by Jim Butcher
“‘He died doing the right thing,’” my father read.
“Maybe I can change it to, ‘he died alone,’” I said back.
My father smiled a little. “Thinking about the death curse, eh?”
“Yeah. ‘Die alone.’” I stared down at my open grave. “Maybe it means I’ll never be with anybody. Have love. A wife. Children. No one who is really close. Really there.”
“Maybe,” my father said. “What do you think?”
“I think that’s what he wanted to do to me. I think I’m so tired that I’m hallucinating. And that I hurt. And that I want someone to be holding my hand when it’s my time. I don’t want to do it alone.”
“Harry,” my dad said, and his voice was very gentle, “can I tell you something?”
“Sure.”
He walked around the grave and put his hand on my shoulder. “Son. Everyone dies alone. That’s what it is. It’s a door. It’s one person wide. When you go through it, you do it alone.” His fingers squeezed me tight. “But it doesn’t mean you’ve got to be alone before you go through the door. And believe me, you aren’t alone on the other side.”
I frowned and looked up at my father’s image, searching his eyes. “Really?”
He smiled and drew his finger in an X on his chest. “Cross my heart.”
I looked away from him. “I did things. I made a deal I shouldn’t have made. I crossed a line.”
“I know,” he said. “It only means what you decide it means.”
I looked up at him. “What?”
“Harry, life isn’t simple. There is such a thing as black and white. Right and wrong. But when you’re in the thick of things, sometimes it’s hard for us to tell. You didn’t do what you did for your own benefit. You did it so that you could protect others. That doesn’t make it right—but it doesn’t make you a monster, either. You still have free will. You still get to choose what you will do and what you will be and what you will become.” He clapped my shoulder and turned to walk away. “As long as you believe you are responsible for your choices, you still are. You’ve got a good heart, son. Listen to it.”
He vanished into the night, and somewhere in the city, bells started tolling midnight.
I stared at my waiting grave, and I suddenly realized that death was really not my biggest worry.
He died doing the right thing.
God, I hope so.
Thomas was waiting back at my apartment when I returned, and Mouse came loping in not long after. Murphy’s bike had failed him completely, and by the time he’d reached the college campus, the fur had flown and the whole show was over. I crashed hard, and slept for more than a day. When I woke up, I found that my injuries had all been dressed again, and that an IV was hanging beside my bed. Butters showed up every day to check on me, and he had me on antibiotics and had imposed a ferociously healthy diet on me that Thomas made me stick to. I grumbled a lot, and slept a lot, and after several days was feeling almost human again.
Murphy showed up to chew me out for the wreck she found where her house used to be. We’d left the place sort of trashed. But when she saw me in bed, covered in bandages, she stopped in her tracks.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Oh. Things,” I said. “Chicago was interesting for a couple of days there.” I peered at her. She had a cast on her left arm, as if for a broken wrist, and I thought I saw the edge of a bruise on her neck. “Hey,” I said. “What happened?”
Her cheeks turned pink. “Oh. Things. Hawaii was interesting for a couple of days there.”
“I’ll trade you my story for yours,” I said.
She got pinker. “Um. I’ll…have to think about it.”
Then we both looked at each other and laughed, and we left it at that.
Chicago reacted to the events of that Halloween predictably. It was all attributed to the worst storm in fifty years, rioting, a minor earth tremor, a large load of bread produced by a local bakery that had been contaminated with ergot, and similar Halloween-fueled hysteria. In the blackout, some reprehensible types had vandalized the museum and relocated Sue’s skeleton to a local campus as some kind of bizarre practical joke. There had been dozens of break-ins, robberies, murders, and other crimes during the blackout, but any other reports and wild stories were automatically put down to hysteria and/or ergot poisoning. Life went on.
Captain Luccio survived her injuries, but not without serious long-term damage that would take a lot of rehabilitation. Between that and the uncertainty of what would happen in her shiny new body, she had been relieved of command as the captain of the Wardens until such time as her health and state of mind were judged to be sound and reliable.
Morgan took her place.
He came to visit me at my place, maybe two weeks later, and gave me the news.
“Dresden,” he said. “I was against inducting you in the first place. But Captain Luccio had the right to ignore my recommendation. She made you a Warden and she made you a regional commander, and there’s nothing I can do about that.” He took a deep breath. “But I don’t like you. I think you are dangerous.”
His mouth twisted. “But I am no longer convinced you do these things out of malice. I think you lack discipline and judgment. You have repeatedly demonstrated your willingness to put yourself in harm’s way to protect others. As much as it galls me to admit it, I don’t think you have any evil intentions. I think your questionable actions are the result of arrogance and poor judgment. In the end, it matters little why you do it. But I cannot in good conscience condemn you for it without giving you some sort of chance to prove me wrong.”
From Morgan, this was the equivalent of Emperor Constantine converting to Christianity. He was almost admitting that he had been wrong. I reached into my pocket, pulled out a penny, and dropped it to the floor.
“What was that for?” he asked.
“I’m just making sure gravity is still online,” I said.
He frowned at me, then shrugged and said, “I don’t trust you. I’m not committing any Wardens to your command, and, truth be told, we don’t have them to spare in any case. But you may be required to participate in missions from time to time, and I will expect you to work with the other regional commander in America. He operates out of Los Angeles. He specifically requested the assignment, and given his role in recent events, he could hardly be gainsaid.”
“Ramirez,” I guessed.
Morgan nodded. Then he reached into his coat and produced an envelope. He handed it to me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Your first paycheck,” Morgan said, and he didn’t look happy to be saying it. “Monthly.”
I opened the envelope and blinked. It wasn’t a fortune, but it sure as hell would be a nice little addition to my earnings in the investigation business. “I never thought I would hear myself say this,” I said as he started to leave, “but thank you, Morgan.”
His face twisted up into something bitter, and he managed to spit out the words: “You’re welcome.” I think he fled before he started to puke.
Several weeks later Butters showed up at my door with a big box wrapped in Christmas paper. I let him in, and he carried it to the living room and presented me with it. “Go ahead. Open it.”
I did. Inside the box was a guitar case, and inside that an old wooden guitar. “Uh,” I said. “What’s this for?”
“Therapy,” Butters said. He’d been having me practice squeezing a squishy ball with my left hand, and, just as he’d predicted, I had slowly gained a little more control of it. “You’re going to learn to play.”
“Uh, my hand doesn’t work that well,” I said.
“Not yet,” Butters replied. “But we’ll start slow like everything else, and you can work up to it. Just do the lessons. Look, there’s a book in the bottom of the case.”
I opened the case and found a book entitled Guitar for Total Idiots, while Butters went on about tendons and metacarpal something-or-other and flexibility. I open
ed the book, but night had fallen and the fire was too low to let me read it. I absently waved a hand at the candles on the table beside the couch and muttered, “Flickum bicus.” They puffed to light with a little whoosh of magic.
I stopped and blinked—first at the candles and then at my burned hand.
“What?” Butters asked.
“Nothing,” I said, and opened the book to look over it. “You know, Butters, for a mortician you’re a pretty good healer.”
“You think so?”
I glanced at the warm, steady flame of the candles and smiled. “Yeah.”
I Was a Teenage Bigfoot
Harry
There are times when, as a professional wizard, my vocation calls me to the great outdoors, and that night I was in the north woods of Wisconsin with a mixed pack of researchers, enthusiasts, and, well, nerds.
“I don’t know, man,” said a skinny kid named Nash. “What’s his name again?”
With a stick I poked the small campfire I’d set up earlier and pretended that they weren’t standing less than ten feet away from me. The forest made forest sounds like it was supposed to. Full dark had fallen about half an hour before.
“Harry Dresden,” said Gary, a plump kid with a cell phone, a GPS unit, and some kind of video-game device on his belt. “Supposed to be a psychic or something.” He was twiddling deft fingers over the surface of what they call a smartphone, these days. Hell, the damned things are probably smarter than me. “Supposed to have helped Chicago PD a bunch of times. I’d pull up the Internet references, but I can’t get reception out here.”
“A psychic?” Nash said. “How is anyone ever supposed to take our research seriously if we keep showing up with fruitcakes like that?”
Gary shrugged. “Dr. Sinor knows him or something.”
Dr. Sinor had nearly been devoured by an ogre in a suburban park one fine summer evening, and I’d gotten her out in one piece. Like most people who have a brush with the supernatural, she’d rationalized the truth away as rapidly as possible—which had led her to participate in such fine activities as tonight’s Bigfoot expedition in her spare time.
“Gentlemen,” Sinor said impatiently. She was a blocky, no-nonsense type, grey-haired and straight-backed. “If you could help me with these speakers, we might actually manage to blast a call or two before dawn.”
Gary and Nash both hustled over to the edge of the firelight to start messing about with the equipment the troop of researchers had packed in. There were half a dozen of them altogether, all of them busy with trail cameras and call-blasting speakers and scent markers and audio recorders.
I pulled a sandwich out of my pocket and started eating it. I took my time about it. I was in no hurry.
For those of you who don’t know it, a forest at night is dark. Sometimes pitch-black. There was no moon to speak of in the sky, and the light of the stars doesn’t make it more than a few inches into a mixed canopy of deciduous trees and evergreens. The light from my little campfire and the hand held flashlights of the researchers soon gave the woods all the light there was.
Their equipment wasn’t working very well—my bad, probably. Modern technology doesn’t get on well with the magically gifted. For about an hour, nothing much happened beyond the slapping of mosquitoes and a lot of electronic noises squawking from the loudspeakers.
Then the researchers got everything online and went through their routine. They played primate calls over the speakers and then dutifully recorded the forest afterward. Everything broke down again. The researchers soldiered on, repairing things, and eventually Gary tried wood knocking, which meant banging on trees with fallen limbs and waiting to hear if there was a response.
I liked Dr. Sinor, but I had asked to come strictly as a ride-along and I didn’t pitch in with her team’s efforts.
The whole “let’s find Bigfoot” thing seems a little ill planned to me, personally. Granted, my perspective is different from that of nonwizards, but marching out into the woods, looking for a very large and very powerful creature by blasting out what you’re pretty sure are territorial challenges to fight (or else mating calls) seems … somewhat unwise.
I mean, if there’s no Bigfoot, no problem. But what if you’re standing there, screaming, “Bring it on!” and find a Bigfoot?
Worse yet, what if he finds you?
Even worse, what if you were screaming, “Do me, baby!” and he finds you then?
Is it me? Am I crazy? Or does the whole thing just seem like a recipe for trouble?
So, anyway, while I kept my little fire going, the Questionably Wise Research Variety Act continued until after midnight. That’s when I looked up to see a massive form standing at the edge of the trees, in the very outskirts of the light of my dying fire.
I’m in the ninety-ninth percentile for height, but this guy was tall. My head might have come up to his collarbone, barely, assuming I had correctly estimated where his collarbone was under the long, shaggy, dark brown hair covering him. It wasn’t long enough to hide the massive weight of muscle he carried on that enormous frame or the simple, disturbing, very slightly inhuman proportions of his body. His face was broad and blunt, with a heavy brow ridge that turned his eyes into mere gleams of reflected light.
Most of all, there was a sense of awesome power granted to his presence by his size alone, chilling even to someone who had seen big things in action before. There’s a reaction to something that much bigger than you, an automatic assumption of menace that is built into the human brain: Big equals dangerous.
It took about fifteen seconds before the first researcher—Gary, I think—noticed and let out a short gasp. In my peripheral vision, I saw the entire group turn toward the massive form by the fire and freeze into place. The silence was brittle crystal.
I broke it by bolting up from my seat and letting out a high-pitched shriek.
Half a dozen other screams joined it, and I whirled as if to flee, only to see Dr. Sinor and crew hotfooting it down the path we’d followed into the woods, back toward the cars.
I held it in for as long as I could, and only after I was sure that they wouldn’t hear it did I let loose the laughter bubbling in my chest. I sank back onto my log by the fire, laughing, and beckoning the large form forward.
“Harry,” rumbled the figure in a very, very deep voice, the words marked with the almost indefinable clippings of a Native American accent. “You have an unsophisticated sense of humor.”
“I can’t help it,” I said, wiping at tears of laughter. “It never gets old.” I waved to the open ground across the fire from me. “Sit, sit. Be welcome, big brother.”
“Appreciate it,” rumbled the giant, and he squatted down across the fire from me, touching fingers the size of cucumbers to his heart in greeting. His broad, blunt face was amused. “So. Got any smokes?”
It wasn’t the first time I’d done business with the Forest People. They’re old-school. There’s a certain way one goes about business with someone considered a peer, and Strength of a River in His Shoulders was an old-school kind of guy. There were proprieties to be observed.
So we shared a thirty-dollar cigar, which I’d brought, had some s’mores, which I made, and sipped from identical plastic bottles of Coca-Cola, which I had purchased. By the time we were done, the fire had burned down to glowing embers, which suited me fine—and I knew that River Shoulders would be more comfortable in the near-dark, too. I didn’t mind being the one to provide everything. It would have been a hassle for River Shoulders to do it, and we’d probably be smoking, eating, and drinking raw and unpleasant things if he had.
Besides, it was worth it. The Forest People had been around long before the great gold rushes of the nineteenth century, and they were loaded. River Shoulders had paid my retainer with a gold nugget the size of a golf ball the last time I’d done business with him.
“Your friends,” he said, nodding toward the disappeared researchers. “They going to come back?”
“Not before dawn,�
�� I said. “For all they know, you got me.”
River Shoulders’s chest rumbled with a sound that was both amused and not entirely pleased. “Like my people don’t have enough stigmas already.”
“You want to clear things up, I can get you on the Larry Fowler show anytime you want.”
River Shoulders shuddered—given his size, it was a lot of shuddering. “TV rots the brains of people who see it. Don’t even want to know what it does to the people who make it.”
I snorted. “I got your message,” I said. “I am here.”
“And so you are,” he said. He frowned, an expression that was really sort of terrifying on his features. I didn’t say anything. You just don’t rush the Forest People. They’re patient on an almost alien level, compared to human beings, and I knew that our meeting was already being conducted with unseemly haste by River Shoulders’s standards. Finally, he swigged a bit more Coke, the bottle looking tiny in his vast hands, and sighed. “There is a problem with my son. Again.”
I sipped some Coke and nodded, letting a little time pass before I answered. “Irwin was a fine, strong boy when I last saw him.”
The conversation continued with contemplative pauses between each bit of speech. “He is sick.”
“Children sometimes grow sick.”
“Not children of the Forest People.”
“What, never?”
“No, never. And I will not quote Gilbert and Sullivan.”
“Their music was silly and fine.”
River Shoulders nodded agreement. “Indeed.”
“What can you tell me of your son’s sickness?”
“His mother tells me the school’s doctor says he has something called mah-no.”
“Mono,” I said. “It is a common illness. It is not dangerous.”
“An illness could not touch one born of the Forest People,” River Shoulders rumbled.
“Not even one with only one parent of your folk?” I asked.