by Jim Butcher
“Ah,” I said.
She frowned. “Ah?”
“It’s another kid.”
Pounder blinked. “How … ?”
“I have the advantage over you and your husband, inasmuch as I have actually been a grade-school boy before,” I said. “If he snitches about it to the teachers or to you, he’ll probably have to deal with retributive friction from his classmates. He won’t be cool. He’ll be a snitching, tattling pariah.”
Pounder sat back in her seat, frowning. “I’m … hardly a master of social skills. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
I shrugged. “On the other hand, you clearly aren’t the sort to sit around wringing her hands, either.”
Pounder snorted and gave me a brief, real smile.
“So,” I went on, “when he started coming home hurt, what did you do about it?”
“I started escorting him to school and picking him up the moment class let out. That’s been for the past two months. He hasn’t had any more injuries. But I have to go to a conference tomorrow morning and—”
“You want someone to keep an eye on him.”
“That, yes,” she said. “But I also want you to find out who has been trying to hurt him.”
I arched an eyebrow. “How am I supposed to do that?”
“I used River’s financial advisor to pull some strings. You’re expected to arrive at the school tomorrow morning to begin work as the school janitor.”
I blinked. “Wait. Bigfoot has a financial advisor? Who? Like, Nessie?”
“Don’t be a child,” she said. “The human tribes assist the Forest People by providing an interface. River’s folk give financial, medical, and educational aid in return. It works.”
My imagination provided me with an image of River Shoulders standing in front of a children’s music class, his huge fingers waving a baton that had been reduced to a matchstick by his enormity.
Sometimes my head is like an Etch A Sketch. I shook it a little, and the image went away.
“Right,” I said. “It might be difficult to get you something actionable.”
Pounder’s eyes almost seemed to turn a green-tinged shade of gold, and her voice became quiet and hard. “I am not interested in courts,” she said. “I only care about my son.”
Yikes.
Bigfoot Irwin had himself one formidable mama bear. If it turned out that I was right and he was having issues with another child, that could cause problems. People can overreact to things when their kids get involved. I might have to be careful with how much truth got doled out to Dr. Pounder.
Nothing’s ever simple, is it?
THE SCHOOL WAS called the Madison Academy, and it was a private elementary and middle school on the north side of town. Whatever strings River Shoulders had pulled, they were good ones. I ambled in the next morning, went into the administrative office, and was greeted with the enthusiasm of a cloister of diabetics meeting their insulin-delivery truck. Their sanitation engineer had abruptly departed for a Hawaiian vacation, and they needed a temporary replacement.
So I wound up wearing a pair of coveralls that were too short in the arms, too short in the legs, and too short in the crotch, with the name NORM stenciled on the left breast. I was shown to my office, which was a closet with a tiny desk and several shelves stacked with cleaning supplies of the usual sort.
It could have been worse. The stencil could have read FREDDIE.
So I started engineering sanitation. One kid threw up, and another started a paint fight with his friend in the art room. The office paged me on an old intercom system that ran throughout the halls and had an outlet in the closet when they needed something in particular, but by ten I was clear of the child-created havoc and dealing with the standard human havoc, emptying trash cans, sweeping floors and halls, and generally cleaning up. As I did, going from classroom to classroom to take care of any full trash cans, I kept an eye out for Bigfoot Irwin.
I spotted him by lunchtime, and I took my meal at a table set aside for faculty and staff in one corner of the cafeteria as the kids ate.
Bigfoot Irwin was one of the tallest boys in sight, and he hadn’t even hit puberty yet. He was all skin and bones—and I recognized something else about him at once. He was a loner.
He didn’t look like an unpleasant kid or anything, but he carried himself in a fashion that suggested that he was apart from the other children; not aloof, simply separate. His expression was distracted, and his mind was clearly a million miles away. He had a double-sized lunch and a paperback book crowding his tray, and he headed for one end of a lunch table. He sat down, opened the book with one hand, and started eating with the other, reading as he went.
The trouble seemed obvious. A group of five or six boys occupied the other end of his lunch table, and they leaned their heads closer together and started muttering to one another and casting covert glances at Irwin.
I winced. I knew where this was going. I’d seen it before, when it had been me with the book and the lunch tray.
Two of the boys stood up, and they looked enough alike to make me think that they either had been born very close together or else were fraternal twins. They both had messy, sandy brown hair, long, narrow faces, and pointed chins. They might have been a year or two ahead of Irwin, though they were both shorter than the lanky boy.
They split, moving down either side of the table toward Irwin, their footsteps silent. I hunched my shoulders and watched them out of the corner of my eye. Whatever they were up to, it wouldn’t be lethal, not right here in front of half the school, and it might be possible to learn something about the pair by watching them in action.
They moved together, though not perfectly in sync. It reminded me of a movie I’d seen in high school about juvenile lions learning to hunt together. One of the kids, wearing a black baseball cap, leaned over the table and casually swatted the book out of Irwin’s hands. Irwin started and turned toward him, lifting his hands into a vague, confused-looking defensive posture.
As he did, the second kid, in a red sweatshirt, casually drove a finger down onto the edge of Irwin’s dining tray. It flipped up, spilling food and drink all over Irwin.
A bowl broke, silverware rattled, and the whole tray clattered down. Irwin sat there looking stunned while the two bullies cruised right on by, as casual as can be. They were already fifteen feet away when the other children in the dining hall had zeroed in on the sound and reacted to the mess with a round of applause and catcalls.
“Pounder!” snarled a voice, and I looked up to see a man in a white visor, sweatpants, and a T-shirt come marching in from the hallway outside the cafeteria. “Pounder, what is this mess?”
Irwin blinked owlishly at the barrel-chested man and shook his head. “I …” He glanced after the two retreating bullies and then around the cafeteria. “I guess … I accidentally knocked my tray over, Coach Pete.”
Coach Pete scowled and folded his arms. “If this was the first time this had happened, I wouldn’t think anything of it. But how many times has your tray ended up on the floor, Pounder?”
Irwin looked down. “This would be five, sir.”
“Yes, it would,” said Coach Pete. He picked up the paperback Irwin had been reading. “If your head wasn’t in these trashy science fiction books all the time, maybe you’d be able to feed yourself without making a mess.”
“Yes, sir,” Irwin said.
“Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Coach Pete said, looking at the book. “That’s stupid. You can’t hitchhike onto a spaceship.”
“No, sir,” Irwin said.
“Detention,” Coach Pete said. “Report to me after school.”
“Yes, sir.”
Coach Pete slapped the paperback against his leg, scowled at Irwin, and then abruptly looked up at me. “What?” he demanded.
“I was just wondering. You don’t, by any chance, have a Vogon in your family tree?”
Coach Pete eyed me, his chest swelling in what an anthropologist migh
t call a threat display. It might have been impressive if I hadn’t been talking to River Shoulders the night before. “That a joke?”
“That depends on how much poetry you write,” I said.
At this Coach Pete looked confused. He clearly didn’t like feeling that way, which seemed a shame, since I suspected he spent a lot of time doing it. Irwin’s eyes widened and he darted a quick look at me. His mouth twitched, but the kid kept himself from smiling or laughing—which was fairly impressive in a boy his age.
Coach Pete glowered at me, pointed a finger as if it might have been a gun, and said, “You tend to your own business.”
I held up both hands in a gesture of mild acceptance. I rolled my eyes as soon as Coach Pete turned his back, drawing another quiver of restraint from Irwin.
“Pick this up,” Coach Pete said to Irwin, and gestured at the spilled lunch on the floor. Then he turned and stomped away, taking Irwin’s paperback with him. The two kids who had been giving Irwin grief had made their way back to their original seats, meanwhile, and were at the far end of the table, looking smug.
I pushed my lunch away and got up from the table. I went over to Irwin’s side and knelt down to help him clean up his mess. I picked up the tray, slid it to a point between us, and said, “Just stack it up here.”
Irwin gave me a quick, shy glance from beneath his mussed hair and started plucking up fallen bits of lunch. His hands were almost comically large compared to the rest of him, but his fingers were quick and dexterous. After a few seconds he asked, “You’ve read the Hitchhiker’s Guide?”
“Forty-two times,” I said.
He smiled and then ducked his head again. “No one else here likes it.”
“Well, it’s not for everyone, is it?” I asked. “Personally, I’ve always wondered if Adams might not be a front man for a particularly talented dolphin. Which I think would make the book loads funnier.”
Irwin let out a quick bark of laughter and then hunched his shoulders and kept cleaning up. His shoulders shook.
“Those two boys give you trouble a lot?” I asked.
Irwin’s hands stopped moving for a second. Then he started up again. “What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ve been you before,” I said. “The kid who liked reading books about aliens and goblins and knights and explorers at lunch and in class and during recess. I didn’t care much about sports. And I got picked on a lot.”
“They don’t pick on me,” Irwin said quickly. “It’s just … just what guys do. They give me a hard time. It’s in fun.”
“And it doesn’t make you angry,” I said. “Not even a little.”
His hands slowed down and his face turned thoughtful. “Sometimes,” he said quietly. “When they spoil my broccoli.”
I blinked. “Broccoli?”
“I love broccoli,” Irwin said, looking up at me, his expression serious.
“Kid,” I said, smiling, “no one loves broccoli. No one even likes broccoli. All the grown-ups just agree to lie about it so that we can make kids eat it, in vengeance for what our parents did to us.”
“Well, I love broccoli,” Irwin said, his jaw set.
“Hunh,” I said. “Guess I’ve seen something new today.” We finished, and I said, “Go get some more lunch. I’ll take care of this.”
“Thank you,” he said soberly. “Um, Norm.”
I grunted, nodded to him, tossed the dropped food, and returned the tray. Then I sat back down at the corner table with my lunch and watched Irwin and his tormentors from the corner of my eye. The two bullies never took their eyes off Irwin, even while talking and joking with their group.
I recognized that behavior, though I’d never seen it in a child before; only in hunting cats, vampires, and sundry monsters.
The two kids were predators.
Young and inexperienced, maybe. But predators.
For the first time, I thought that Bigfoot Irwin might be in real trouble.
I went back to my own tray and wolfed down the “food” on it. I wanted to keep a closer eye on Irwin.
BEING A WIZARD is all about being prepared. Well, that and magic, obviously. While I could do a few things in a hurry, most magic takes long moments or hours to arrange, and that means you have to know what’s coming. I’d brought a few things with me, but I needed more information before I could act decisively on the kid’s behalf.
I kept track of Irwin after he left the cafeteria. It wasn’t hard. His face was down, his eyes on his book, and even though he was one of the younger kids in the school, he stood out, tall and gangly. I contrived to go past his classroom several times in the next hour. It was trig, which I knew, except I’d been doing it in high school instead of when I was nine.
Irwin was the youngest kid in the class. He was also evidently the smartest. He never looked up from his book. Several times the teacher tried to catch him out, asking him questions. Irwin put his finger on the place in his book, glanced up at the blackboard, and answered them with barely a pause. I found myself grinning.
Next I tracked down Irwin’s tormentors. They weren’t hard to find, either, since they both sat in the chairs closest to the exit, as though they couldn’t wait to go off and be delinquent the instant school was out. They sat in class with impatient, sullen expressions. They looked like they were in the grip of agonizing boredom, but they didn’t seem to be preparing to murder a teacher or anything.
I had a hunch that something about Irwin was drawing a predatory reaction from those two kids. And Coach Vogon had arrived on the scene pretty damned quickly—too much so for coincidence, maybe.
“Maybe Bigfoot Irwin isn’t the only scion at this school,” I muttered to myself.
And maybe I wasn’t the only one looking out for the interests of a child born with one foot in this world and one in another.
I WAS STANDING outside the gymnasium as the last class of the day let out, leaning against the wall on my elbows, my feet crossed at the heels, my head hanging down, my wheeled bucket and mop standing unused a good seven feet away—pretty much the picture of an industrious janitor. The kids went hurrying by in a rowdy herd, with Irwin’s tormentors being the last to leave the gym. I felt their eyes on me as they went past, but I didn’t react to them.
Coach Vogon came out last, flicking out the banks of fluorescent lights as he went, his footsteps brisk and heavy. He came to a dead stop as he appeared and found me waiting for him.
There was a long moment of silence while he sized me up. I let him. I wasn’t looking for a fight, and I had taken the deliberately relaxed and nonconfrontational stance I was in to convey that concept to him. I figured he was connected to the supernatural world, but I didn’t know how connected he might be. Hell, I didn’t even know if he was human.
Yet.
“Don’t you have work to do?” he demanded.
“Doing it,” I said. “I mean, obviously.”
I couldn’t actually hear his eyes narrow, but I was pretty sure they did. “You got a lot of nerve, buddy, talking to an instructor like that.”
“If there weren’t all these kids around, I might have said another syllable or two,” I drawled. “Coach Vogon.”
“You’re about to lose your job, buddy. Get to work or I’ll report you for malingering.”
“Malingering,” I said. “Four whole syllables. You’re good.”
He rolled another step toward me and jabbed a finger into my chest. “Buddy, you’re about to buy a lot of trouble. Who do you think you are?”
“Harry Dresden,” I said. “Wizard.”
And I looked at him as I opened my Sight.
A wizard’s Sight is an extra sense, one that allows him to perceive the patterns of energy and magic that suffuse the universe—energy that includes every conceivable form of magic. It doesn’t actually open a third eye in your forehead or anything, but the brain translates the perceptions into the visual spectrum. In the circles I run in, the Sight shows you things as they truly are, cutting through every
known form of veiling magic, illusion, and other mystic chicanery.
In this case, it showed me that the thing standing in front of me wasn’t human.
Beneath its illusion, the spindly humanoid creature stood a little more than five feet high, and it might have weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. It was naked, and anatomically it resembled a Ken doll. Its skin was dark grey, its eyes absolutely huge, bulbous, and midnight black. It had a rounded, high-crowned head and long, delicately pointed ears. I could still see the illusion of Coach Pete around the creature, a vague and hazy outline.
It lowered the lids of its bulbous eyes, the gesture somehow exceptionally lazy, and then nodded slowly. It inclined its head the smallest measurable amount possible and murmured, in a melodious and surprisingly deep voice, “Wizard.”
I blinked a few times and waved my Sight away, so that I was facing Coach Pete again. “We should talk,” I said.
The apparent man stared at me unblinkingly, his expression as blank as a discarded puppet’s. It was probably my imagination that made his eyes look suddenly darker. “Regarding?”
“Irwin Pounder,” I said. “I would prefer to avoid a conflict with Svartalfheim.”
He inhaled and exhaled slowly through his nose. “You recognized me.”
In fact, I’d been making an educated guess, but the svartalf didn’t need to know that. I knew precious little about the creatures. They were extremely gifted craftsmen, and were responsible for creating most of the really cool artifacts of Norse myth. They weren’t wicked, exactly, but they were ruthless, proud, stubborn, and greedy, which often added up to similar results. They were known to be sticklers for keeping their word, and God help you if you broke yours to them. Most important, they were a small supernatural nation unto themselves: one that protected its citizens with maniacal zeal.
“I had a good teacher,” I said. “I want your boys to lay off Irwin Pounder.”
“Point of order,” he said. “They are not mine. I am not their progenitor. I am a guardian only.”
“Be that as it may,” I said, “my concern is for Irwin, not the brothers.”
“He is a whetstone,” he said. “They sharpen their instincts upon him. He is good for them.”