purify everyone it’s linked to.”
“Everyone,” she said slowly.
I blinked twice. “Yeah.”
“So once you do it . . . we’ll see what a bad idea this is. And remember that we both have very good reasons to not get together.”
“Yeah.”
“And . . . we won’t be feeling this anymore. This . . . happy. This complete.”
“No. We won’t.”
Her voice cracked. “Dammit.”
I hugged her tight. “Yeah.”
“I want to tell you to wait awhile,” she said. “I want us to be all noble and virtuous for keeping it intact. I want to tell you that if we destroy the belt, we’ll be destroying the happiness of God knows how many people.”
“Junkies are happy when they’re high,” I said quietly, “but they don’t need to be happy. They need to be free.”
I put the belt back into the car, turned my right hand palm up, and murmured a word. A sphere of white-hot fire gathered over my fingers. I flicked a hand, and the sphere arched gently down into the car and began charring the belt to ashes. I felt sick.
I didn’t watch. I turned to Karrin and kissed her again, hot and urgent, and she returned the kiss frantically. It was as though we thought we might keep something from escaping our mouths if they were sealed together in a kiss.
I felt it when it went away.
We both stiffened slightly. We both remembered that we had decided the two of us couldn’t work out. We both remembered that Murphy was already involved with someone else and that it wasn’t in her nature to stray.
She stepped back from me, her arms folded across her stomach.
“Ready?” I asked her quietly.
She nodded, and we started walking. Neither of us said anything until we reached the Blue Beetle.
“You know what, Harry?” she said quietly from the other side of the car.
“I know,” I told her. “Like you said, love hurts.”
We got into the Beetle and headed back to Chicago.
AFTERMATH
—original novella
Takes place an hour or two after the end of Changes
To quote a great man: ’Nuff said.
I can’t believe he’s dead.
Harry Dresden, Professional Wizard. It sounds like a bad joke. Like most people, at first I figured it was just his schtick, his approach to marketing himself as a unique commodity in private investigation, a job market that isn’t ever exactly teeming with business.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I knew better. I’d seen something that the rules of the normal world just couldn’t explain, and he was right in the middle of it. But I did what everyone does when they run into the supernatural: I told myself that it was dark, and that I didn’t really know what I had seen. No one else had witnessed anything to support me. They would call me crazy if I tried to tell anyone about it. By the time a week had passed, I had half convinced myself that I hallucinated the whole thing. A year later, I was almost certain it had been some kind of trick, an illusion pulled off by a smarmy but savvy con.
But he was for real.
Believe me, I know. Several years and several hundred nightmares later, I know.
He was the real thing.
God. I was already thinking about him in the past tense.
“Sergeant Murphy,” said one of the lab guys. Dresden was almost one of our own, in Special Investigations. We’d pulled every string we had to get a forensics team on the site. “Excuse me, Sergeant Murphy.”
I turned to face the forensic tech. He was cute, in a not-quite-grown, puppyish kind of way. The ID clipped to his lapel said his name was Jarvis. He looked nervous.
“I’m Murphy,” I said.
“Um, right.” He swallowed and looked around. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but . . . my boss said I shouldn’t be talking to you. He said you were on suspension.”
I looked at him calmly. He wasn’t more than average height, but that put his head about eight and a half inches over mine. He still had that whippet thinness that some twentysomethings hang on to for a while after their teenage years. I smiled at him and tried to put him at ease. “I get it,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”
He licked his lips nervously.
“Jarvis,” I said, “please.” I gestured at the bloodstain on the exterior of the cabin of a dumpy little secondhand boat, the lettering on which proclaimed it the Water Beetle. “He is my friend.”
I didn’t say was—not out loud. You don’t ever do that until you’ve found the remains. It’s professional.
Jarvis exhaled and looked around. I thought he looked as if he might throw up.
“The blood spatter suggests that whoever was struck there took a hit somewhere in his upper torso. It’s impossible to be sure, but”—he swallowed—“it was a heavy spray. Maybe an arterial hit.”
“Or maybe not,” I said.
He was too young to notice the way I was grasping at straws. “Or maybe not,” he agreed. “There’s not enough blood on the site to call it a murder, but we think most of it . . . We didn’t find the round. It went through the victim, and both walls of the, uh, boat there. It’s probably in the lake.”
I grunted. It’s something I picked up over a fifteen-year career in law enforcement. Men have managed to create a complex and utterly impenetrable secret language consisting of monosyllabic sounds and partial words—and they are apparently too thick to realize it exists. Maybe they really are from Mars. I’d been able to learn a few Martian phrases over time, and one of the useful ones was the grunt that meant I acknowledge that I’ve heard what you said; please continue.
“Smears on the deck and the guard
rail suggest that the victim went over the side and into the water,” Jarvis continued, his tone subdued. “There’s a dive team on the way, but . . .”
I used the Martian phrase for You needn’t continue; I know what you’re talking about. It sounded a lot like the first grunt to anyone without a Y chromosome, but I really did get it.
Lake Michigan is jealous and protective of her dead. The water’s depth and the year-round cold temperatures that go with it mean that corpses don’t tend to produce many gasses as they decompose. As a result, they often don’t bob to the surface, like you see in all those cop shows on cable. They just lie on the bottom. No one knows how many poor souls’ earthly remains rest in the quiet cold of Michigan’s depths.
“It hasn’t been long,” I said. “Even if he fell off the back, into the open water, he can’t have gone far.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jarvis said. “Um. If you’ll excuse me.”
I nodded at him and shoved my hands into the pockets of my coat. Night was coming on, but it wouldn’t make a lot of difference—the lake wasn’t exactly crystal clear on the best days. The divers would have to use flashlights, day or night, even though we weren’t more than fifty yards from shore, on the docks of the marina the Water Beetle called home. That would limit the area of water they could search at any given moment. The cold would impose limits on their dive time. Sonar might or might not be useful. This close to Chicago, the lake floor was cluttered with all kinds of things. They’d have to get lucky to get a good radar hit and find him.
If he was in there, he’d been there for several hours, and the wind had been rising the whole time, stirring the surface of the lake. Harry’s corpse would have had plenty of time to fall to the bottom and begin to drift.
The dive team probably wasn’t going to find him. They’d try, but . . .
Dammit.
I stared hard at the lengthening shadows and tried to make my tears evaporate through sheer will.
“I’m . . . very sorry, Sergeant,” Jarvis said.
I replied with the Martian for Thank you for your concern, but at the moment I need some space. That one’s easy. I just stared forward without saying anything, and after a moment, Jarvis nodded and toddled off to continue working.
A while later, Stallings was standing next to me, wearing his badge prominently out on his coat. After I’d been busted back to sergeant, Stallings had replaced me as the head of Special Investigations, Chicago’s unofficial monster squad. We dealt with the weird stuff no one would accept, and then lied about what we’d been doing so that everything fit neatly into a report.
Stallings was a big, rawboned man, comfortably solid with age, his hair thinning on top. He had a mustache like Magnum’s. I’d been his boss for nearly seven years. We got along well with each other. He never treated me like his most junior subordinate—more like an adviser who had been made available to the new commander.
The forensics boys were sealing the doors of the little boat with crime scene tape, having taken enough samples and photographs to choke a rhinoceros, before anyone spoke.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
He exhaled through his nose and said, “Hospital checks have come up with zip.”
I grimaced. They would. When Harry got hurt, the hospital was the last place he wanted to be. He felt too vulnerable there—and he worried that the way a wizard’s presence disrupted technology could hurt or kill someone on life support, or do harm to some innocent bystander.
But there was so much blood on the boat. If he was that badly hurt, he couldn’t have gone anywhere on his own power. And down here, anyone who had found him would have called emergency services.
And the blood trail led to the lake.
I shook my head several times. I didn’t want to believe it, but you can’t make fact into fiction, no matter how much denial you’ve got to draw upon.
Stallings sighed again. Then he said, “You’re on suspension, Murphy. And this is a crime scene.”
“Not until we know a crime’s been committed,” I said. “We don’t absolutely know anyone’s been hurt or killed. Right now, it’s just a mess.”
“God dammit,” he said, his voice weary. “You’re a civilian now, Karrin. Get away from the fucking scene. Before someone gets word to Rudolph about this and Infernal Affairs comes down here to toss your ass in jail.”
“On any other day, I would think you were talking sense,” I said.
“I don’t care what you think,” he said. “I care what you do. And what you’re going to do is turn around, walk over to your car, get in it, go home, and get a good night’s sleep. You look like a hundred miles of bad road. Through Hell.”
See, most women would have been a little put out by a remark like that. Especially if they were wearing slacks that flattered their hips and butt, with a darling red silk blouse and a matching silver necklace and two bracelets, studded with tiny sapphires, which they’d inherited from their grandmother. And more makeup than they usually wore in a week. And new perfume. And great shoes.
By any measure, that kind of remark was insulting. When you were dressed for a date, it was more so.
But Stallings wasn’t trying to piss me off. The insult was Martian, too, for something along the lines of I have so much regard for you that I went out of my way to create this insult so that we can have the fun of a mildly adversarial conversation. See how much I care?
“John,” I replied, using his first name, “you are a sphincter douche.”
Translation: I love you, too.
He gave me a quiet smile and nodded.
Men.
He was right. There was nothing I could do here.
I turned my back on the last place I’d seen Harry Dresden and walked back to my car.
IT HAD BEEN a long day, starting most of two days before, including a gunfight at the FBI building—which the news was still going insane about, especially after the office building bombing a couple of days before that—and a pitched battle at an ancient Mayan temple that ended in the utter destruction of the vampires of the Red Court.
And after that, things had gotten really dangerous.
I’d shown up to that ratty old boat where Harry was crashing, dressed in the outfit Stallings had insulted. Harry and I were supposed to go grab a few drinks and . . . and see what happened.
Instead, I’d found nothing but his blood.
I didn’t think I would sleep, but two days plus of physical and psychological stress made it inevitable. Nightmares came to haunt me, but they didn’t make much of an impression. I’d seen worse in the real world. I did cry, though. I remember that—waking up in the middle of the night from bad dreams that were old hat by now, sobbing my eyes out in pure reaction to the events of the past two days.
It happens. You feel overwhelmed, you cry, you feel better, and you go back to sleep.
If you don’t get it, don’t ask. It doesn’t really translate into Martian.
I WOKE UP to a firm knock at my front door. I got out of bed, my Sig in my hand, and flicked a quick glance out the window at the backyard. It was empty, and there was no one at the door that led into my kitchen. Only after I had checked my six o’clock did I go to the front door, glancing quickly out the window in the hall as I went.
I recognized the stout young man standing on the porch, and I relaxed somewhat. Since I slept in an oversized T-shirt, I grabbed a pair of sweats and hopped into them, then went to see the werewolf standing at my door.
Will Borden didn’t look like a werewolf. He was about five five, five six, and built like an armored car, all flat, heavy muscle. He wore glasses, his brown hair was cut short and neat, and you would never have guessed, from looking at him, that he and his friends had been responsible for a forty percent drop in crime in a six-block radius around the University of Chicago—and that didn’t even take into account the supernatural predators that had been driven away and that now avoided the neighborhood. Strictly speaking, I probably should have ar
rested him as a known vigilante.
Of course, strictly speaking, I wasn’t a cop anymore. I wouldn’t be arresting anybody. Ever again.
That thought hit my stomach like a lead wrecking ball, and no amount of bravado or discipline could keep it from hurting. So I turned away from it.
I answered the door, and said, “Hello, Will.”
“Sergeant Murphy,” he said, nodding at me. “Got a minute?”
“It’s early,” I said, not bothering to correct his form of address.
“I need your help,” he said.
I took a deep breath through my nose.
It wasn’t as though I had to go to work. It wasn’t as though I had a hot date waiting for me.
Part of me longed to slam the door in Will’s face and go back to bed. I’d always thought that kind of selfish reaction had been a fairly small portion of my character. Today, it felt huge.
The house was silent and empty behind me.
“Okay,” I said. “Come in.”
I SEATED HIM at the kitchen table and went back to my room to put on clothes that looked a little less pajama-like. When I came back out, Will had gotten the coffeepot going, and brew was already a finger deep in the little glass pitcher.
I popped some bread in the toaster and watched it carefully to make sure it didn’t burn. My toaster was an old one, but even so I didn’t need to be watching it. It just gave me something to do until the coffee was done.
I took the finished toast and coffee to the table, a bit for each of us, and set out a jar of strawberry preserves. Will accepted the food readily and, naturally, wolfed it down. We did all of that in silence.
“Okay,” I said, settling back in my chair and studying him. “What help?”
“Georgia’s gone,” he said simply.
I kept myself from wincing. Georgia was Will’s wife. They’d been together since they were barely out of high school. They’d learned to be werewolves together, apparently. I liked them both. “Tell me.”
“Work had me out of town,” he said. “Omaha. Georgia is getting ready to defend her dissertation. She stayed home. We both watched the news—about Dresden’s office building and the terrorists at the FBI. We were worried but . . . I got a call from her late last night. She was . . .” His face became pale. “She was almost incoherent. Terrified. She wasn’t making any sense. Then the call cut off abruptly.” His voice shook. “She was screaming. I tried to call the cops, but . . .”