Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  Thomas watched her go with what I recognized as his look of quiet possession and pride. “They enjoy it a lot.” He gave me one of his brief, swift grins. “I imagine there’s a lot of husbands and boyfriends enjoying it, too.”

  “But they’re addicted to it, I’d imagine.”

  He shrugged again. “Some, maybe. I try to spread myself around as much as I can. It isn’t a perfect solution—”

  “But it’s the one you’ve got,” I said. I frowned. “What happens when you try to wash somebody’s hair and it turns out that they’re in love? Protected?”

  “True love isn’t as common as you’d think,” Thomas said. “Especially among people rich enough to afford me and superficial enough to think that it is money well spent.”

  “But when they do show?” I asked.

  “That’s why I’ve got all the hired help, man. I know what I’m doing.”

  I shook my head. “All this time and…” I snorted and sipped at some coffee. It was amazing. Smooth and rich and just sweet enough, and it probably cost more than a whole fast-food meal. “They all think I’m your lover, don’t they.”

  “This is a trendy, upper-class boutique, Harry. No one expects a man with a place like this to be straight.”

  “Uh-huh. And the accent, Toe-moss?”

  He smiled. “No one would pay that much money to an American stylist. Please.” He shrugged. “It’s superficial and silly, but true.” He glanced around, suddenly self-conscious. His voice lowered, and his accent dropped. “Look. I know it’s a lot to ask….”

  It was an effort not to laugh at him, but I managed to give him a hard look, sigh, and say, “Your secret is safe with me.”

  He looked relieved. “Merci.”

  “Hey,” I said. “Can you stop by my place tonight after work? I’m putting something together that might help people if someone else starts something like those White Court bozos just tried. I thought maybe you’d want to be in on it.”

  “Um, yeah. Yeah, we can talk about it.”

  I sipped more coffee. “Maybe Justine could help, too. Might be a way to get her out, if you want to do it.”

  “Are you kidding?” Thomas asked. “She’s been working for a year to get closer to Lara.”

  I blinked up at him. “Hell’s bells, I thought she was acting weird,” I said. “She came on all zonked out, like the mindless party girl, but she dropped it a couple of times, where I could see. I just put it down to, well. Weirdness.”

  He shook his head. “She’s been getting information to me. Nothing huge, so far.”

  “Does Lara know about her?”

  Thomas shook his head. “She hasn’t tipped to it yet. Justine is, as far as Lara is concerned, still one more helpless little doe.” He glanced up. “I talked it over with her. She wants to stay. She’s Lara’s assistant, most of the time.”

  I exhaled slowly. Holy crap. If Justine stayed in place, and was willing to report on what she knew…intelligence gathered at that level could turn the entire course of the war—because even if the White Court’s peace proposal went through, it just meant a shift in focus and strategy. The vamps weren’t about to let up.

  “Dangerous,” I said quietly.

  “She wants to do it,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I take it you’ve been in touch with Lara?”

  “Of course,” Thomas said. “Given my recent heroism”—his voice turned wry—“in defense of the White King, I am now in favor in the Court. The prodigal son has been welcomed home with open arms.”

  “Really?”

  “Well,” Thomas amended, “with reluctant, irritated arms, anyway. Lara’s miffed about the Deeps.”

  “Guess the bombs weren’t good for them.”

  Thomas’s teeth showed. “The whole place just collapsed in on itself. There’s a huge hole in the ground, the plumbing at the manor got torn up, and the foundation cracked. It’s going to cost a fortune to fix it.”

  “Poor Lara,” I said. “No more convenient corpse-disposal facilities.”

  He laughed. “It’s nice to see her exasperated. She’s usually so self-assured.”

  “I have a gift.”

  He nodded. “You do.” We sat quietly for a few minutes.

  “Thomas,” I said, finally, gesturing at the room. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  He shrugged and looked down. “At first? Because it was humiliating. I mean…working nights to put myself through cosmetology school? Starting my own place and posing as…” He waved a hand down at himself. “I thought…I don’t know. At first I thought you’d disapprove or…laugh at me or something.”

  I kept a straight face. “No. Never.”

  “And after that…well. I’d been keeping secrets. I didn’t want you to think I didn’t trust you.”

  I snorted. “In other words you didn’t trust me. To understand.”

  His cheeks turned very slightly pink and he looked down. “Um. I guess so, yeah. Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  He closed his eyes and nodded and said, “Thanks, Harry.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder for a second, then dropped it again. Nothing else needed to be said.

  Thomas gave me a suspicious look. “Now you’re going to laugh at me.”

  “I can wait until you’ve turned your back, if you like.”

  He grinned at me again. “It’s all right. I sort of stopped caring about it after I got fed steady for a few weeks straight. Feels too nice not to be starving again. Laugh all you want.”

  I looked around the place for a minute more. The coffee girls were having a private conversation, evidently discussing us, if all the covert glances and quiet little smiles were any indication.

  I couldn’t help it. I burst out laughing, and it felt good.

  AAAA Wizardry

  Harry

  The first thing I thought, looking at the roomful of baby Wardens, was, They all look so darned young. The close second was, My God, am I getting old?

  “Okay, children,” I said, closing the door behind me. I had rented an alleged conference center in a little Chicago hotel not too far from the airport, which amounted to a couple of rooms big enough for twenty or thirty people—if they were friendly—plus a few dozen chairs and several rickety old folding tables.

  They didn’t even provide a cooler of water—just directions to their vending machines.

  After my fellow Warden-Commander in the United States, Warden Ramirez, and I had gotten done learning the little Warden-kind up on their mayhem, for the sake of getting them killed in a war as quickly as possible, we thought it might be nice to give them a little instruction in other things, too. Ramirez was going to cover the course on relations with mortal authorities, which made sense; Ramirez got on just fine with the cops in LA, and hadn’t been shot by nearly as many law-enforcement personnel as I had.

  The kids had all come to Chicago to learn about independent investigation of supernatural threats from me, which also made sense, because I’d done more of that, relative to my tender years, than any other wizard on the planet.

  “Okay, okay,” I said to the room. The young Wardens became silent and attentive at once. No shock there—the disruptive ones who didn’t pay attention during lessons had mostly been killed and maimed in the war with the Red Court. Darwin always thought that it paid to be a quick learner. The war had simply made the penalty for not learning quite a bit steeper.

  “You’re here,” I said, “to learn about investigating supernatural threats on your own. You’ll learn about finding and hunting warlocks from Captain Luccio, whenever the Reds give us enough time for it. Warlocks, our own kind gone bad, aren’t the most common opponent you’ll find yourself facing. Far more often, you’re going to run up against other threats.”

  Ilyana, a young woman with extremely pale skin and ice-blue, nearly white eyes, raised her hand and spoke in a clipped Russian accent when I nodded to her. “What kinds of threats?” she asked. “In the pract
ical sense. What foes have you faced?”

  I held up my hands and flipped up a finger for each foe. “Demons, werewolves, ghosts, faeries, fallen angels, Black Court vampires, Red Court vampires, White Court vampires, cultists, necromancers”—I paused to waggle one foot, standing with three limbs in the air—“zombies, specters, phobophages, half-blood scions, jann …” I waved my hands and foot around a bit more. “I’d need to borrow a few people to do the whole list. Get the picture?” A few smiles had erupted at my antics, but they sobered up after a moment’s consideration.

  I nodded and stuck my hands into my pockets. “Knowledge is quite literally power and will save your life. When you know what you’re facing, you can deal with it. Walk into a confrontation blind, and you’re begging to get your families added to the Wardens’ death-benefits list.” I let that sink in for a few seconds before continuing. “You can’t ever be sure what you’re going to come up against. But you can be sure about how to approach the investigation.”

  I turned to the old blackboard on the wall behind me and scribbled on it with the stub of a piece of chalk. “I call it the Four As,” I said, and wrote four As down the left side of the board. “Granted, it doesn’t translate as neatly to other languages, but you can make up your own native-tongue mnemonic devices later.” I used the first A to spell ascertain.

  “Ascertain,” I said, firmly. “Before you can deal with the threat, you’ve got to know that it exists, and you’ve got to know who the threat’s intended target is. A lot of times, that target is going to cry out for help. Whatever city you’re based in, it’s going to be your responsibility to work out how best to hear that scream. But sometimes there’s no outcry. So keep your eyes and ears open, kids. Ascertain the threat. Become aware of the problem.”

  MY CAR DIDN’T make it all the way to Kansas City. It broke down about thirty miles short of town, and I had to call a wrecker. I had planned on being there before dark, but between walking eleven miles to find an increasingly rare pay phone, dumping most of my cash into a tow-truck driver’s pocket, and the collapse of an office computer network that delayed picking up a rental car for an extra hour and a half, I wound up pulling to the curb of a residential address a couple of minutes before nine in the evening.

  I’d gotten the address from a contact on the Paranet—the organization made up mostly of men and women who didn’t have enough magical power to be accepted into the ranks of the White Council or to protect themselves from major predators, but who had more than enough mojo to make them juicy targets. For the past year, I and others like me had been working hard to teach them how to defend themselves—and one of the first things they were to do was notify someone upstream in the Paranet’s organization that they were in trouble.

  One such call had been bucked up to me, and here I was, answering. Before I had closed the door of the car, a spare, tense-looking man in his forties came out of the house and walked quickly toward me.

  “Harry Dresden?” he called.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You’re late.”

  “Car trouble,” I said. “Are you Yardly?” He stopped across the hood of the car from me, frowning severely. He was average height, and wore most of a business suit, including the tie. His black hair was cut into a short brush. He looked like the kind of guy who solved his problems through ferocious focus and mulish determination, and who tolerated no nonsense along the way.

  “I’m Yardly,” he said. “Can you show me some ID?”

  I almost smiled. “You want to see my American Association of Wizards card?”

  Yardly didn’t smile. “Your driver’s license will do.”

  “If I were a shapeshifter,” I said, passing him the license, “this wouldn’t help.”

  Yardly produced a little UV flashlight and shone it onto the license. “I’m more concerned about a simple con man.” He passed me the license back. “I’m not really into my sister’s group. Whatever they are. But she’s had it rough lately and I’m not going to see her hurt anymore. Do you understand?”

  “Most big brothers stop making threats about their little sisters after high school.”

  “I must be remedial,” Yardly said. “If you abuse Megan in any way, you’ll answer to me.”

  I felt my mouth lift up on one side. “You’re a cop.”

  “Detective Lieutenant,” he said. “I asked Chicago PD for their file on you. They think you’re a fraud.”

  “And you don’t?”

  He grunted. “Megan doesn’t. I learned a long time ago that a smart man doesn’t discount her opinion out of hand.”

  He stared at me with hard and opaque eyes, and I realized, in a flash of insight, that the man was tense because he was operating on unfamiliar ground. You couldn’t read it in his face, but it was there if you knew what to look for. A certain set of the shoulders, a twitch along the jawline, as if some part of him was ready to whirl around and sink his teeth into a threat that he could feel creeping up behind him.

  Yardly was afraid. Not for himself, maybe, but the man was terrified.

  “Megan says shrinks can’t help with this one,” he said quietly. “She says maybe you can.”

  “Let’s find out,” I said.

  “SECOND A,” I said to the Wardenlets, writing on the chalkboard as I did. “Analysis.”

  “How do you get an ogre to lie down on the couch, Harry?” called a young man with the rounded vowels of a Northern accent in his speech. The room quivered with the laughter of young people.

  “That’s enough out of you, there, McKenzie, you hoser,” I shot back, in a parody of the same accent. “Give me a break here, eh?”

  I got a bigger laugh than the heckler. Which is how you make sure the heckler doesn’t steal the show from you. “Pipe down,” I said, and waited for them to settle. “Thank you. Your second step is always analysis. Even when you know what you’re dealing with, you’ve got to know why it’s happening. If you’ve got an angry ghost, it’s generally angry for a reason. If a new pack of ghouls has moved in down the block, they’ve generally picked their spot for a reason.”

  Ilyana raised her hand again and I pointed at her. “What does it matter?” she asked. “Ghost or ghoul is causing problem, still we are dealing with them, yes?” She pointed her finger like a gun and dropped her thumb like the weapon’s hammer on the word dealing.

  “If you’re stupid, yeah,” I said.

  She didn’t look pleased at my response.

  “I used to have a similar attitude,” I said. I held up my left hand. It was a mass of old scars, and not the pretty kind. It had been burned, and badly, several years before. Wizards heal up better than regular folks, over the long term. I could move it again, and I had feeling back in parts of all the fingers. But it still wasn’t a pretty picture. “An hour or two of work would have told me enough about the situation I was walking into to let me avoid this,” I told them. It was the truth. Pretty much. “Learn everything you possibly can.”

  Ilyana frowned at me.

  McKenzie raised his hand, frowning soberly, and I nodded at him.

  “Learn more. Okay. How?”

  I spread my hands. “Never let yourself think you know all the ways to learn,” I said. “Expand your own knowledge base. Read. Talk to other wizards. Hell, you might even go to school.”

  That got me another laugh. I went on before it gathered much momentum.

  “Warden Canuck there was onto something earlier, too. People are people. Learn about what makes them tick. Monsters are the same way. Find ways to emulate their thinking”—I wasn’t even going to try a phrase like Get into their heads, thank you—“and you’ll have insight into their actions and their probable intentions.

  “Information-gathering spells can be darned handy,” I continued, “but if you’ll forgive the expression, they aren’t magic. The information you get from them can be easily misread, and it will almost never let you see past one of your own blind spots. You can seek answers from other planes, but if
you go bargaining with supernatural beings for knowledge, things can get dangerous fast. Sometimes what you get from them is invaluable. Most of the time, it could be had another way. Approach that particular well with extreme caution.”

  To emphasize those last two words, I stared slowly around the room in pure challenge, daring anyone to disagree with me. The young people dropped their eyes from mine. Eye contact with a wizard is tricky—it can trigger a soulgaze, and that isn’t the kind of thing you want happening to you casually.

  “Honestly,” I said into the silence, letting my voice become gentler, more conversational, “the best thing you can do is communicate. Talk to the people involved. Your victims, if they can speak to you. Their family. Witnesses. Friends. Most of the time, everything you need is something they already know. Most of the time, that’s the fastest, safest, easiest way to get it.”

  McKenzie raised his hand again, and I nodded. “Most of the time?” he asked.

  “That’s the thing about people,” I said quietly, so they would pay attention. “Whether it’s to you or to everyone or just to themselves, people lie.”

  MEGAN YARDLY WAS a single mother of three. She was in her early thirties and looked it, had gorgeous red hair and bright green eyes. She and her children lived in a suburb that was more sub than urb, southeast of KC, named Peculiar. Peculiar, Missouri. You can’t make these things up. Megan opened the door, nodded to her brother, looked up at me, and said, “You’re him. You’re the wizard.” Her eyes narrowed. “Your … your car broke down. And you think the name of our town is a bad joke.” She nodded, like a musician who has picked up on a beat and a chord progression. “And you think this probably isn’t a supernatural problem.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “You’re one hell of a sensitive.”

  She nodded. “You were expecting someone who was good at cold reading.”

  “A lot of professional psychics are,” I said. I smiled. “So are you.”