by Jim Butcher
“Maybe you’ll get lucky and someone will kill you first.”
She shrugged. “Lea’s been doing what she could about that. If it happens, it happens. As long as there’s a reason for it, that kind of death wouldn’t bother me.”
I shivered, just from the emotionless tone of her voice. “Except for the dead part?”
“Everyone dies, Harry,” she said. “There’s no use whining about it.”
I waited for a couple of beats and then said, “Here’s where you talk about how what you do with your life is what’s truly important.”
Her head fell back and she let out a belly laugh. It sounded warm and natural. Her eyes were just too wide, though, her smile too strained.
“Yeah. Exactly.” She shook her head and looked at me intently. “Is that what it’s always like for you? Throwing fire that way?”
I blinked and tried to change mental gears. I didn’t do it as smoothly as she had. Someone uncharitable or unbiased might note that it could be because Molly had stripped said gears. “Um. Oh, back at the fight with the Fomor guys?”
“They weren’t the Fomor,” Molly corrected me. “They were humans the Fomor have altered. They’re called—”
“Turtlenecks,” I said.
She arched an eyebrow. “You and Murphy both. No, they’re known as servitors. The Fomor muck around with them. Install things. Gills, extra muscles, organs for sonar, night-vision eyes . . .”
I whistled. “All kinds of fun.”
She nodded. “The odd bits kind of turn to jelly when they die. Police are calling them transients.”
I nodded, and tried to keep the conversation casual. “A lot of them dying around here?”
“It’s Chicago,” she said. “There’s always someone dying around here. And you should see what these . . . these animals do, Harry. They take people right out of their beds. Grab children waiting for the school bus. They’ve tortured people to death for fun.”
As she spoke, the calm in her voice had begun to fracture. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a break of her voice, an inhalation between sentences that was a little too harsh.
“You can’t stand around doing nothing,” I said, nodding.
“No,” she said. “They’ll come and scream at you in your sleep if you try. So . . .”
“So?”
Molly was silent. I didn’t push. Five minutes went by before she closed her eyes and whispered, “It’s easy. It shouldn’t be so easy.”
Technically, I didn’t have a heart anymore. It couldn’t twist. It couldn’t break.
It did anyway.
“The first one was paying off a cop. Gold coins. He stood there with a little girl in a gym bag and paid the cop to look the other way.” She swallowed. “God, if I could be like you. Have so much power to pour out. Like water from a hydrant. But I’ve just got a squirt gun. Not even a Super Soaker. Just one of the little ones.” She opened her eyes and met mine. “But it was enough. They didn’t even know I was there.”
“Molly,” I said gently, “what did you do?”
“An illusion. A simple one. I made the bag of gold look like a gun. The cop drew his weapon and shot him. But the servitor lived long enough to break the cop’s neck.” She held up a pair of fingers. “Twofer. For one little illusion.”
I swallowed. I couldn’t speak.
Her voice slowly gained volume. “There have been others like that. I mean, God, they make it simple. You just need an opportunity and the right little nudge at the right time. Green traffic light instead of a red one. Put a knife in someone’s hand. Or a wedding ring on one finger. Add a spot of blood to someone’s collar. They’re animals. They tear into one another like animals.”
“Molly,” I said gently.
“I started leaving the bits of rag on them,” she said. “It hurt at first. Being near that kind of . . . experience. It still hurts. But I have to do it. You don’t know, Harry. What you did for this town.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know how many things just didn’t come here before, because they were afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
She looked at me as if her heart was breaking. “Of you, Harry. You could find anything in this town, but you never even noticed the shadow you cast.” Her eyes overflowed and she slashed at them angrily with one hand. “Every time you defied someone, every time you came out on top against things you couldn’t possibly have beaten, your name grew. And they feared that name. There were other cities to prey on—cities that didn’t have the mad wizard Dresden defending them. They feared you.”
I finally understood. “The Rag Lady.”
“Sometimes me,” Molly said. “Sometimes it’s Lea. She’s like a kid on recess when she takes a shift. I’m building a new name. Creating something else for them to fear. I can’t do what you did, Harry.” Her eyes, red and blue, flashed with something dangerous, deadly, and she slammed the heel of her hand onto the table as she leaned toward me. “But I can do that. I can kill them. I can make the fuckers afraid.”
She stared at me, her breathing heavy. It took her several seconds to look slowly around the room.
Every eye in the place was locked on Molly. A waitress stood with wide eyes and a telephone against her ear.
Molly looked around at them for a moment and then said, “God, you people have it good. You don’t know. You wouldn’t know if one of them walked up to you and tore the thoughts out of your skull.”
She rose, grabbed the tuning fork, and left a pile of wadded bills on the table. She pointed at the waitress and said, “Put the phone down. Or you won’t get a tip.”
The telephone dropped from the woman’s fingers and clattered on the floor.
“See?” she said, glancing back in my general direction. “It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good for.”
I sat there, stunned and heartbroken, unable to think of anything to say or do to help Molly.
I watched my mad apprentice stalk out of the silent restaurant and into the frozen night.
Chapter
Twenty-four
I walked the shadowy streets, thinking. Or, at least, trying to think.
When I’d been alive, walking was something I did when I needed to chew something over. Engage the body in effort and activity and the purely physical manifestations of a mental problem stop being distractions. I didn’t have a body anymore, but I didn’t know how else to cope with so many overwhelming troubles.
So I walked, silent and invisible, my head down, and I thought furiously as I went.
A single fact glared out at me, blazing in front of my mind’s eye in stark reality illuminated by all the lives that were on fire around me:
In the end, when it had mattered most, I’d blown it.
I grew up an orphan with nothing but a few vague memories of my father before he’d died. My childhood hadn’t been the kind of thing I’d wish on anyone. I had run into some bad people. Justin was the worst—a true monster.
When I was sixteen or seventeen, still agonized by his betrayal, and certain that I would never know anything like a home, friends, or family, I made myself a promise: I would never allow a child of mine to grow up as I had—driven from home to home, an easy victim with no protector, never stable, never certain.
Never.
When Susan had asked me to help her recover Maggie, I went all-in without a second thought. The child was my daughter. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t known about her or that I had never seen her with my own eyes. There was a child of my blood who needed my help and protection. I was her father. I would die to protect her if need be.
End of story.
I may have had good reasons. I may have had the best of intentions.
But intentions aren’t enough, no matter how good they are. Intentions can lead you to a place where you’re able to make a choice.
It’s the choice that counts.
To get my daughter back, I’d crossed a line. Not just crossed it; I’d sprinted at it
and taken a flying freaking leap over it. I made a pact with the Queen of Air and Darkness, giving away my free will, my very self, to Mab in exchange for power enough to challenge the Red King and his monstrous Court. That was stupid.
I’d had excuses at the time. My back had been against the wall. Actually, it had been broken and against a wall. All the help I’d been able to call upon, all the allies and tricks and techniques in my arsenal, had not been enough. My home had been destroyed. So had my car. I couldn’t even get up and walk, much less fight. And the forces arrayed against me had been great—so great that even the White Council of Wizards was terrified of confronting them.
In that bleak hour, I had chosen to sell my soul. And after that, I had led my closest friends and allies out on what I knew was practically a suicide mission. I’d known that such a battle would put a savage strain on Molly’s psychic senses, and that even if she did manage to survive, she might never be the same. I’d risked the two irreplaceable Swords of the Cross in my keeping, sending them into the battle even though I knew that if we fell, some of the world’s mightiest weapons for good would be captured and lost.
And when I saw that the sacrificial blood rite the Red King had intended to destroy me could be turned back on the Red Court, I had used it without hesitation.
I murdered Susan Rodriguez on a stone altar in Chichén Itzá and wiped out the Red Court. I saved my little girl.
I created a perfect situation for chaos to engulf the supernatural world. The sudden absence of the Red Court might have removed thousands of monsters from the world, but it meant only that tens of thousands of other monsters were suddenly free to rise, to expand into the vacuum I’d created. I shuddered as I wondered how many other men’s little girls had been hurt and killed as a result.
And, God help me . . . I would do it again. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t noble. It wasn’t good. I’d spent less than three hours in the company of my daughter—and so help me, if it meant keeping her safe, I would do it again.
Maybe the White Council needed an Eighth Law of Magic: the law of unintended consequences.
How do you measure one life against another? Can thousands of deaths be balanced by a single life? Even if Mab had not had time to fully take possession of me, how could I be sure that the very act of choosing to cross that line had not changed me into something monstrous?
I found myself stopped, standing on the Michigan Avenue bridge over the Chicago River. The mounded snow filled the night with light. Only the waters below me were dark, a black and whispering shadow, the Lethe and the Styx in one.
I looked up at the towers nearby. NBC. Trump’s place. The Sheraton. They stood tall and straight and clean in the night. Lights winked golden in windows.
I turned and stared south of me at the Loop, at the skyline I knew so well. There was a rare moment of stillness down Michigan Avenue. Streetlights. Traffic lights. A scattering of fresh snowflakes, enough to keep everything pretty and white instead of slushy and brown.
God, my town is beautiful.
Chicago. It’s insane and violent and corrupt and vital and artistic and noble and cruel and wonderful. It’s full of greed and hope and hate and desire and excitement and pain and happiness. The air sings with screams and laughter, with sirens, with angry shouts, with gunshots, with music. It’s an impossible city, at war with itself, every horrible and wonderful thing blending together to create something terrifying and lovely and utterly unique.
I had spent my adult life here fighting, bleeding, to protect its people from threats they thought were purely imaginary.
And because of what I’d done, the lines I crossed, the city had gone mad. Fomor and their turtlenecks. Freakish ghost riots. Huddled groups of terrified folks of the supernatural community.
I hadn’t meant for that to happen, but that didn’t matter. I was the guy who made the choice.
This was all on me.
I stared down at the quiet blackness of the river. I could go down there, I realized. Running water would disrupt supernatural energy, disperse it, destroy the pattern in which it flowed.
And I was made out of energy now.
The black, whispering river could make everything go away.
Styx. Lethe. Oblivion.
My apprentice was bitter, damaged. My friends were fighting a war, and it was tearing at their souls. The one guy who I was sure could help me out had been snatched, and there wasn’t a whole lot I could do about it. Hell’s bells, I was doing well just to find someone who could hear me talk.
What could I do?
What do you do to make up for failing everyone in your life? How do you make it right? How do you apologize for hideous things you never intended to happen?
I don’t remember when I fell to my knees. Memories, stirred by my rumination, flooded over me, almost as sharp and real as life. Those memories stirred others and brought them along, like pebbles triggering a landslide. My life in Chicago rolled over me, crushed me, all the black pain and bright joy doubling me over, ripping tears out of my eyes.
Later, it was quiet.
It was difficult. A tremendous, slow inertia resisted my desire. But I pushed myself to my feet again.
I turned away from the river.
This city was more than concrete and steel. It was more than hotels and businesses and bars. It was more than pubs and libraries and concerts. It was more than a car and a basement apartment.
It was home.
My home.
Sweet home Chicago.
The people here were my family. They were in danger, and I was part of the reason why. That made things pretty clear.
It didn’t matter that I was dead. It didn’t matter that I was literally a shadow of my former self. It didn’t matter that my murderer was still running around somewhere out there, vague prophecies of Captain Murphy notwithstanding.
My job hadn’t changed: When demons and horrors and creatures of the night prey on this city, I’m the guy who does something about it.
“Time to start doing,” I whispered.
I closed my hands into fists, straightened my back, and vanished.
Chapter
Twenty-five
I was ten minutes late to the meeting with Fitz, but he was still there, lurking at a nearby storefront, looking about as innocent as an only child near a fresh Kool-Aid stain. He had a huge, empty sports-equipment bag hanging over one shoulder. For the love of God. The kid might as well have been wearing a stocking cap and a black mask, with a giant dollar sign printed on the outside of his bag to boot.
I appeared next to him and said, “You look so relaxed and calm. I’ll bet any cop that rolls by will ask you for tips on self-control.”
Fitz twitched, clearly controlling an instant instinct to flee. Then he spat on the frozen ground and said, “You’re late, Harvey.”
“Forgot to wind my watch,” I said.
“And I was starting to think my brain had thrown a rod after all.” Fitz looked up and down the street and shook his head. “But nothing’s ever that easy.”
“Life can be a bitch that way,” I said.
“So, you’re real.”
“I’m real.”
Fitz nodded. “You said you would help. Were you serious about that?”
“Yes,” I said.
A gust of wind pulled his longish, curly red hair out to one side. It matched his lopsided smirk. “Fine. Help.”
“Okay,” I said. “Turn left and start walking.”
Fitz put a fist on his hip and said, “You were going to help me with the guns.”
“Never said that,” I said. “You need help, kid, not tools. Guns aren’t gonna cut it.” I waited for him to begin to speak before I interrupted him. “Besides. If you don’t play along, I’ve arranged for word to get to Murphy about where you and your band of artful dodgers are crashing.”
“Oh,” he snarled. “You . . . you son of a bitch.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“You can go fuck you
rself.”
“You need help. I’ve got it to give. But there ain’t no free lunch, kid,” I said in a calm and heartless tone. “You know that.”
“You can kiss my ass is what you can do,” he said, and turned away.
“Go ahead and walk,” I said. “But you’re throwing away your only chance to get your crew out from under Baldy.”
He stopped in the middle of taking a step.
“If you bug out now, where are you going to go—back to Baldy? He’ll kill you for failing to get the guns. And after that, Murphy’s crew and the Rag Lady will take out the whole building. Baldy will probably skate out on your buddies, and do the same thing to some other batch of kids.”
Fitz turned his head in my general direction, his eyes murderous. But he was listening.
“Look, kid. Doesn’t have to be the end of the world. If you work with me, everything’s peachy.”
I was lying, of course. The last thing I wanted was to hand Murphy a convenient target in her present frame of mind. And I really did want to help the kid—but I’ve been where he was mentally. He wouldn’t have believed in a rescuer on a white horse. In his world, no one just gave anyone anything, except maybe pain. The best you could hope for was an exchange, something for something, and generally you got screwed even then. I needed his cooperation. Handing him a familiar problem was the best way to get it.
“I’m not a monster, Fitz. And honestly, I don’t care about you and your goons or what happens to you. But I think you can help me—and I’m willing to help you in return if you do.”
The young man grimaced and bowed his head. “It’s not as though I have a lot of choice, is it?”
“We’ve all got choices,” I said calmly. “At the moment, yours are limited. You gonna play ball?”
“Fine,” Fitz spat. “Fine. Whatever.”
“Groovy,” I said. “Hang a left and get going. We’ve got some ground to cover.”
He shoved his hands into his pockets, his eyes sullen, and started walking. “I don’t even know who the hell you are.”
“My name is Harry Dresden,” I said.