by Jim Butcher
“You sure it was deliberate?”
“Yeah. But whoever it was, he wasn’t a pro.”
“Why do you say that?”
“If he had been, he’d have spun me easy. No idea he was there until he’d hit me. Could have bumped me into a spin before I could have straightened out. Flipped my car a few times. Killed me pretty good.” I rubbed at the back of my neck. A nice, full-body ache was already spreading out into my muscles. “Isn’t exactly the best place for it, either.”
“Attack of opportunity,” Murphy said.
“Whassat?”
She smiled a little. “When you weren’t expecting the shot, but you see it and take it before the opportunity passes you by.”
“Oh. Yeah, probably one of those.”
Murphy shook her head. “Look, maybe I should get you to a doctor anyway.”
“No,” I said. “Really. I’m okay. But I want to get off the street soonest.”
Murphy inhaled slowly and then nodded. “I’ll take you home.”
“Thanks.”
Grayson came ambling over to us. “Wrecker’s on the way,” he said. “What do we got here?”
“Hit and run,” Murphy said.
Grayson lifted his eyebrows and eyed me. “Yeah? Looked to me like you got hit a couple of times. On purpose-like.”
“For all I know it was an honest accident,” I said.
Grayson nodded. “There’s some clothes in your backseat. Looks like they have blood on them.”
“Leftovers from last Halloween,” I said. “It’s costume stuff. A cloak and robes and such, had fake blood all over them. It looked cheesy as hell.”
Grayson snorted. “You’re worse than my kid. He’s still got some of his football jerseys in his backseat from last fall.”
“He probably has a nicer car.” I glanced up at the Beetle. It was a real mess, and I winced. It wasn’t like the Beetle was a priceless antique or anything, but it was my car. I drove it places. I liked it. “In fact, I’m sure it’s a nicer car.”
Grayson let out a wry chuckle. “I need to fill out some papers. You okay to help me fill in the blanks?”
“Sure,” I told him.
“Thanks for the call, Sergeant,” Murphy said.
“De nada,” Grayson replied, touching the brim of his cap with a finger. “I’ll get those forms, Dresden, soon as the wrecker gets here.”
“Cool,” I said.
Grayson moved off, and Murphy stared at me steadily for a moment.
“What?” I asked her quietly.
“You lied to him,” she said. “About the clothes and the blood.”
I twitched one shoulder.
“And you did it well. I mean, if I didn’t know you…” She shook her head. “It surprises me about you. That’s all. You’ve always been a terrible liar.”
“Um,” I said. I wasn’t sure how to take that one. “Thank you?”
She let out a wry chuckle. “So what’s the real story?”
“Not here,” I said. “Let’s talk in a bit.”
Murphy studied my face for a second, and her frown deepened. “Harry? What’s wrong?”
The limp, headless body of that nameless young man filled my thoughts. It brought up too many emotions with it, and I felt my throat tighten until I knew I wouldn’t be able to speak. So I shook my head a little and shrugged.
She nodded. “You going to be all right?”
There was a peculiar gentleness in her voice. Murphy had been playing in what amounted to a boys-only league in her work with CPD, and she put off a tough-as-nails aura that made her seem almost as formidable as she actually was. That exterior almost never varied, at least out in the open, with other police officers nearby. But as she looked at me, there was a quiet, definite, and unashamed vulnerability in her voice.
We’ve had our differences in the past, but Murphy was one hell of a good friend. I gave her my best lopsided smile. “I’m always all right. More or less.”
She reached out and twitched a stray bit of hair from my forehead. “You’re a great big girl, Dresden. One little fender bender and you go all emotional and pathetic.” Her eyes flickered to the Beetle again, and suddenly burned with a cold blue fire. “Do you know who did this to you?”
“Not yet,” I growled as the wrecker arrived. “But you can bet your ass I’m going to find out.”
Chapter
Five
By the time we got back to my place, my head was starting to run at its normal speed, the better to inform me how much it hurt. I had a nice, deep-down body ache to go along with the bruised skull. The light of the afternoon sun stabbed at my eyes in a cheerfully vicious fashion, and I was glad when I shambled down the steps to my basement apartment, disarmed my magical wards, unlocked the door, and shoved hard at it.
It didn’t open. The previous autumn, zombies had torn apart my steel security door and wrecked my apartment. Though I was getting a modest paycheck from the Wardens now, I still didn’t have enough money to pay for all the repairs, and I had set out to fix the door on my own. I hadn’t framed it very well, but I try to think positive: The new door was arguably even more secure than the old one—now you could barely get the damned thing open even when it wasn’t locked.
While I was in home-renovation mode, I put down linoleum in the kitchen, carpet on the living room and bedroom floors, and tile in the bathroom, and let me tell you something.
It isn’t as easy as those Time-Life homeowner books make it look.
I had to slam my shoulder against it three or four times, but the door finally groaned and squealed and came open.
“I thought you were going to have a contractor fix that,” Murphy said.
“When I get the money.”
“I thought you were getting another paycheck now.”
I sighed. “Yeah. But the rate of pay was set in 1959, and the Council hasn’t given it a cost-of-living increase since. I think it comes up for review in a few more years.”
“Wow. That’s even slower than City Hall.”
“Always thinking positive.” I went inside, stepping onto the large wrinkle that had somehow formed in the carpet before the door.
My apartment isn’t huge. There’s a fairly roomy living room, with a miniature kitchen set in an alcove opposite the door. The door to my tiny bedroom and bathroom is on the right as you come in, with a red-brick fireplace set in the wall beside it. Bookshelves, tapestries, and movie posters line the cold stone walls. My original Star Wars poster had survived the attack, though my library of paperbacks had taken a real beating. Those darned zombies, they always dog-ear the pages and crack the spines the minute they’re done oozing foul goop and smashing up furniture.
I have a couple of secondhand sofas, which aren’t hard to get cheap, so replacing them wasn’t too bad. A pair of comfortable old easy chairs by the fire, a coffee table, and a large mound of grey-and-black fur rounded out the furnishings. There’s no electricity, and it’s a dim little hole, but it’s a dim, cool little hole, and it was a relief to get out of the broiling sun.
The small mountain of fur shook itself, and something thudded against the wall beside it as it rose up into the shape of a large, stocky dog covered in a thick shag of grey fur, complete with an almost leonine mane of darker fur around his neck, throat, chest, and upper shoulders. He went to Murphy straightaway, sitting and offering up his right front paw.
Murphy laughed, and grabbed his paw briefly—her fingers couldn’t have stretched around the offered limb. “Hiya, Mouse.” She scratched him behind the ears. “When did you teach him that, Harry?”
“I didn’t,” I said, stooping to ruffle Mouse’s ears as I went past him to the fridge. “Where’s Thomas?” I asked the dog.
Mouse made a chuffing sound and looked at the closed door to my bedroom. I stopped to listen for a moment, and heard the faint gurgle of water in the pipes. Thomas was in the shower. I got a Coke out of the fridge and glanced at Murphy. She nodded. I got her one too, and doddered
over to the couch to sit down slowly and carefully, my aches and pains complaining at me the whole while. I opened the Coke, drank, and settled back with my eyes closed. Mouse lumbered over to sit down by the couch and lay his massive head on one knee. He pawed at my leg.
“I’m fine,” I told him.
He exhaled through his nose, doggie expression somehow skeptical, and I scratched his ears, to prove it. “Thanks for the ride, Murph.”
“Sure,” she said. She brought out a plastic sack she’d carried in and tossed it on the floor. It held my robe, stole, and cloak, all of them spattered with blood. She walked over to the kitchen sink and started filling it with cold water. “So let’s talk.”
I nodded and told her about the Korean kid. While I did that, she put my stole in the sink, then started washing it briskly in the cold water.
“That kid is what wizards mean when they talk about warlocks,” I said. “Someone who has betrayed the purpose of magic. Gone bad, right from the start.”
She waited a moment and then said, in a quiet, dangerous voice, “They killed him here? In Chicago?”
“Yes,” I said. I felt even more tired. “This is one of our safer meeting places, apparently.”
“You saw it?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t stop it?”
“I couldn’t have,” I said. “There were heavyweights there, Murphy. And…’’ I took a deep breath. “I’m not sure they were completely in the wrong.”
“Like hell they weren’t,” she snarled. “I don’t give a good God damn what the White Council does over in England or South America or wherever they want to hang around flapping their beards. But they came here.”
“Had nothing to do with you,” I said. “Nothing to do with the law, that is. It was internal stuff. They would have done the same to that kid, no matter where they were.”
Her movements became jerky for a moment, and water splashed over the rim of the sink. Then she visibly forced herself to relax, put the stole aside, and went to work on the robe. “Why do you think that?” she asked.
“The kid had gone in for black magic in a big way,” I said. “Mind-control stuff. Robbing people of their free will.”
She regarded me with cool eyes. “I’m not sure I understand.”
“It’s the Fourth Law of Magic,” I said. “You aren’t allowed to control the mind of another human. But…hell, it’s one of the first things a lot of these stupid kids try—the old Jedi mind trick. Sometimes they start with maybe getting homework overlooked by a teacher or convincing their parents to buy them a car. They come into their magic when they’re maybe fifteen or so, and by the time they’re seventeen or eighteen they’ve got a full-grown talent.”
“And that’s bad?”
“A lot of times,” I said. “Think about how men that age are. Can’t go ten seconds without thinking about sex. Sooner or later, if someone doesn’t teach them otherwise, they’ll put the psychic armlock on the head cheerleader to get a date. And more than a date. And then more girls, or I guess other guys if I’m going to be PC about it. Someone else gets upset about losing a girlfriend or a daughter getting pregnant and the kid tries to fix his mistakes with more magic.”
“But why does that mandate execution?” Murphy asked.
“It…” I frowned. “Getting into someone’s mind like that is difficult and dangerous. And sooner or later, while you’re changing them, you start changing yourself, too. You remember Micky Malone?”
Murphy didn’t exactly shudder, but her hands stopped moving for a minute. Micky Malone was a retired police officer. A few months after he’d gotten out of the game, an angry and vicious spiritual entity had unleashed a psychic assault on him, and bound him in spells of torment to boot. The attack had transformed a grandfatherly old retired cop into a screaming maniac, totally out of control. I’d done what I could for the poor guy, but it had been really bad.
“I remember,” Murphy said quietly.
“When a person gets into someone’s head, it inflicts all kinds of damage—sort of like what happened to Micky Malone. But it damages the one doing it, too. It gets easier to bend others as you get more bent. Vicious cycle. And it’s dangerous for the victim. Not just because of what might happen as a direct result of suddenly being forced to believe that the warlock is the god-king of the universe. It strains their psyche, and the more uncharacteristically they’re made to feel and act, the more it hurts them. Most of the time, it devolves into a total breakdown.”
Murphy shivered. “Like those office workers Mavra did it to? And the Renfields?”
A flash of phantom pain went through my maimed hand at the memory. “Exactly like that,” I said.
“What can that kind of magic do?” she asked, her voice more subdued.
“Too much. This kid had forced a bunch of people to commit suicide. A bunch more to commit murder. He’d turned a whole gang of people, most of them his family, into his personal slaves.”
“My God,” Murphy said quietly. “That’s hideous.”
I nodded. “That’s black magic. You get enough of it in you and it changes you. Stains you.”
“Isn’t there anything else the Council can do?”
“Not when the kid is that far gone. They’ve tried it all,” I said. “Sometimes the warlock seemed to get better, but they all turned back in the end. And more people died. So unless someone on the Council takes personal responsibility for the warlock, they just kill them.”
She thought about that for a moment. Then she asked, “Could you have done that? Taken responsibility for him?”
I shifted uncomfortably. “Theoretically, I guess. If I really believed he could be salvaged.”
She pressed her lips together and stared at the sink.
“Murph,” I said, as gently as I knew how. “The law couldn’t handle someone like that. You couldn’t arrest them, contain them, without some serious magic to neutralize their powers. If you tried to bring an angry warlock into holding down at SI, it would get ugly. Worse than the loup-garou.”
“There’s got to be another way,” Murphy said.
“Once a dog goes rabid, you can’t bring him back,” I said. “All you can do is keep him from hurting others. The best solution is prevention. Find the kids displaying serious talent and teach them better from the get-go. But the world population has grown so much in the past century that the White Council can’t possibly identify and reach them all. Especially with this war on. There just aren’t enough of us.”
She tilted her head, staring at me. “Us? That’s the first time I’ve heard you reference the White Council with yourself included in it.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I drank the rest of my Coke. Murphy went on washing for a minute, set the robe aside, and reached for the grey cloak. She dropped it into the sink, frowned, and then held it up. “Look at this,” she said. “The blood came out when it hit the water. All by itself.”
“It’s like that kid never died. Cool,” I said quietly.
Murphy watched me for a moment. “Maybe this is what it feels like for civilians when they see cops doing some of the dirty work. A lot of times they don’t understand what’s happening. They see something they don’t like and it upsets them—because they don’t have the full story, aren’t personally facing the problem, and don’t know how much worse the alternative could be.”
“Maybe,” I agreed.
“It sucks.”
“Sorry.”
She cast me a fleeting smile, but her expression grew serious again when she crossed the room to sit down near me. “Do you really think what they did was necessary?”
God help me, I nodded.
“Is this why the Council was so hard on you for so long? Because they thought you were a warlock about to relapse?”
“Yeah. Except for the part where you’re using the past tense.” I leaned forward, chewing on my lip for a second. “Murph, this is one of those things the cops can’t get involved in. I told you t
here would be things like this. I don’t like what happened anymore than you do. But please, don’t push this. It won’t help anyone.”
“I can’t ignore a dead body.”
“There won’t be one.”
She shook her head and stared at the Coke for a while more. “All right,” she said. “But if the body shows up or someone reports it, I won’t have any choice.”
“I understand.” I looked around for a change of subject. “So. There’s black magic afoot in Chicago, according to an annoyingly vague letter from the Gatekeeper.”
“Who is he?”
“Wizard. Way mysterious.”
“You believe him?”
“Yeah,” I said. “So we should be on the lookout for killings and strange incidents and so on. The usual.”
“Right,” Murphy said. “I’ll keep an eye out for corpses, weirdos, and monsters.”
The door to the bedroom opened and my half brother Thomas emerged, freshly showered and smelling faintly of cologne. He was right around six feet in height, and was built like the high priest of Bowflex—all lean muscle, sculpted and well formed, not too much of a good thing. He wore a pair of black trousers and black shoes, and was pulling a pale blue T-shirt down over his rippling abs as he came into the room.
Murphy watched him, blue eyes gleaming. Thomas is awfully pretty to look at. He’s also a vampire of the White Court. They didn’t go in for fangs and blood so much as pale skin and supernaturally hot sex, but just because they fed on raw life force rather than blood didn’t make them any less dangerous.
Thomas had worked hard to make sure that he kept his hunger under control, so that when he fed he wouldn’t hurt anyone too badly—but I knew it had been a difficult struggle for him, and he carried that strain around with him. It was visible in his expression, and it made all of his movements those of a lean, hungry predator.
“Monsters?” he asked, pulling the shirt down over his head. He smiled pleasantly and said, “Karrin, good afternoon.”
“That’s Lieutenant Murphy to you, Prettyboy,” she shot back, but her face was set in an appreciative smile.