by Jim Butcher
Act like it. Commit. I could do those things.
Faith was harder. I’d never asked God to help me handle things before.
But I had faith in my friends.
One friend in particular.
“Got it,” I said quietly. “I guess I better go, Harry. Got work to do.”
“Good hunting, Knight.”
“Thank you, wizard.”
WHEN I OPENED the door, things had changed.
I’d taken a white sheet from Stan’s bed, draped it over my shoulders, and tied two corners around my neck. On the part of the sheet that draped over my chest, I’d taken a first-aid sticker from a drawer of supplies beside the bed and stuck the red-cross symbol over my heart.
It wasn’t like Sanya’s or Michael’s cloaks. But it would do.
More important, I’d put my headphones in my ears, plugged the jack into my phone, and blared “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “NOW That’s What I Call Polka!” at full volume on loop.
I could barely see. And I couldn’t hear anything but my goofy, beautiful polka, one of the songs I knew perfectly at that, which was kind of the point.
In the hallway, I could feel the emptiness stretching out around me and the low fear in the air. The baka baku had run everyone off the floor—I could dimly see hollow yellow squares retreating, tracking the workmen and nurses and doctors all leaving the floor by the stairs and elevators, leaving it to just the two of us and the trapped, dreaming victims.
The fluorescent lights were all flickering and flashing as if they needed changing.
I didn’t see the hostile red targeting carat.
But I didn’t need it.
I went to the center of the hall, lifted the Sword to a high guard, and felt it ignite and change the way shadows fell on the hall. As Yankovic translated popular music into polka in my ears, I shouted, “Baka baku! Betrayer of children! You have lost your path! Come and face me!”
And I closed my eyes and waited.
See, magic isn’t really magic. I’ve spent a lot of time studying the theory, and I know that for a fact. I mean, it is magic, obviously, but it doesn’t just happen in a giant vacuum, inexplicably creating miracles. Lots and lots of magic actually follows many of the physical laws of the universe. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, for example.
If the baka baku was sending magical fear into people’s brains, that fear had to be transmitted by something. It can’t just appear magically—poof—in someone else’s head. It’s a kind of broadcast—a signal. And that means that, like other magical broadcasts, such as those used on the communicators I’d designed and built in the past, waves on the EM spectrum were the most likely culprits for those transmissions.
Using those things had a side effect of causing distortions in nearby cell phones. It was even more noticeable in headphones.
So I listened to one of my recent favorites and waited. My inner ten-year-old was screaming at me to run.
I told him to shut his mouth and let me work.
And, sure enough, about the time Al was singing about looking incredible in your granddad’s clothes, I heard the sound distort suddenly in my left ear.
Moving quickly is not about effort. It isn’t about making every muscle explode in an instant in an effort to be fast. It’s about being relaxed, smooth, and certain. The instant I heard the distortion, my body just reacted, turning and sweeping the sword down, all in a single liquid motion.
I felt the Sword hit, and the blade’s hum shifted to a triumphant note. I opened my eyes to see a shape about the size and same general coloring as Miyamune reeling back.
There was a much smaller, flesh-colored shape lying on the floor not far from my feet.
I tugged out the earphones and heard Miyamune let out a moan of pain, and the last of my fear fell away from me.
The baka baku bounced off the wall and fell, and I advanced on it, slow and steady.
The creature’s huge, weird shadow spread onto the wall behind it, even as its human face stared up at me.
“Who are you?” the creature asked.
The words that came out of my mouth only sort of felt like my own. “Ehyeh ašer ehyeh,” I said quietly.
The walls of the empty hallway quivered slightly as the words washed over them, even though I never once raised my voice.
The creature just gaped at me.
“Even now,” I heard myself say, “it isn’t too late for you to turn aside. To be forgiven.”
I couldn’t really see its expression—but I saw the gathering tension in its blurry form, felt the anger in the way it suddenly exhaled and came at me.
And the Sword of Faith swept down one last time and ended it.
WHEN MICHAEL PICKED me up from the hospital in his old white pickup late that night, I was exhausted.
He handed me my spare pair of glasses first thing and I put them on gratefully.
“Have to do something about that,” I said. “Maybe sports goggles.”
“Seems like a good idea,” he said. “How’s Stan?”
“He’ll be fine,” I said. “So will the kids.”
“What was hurting them?”
“Something that should have been protecting them,” I said quietly. I squinted out the window as he pulled away. “Just dissolved into nothing when I took it down.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked me, his deep voice gentle.
“I’m not sure I succeeded at this quest,” I said. “I kept trying to reach out to the creature. To give it a chance to turn away.”
“Sometimes they do,” Michael said. “Mostly, they don’t.”
“It’s just …” I said. “Killing is such a waste. What I did was necessary. But I’m not sure it was good.”
“Killing rarely is,” he said, “at least in my experience. Could you have done any differently?”
“Maybe?” I said. “I don’t know. With what I knew at the time … I don’t know.”
“Would they all be alive if you had done differently? The children? Stan?”
I thought about it for a moment, and then shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“Then be content, Sir Knight,” he said.
“Didn’t even have to get my hand cut off to get there,” I said, and leaned my head against the truck’s window.
I never knew it when I fell asleep, relaxed and unafraid.
Zoo Day
Harry/Maggie/Mouse
My name is Harry Dresden. I am possibly one of the more dangerous wizards alive, and I have never once spent a whole day as a dad.
My memories of my father are few and faded. He was a good man, and he was kind, but he died before I got into first grade. Sometimes I wonder whether the memories I have of him are mine or they’re just the stories I’ve been retelling myself my whole life.
The point is, I don’t really have much in the way of a personal role model to base my dad technique on. The man who mostly shaped me was a sadistic monster, and by the time my grandfather came along, Ebenezar wasn’t parenting so much as enacting psychological damage control.
And besides, I’m pretty sure you don’t dad a furious, sullen, magically powered teenage boy the same way you do a ten-year-old girl. Not only that, but I was pretty sure I’d never really spoken to a ten-year-old girl for any length of time. Nor had I ever been one.
I was completely in the woods here, and sure of only one thing:
I really, really wanted to get this right.
Maggie walked next to me, taking maybe three steps to every one of mine. She was a tiny child, in the lowest percentile for height and weight in every class she’d ever been in, with pale skin, dark hair, and absolutely enormous dark eyes. She was wearing purple pants and a beige T-shirt that bore an image echoing the original Star Wars poster, but done in the style of Edo-period samurai art, and her shoes flickered with little red lights when she walked.
Next to her paced a granite grey mountain of muscle and soft fur named Mouse. Mouse was a genuine Temple Guardian, a Foo dog. He weighed
about two hundred and fifty pounds, and the length of his fur was something like a mane around his neck and shoulders. He wore a red nylon vest that declared him a service dog, and walked as carefully as if he were avoiding baby chicks with every step. Maggie kept one of her little hands buried in his mane and her eyes on the ground.
“So, you haven’t been to the zoo before?” I asked.
Maggie shook her head and watched an elderly couple pass us on the sidewalk. She waited until they were several yards away before saying quietly, “Miss Molly tried to take me once, but there were too many people and too much sky, and I cried.”
I nodded. My daughter had seen some bad things. They’d left their marks on her. “That’s okay, you know.”
“Miss Molly said that, too,” Maggie said. “I was little then.”
The spring afternoon sun peeked out from some clouds for a moment, and my shadow engulfed her and enough space for five or ten more of her. “That was probably it,” I said. “But if you need to, we can leave whenever you like.”
She looked up at me for a minute, her face thoughtful. She was the most beautiful child I’d ever seen, but everyone thinks that about their kid.
Maybe everyone is right.
“I want to see the gorillas,” she said finally. “So does Mouse.”
Mouse wagged his tail in agreement, and looked up at me with a doggy grin.
“Okay, then,” I said, as we approached the entrance to the zoo. “Let’s do that.”
Maggie looked at me for a moment more and frowned before saying, “Are you nervous?”
“Why would I be nervous?” I asked.
She looked down and shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m nervous. I haven’t ever gone to the zoo with my dad before. What if I do it wrong?”
I felt a little jab in my chest and cleared my throat. Smart kid. “I’m pretty sure this isn’t something you get right or wrong.”
“What if … I don’t know. What if I set something on fire?”
“Maybe we’ll roast some marshmallows,” I said.
She didn’t laugh, and she kept her face down, but her cheeks rounded up with a smile. “You’re weird.”
“A little,” I said. “Is that okay?”
“I don’t know yet. I think.” She stepped a little closer to Mouse. She could have ridden on his back and he wouldn’t much notice her weight. “Did you really save the gorillas from a monster?”
“Yeah, pretty much,” I said. It had been three hags, and I’d saved one gorilla from taking the fall for a murder one of them had perpetrated. A couple of people died. But that was a lot of dark and complicated conversation for my first dad-daughter outing.
Maggie nodded seriously. “So, you like animals. Like me.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Even dinosaurs?”
“Especially dinosaurs. And dino-dogs.”
“Whuff,” said Mouse, pleased.
I leaned across Maggie to ruffle his furry ears.
A group of noisy children in private-school uniforms came trooping by, and Maggie flinched and withdrew into herself until they’d passed. After that, she stared grimly at the busy entrance to the zoo, looking for all the world like someone a great deal older who badly needed a cup of coffee. Then she sighed, squared her shoulders, and said, “Okay. Let’s see some animals.”
So we did.
THERE WAS A spectacularly good showing from the animals in their various enclosures. The otters played with bombastic fervor. The tigers prowled back and forth at the very front of their pen. One of the polar bears stood up on his hind legs, and a sun bear enthusiastically tore apart a log just as we came walking up. I mean, if I hadn’t known better, I would think they were putting on a show.
Maggie was enchanted, her little face stretching into one quiet smile after another, though she rarely stepped far enough away from the dog beside her to cease being in physical contact with him.
The lion actually roared, a sound that shook the air and sent a dozen people scurrying a few steps back. But not Maggie. Though she flinched whenever anyone walked too close to her, she regarded the lion with an intent gaze, as the beast finished his pronouncement and shook his mane with lazy majesty.
“Awesome,” she said after, and her smile was a sunbeam.
“Yeah,” I said, quietly. “Awesome.”
The actual lion’s roar had been a little too much. There was no way all the animals would be showing off like this without some kind of intervention, and I knew I hadn’t done it. I eyed Mouse with some suspicion.
The dog noticed and dropped his jaws open into a guileless canine grin, panting happily and wagging his tail. I arched an eyebrow at him and shook my head. The beastie was full of incompletely understood yet helpful magic, but he couldn’t play poker to save his life.
Get it? The dog. Playing poker. That’s an art joke.
I may not know humor, but I know what I like.
We had just turned to head toward the gorilla house when my day started getting complicated.
I felt it at first as a series of flickering sensations against my forehead. It reminded me of a moth fluttering against a lit wall—constant and random flutters, somehow conveying confusion, frustration, and fear. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and a quick check around showed me at least three different people who were suddenly perplexed that their electronic devices had started malfunctioning.
Magic was in the air—and it wasn’t coming from me.
“Um. Dad?” Maggie asked me.
I eyed her. She was looking at me in mild confusion. Then I saw her eyes widen as she had some kind of realization, and she moved to stand with Mouse on one side of her and me on the other. “Is there something bad?”
I felt my shoulders tighten into iron bands. Dammit. This day was supposed to go smoothly—just dad-and-daughter time, where Maggie knew that she was the most important thing in the world to me.
God knew I’d been away from her long enough.
The last thing I needed was for her to think I took my job more seriously than I took her. But at the same time, wizarding work wasn’t the kind of thing that came with regular hours. Or dental insurance. Also, there was the minor issue that the moral obligation to do the right thing didn’t suddenly go away due to inconvenience.
“Maybe,” I said. I looked at her. “Maybe nothing. I don’t know. I need to look around and see what’s going on. I need to put you in a safe spot before I do that.”
Maggie stared at a spot in the middle distance, chewing on her lower lip. “It’s important, isn’t it?”
“Maybe,” I said. I nodded toward the café that served the zoo. “How about we go get a booth and order some food? You and Mouse sit, and I’ll go look around and be back before the food gets there.”
Maggie’s arms tightened around the dog’s neck. She looked at him, then at me, and nodded her little chin firmly. “Yeah. I guess that’s okay.”
“How about it, Mouse?” I asked. “Can you behave yourself around food?”
My dog was staring out across the park, in what would have been considered a pensive expression had we all been cartoon characters. He made a noise in his chest that was part whine and part rumble.
“Trouble, boy?” I asked. It wasn’t cliché dialogue. Mouse was better than me at sensing trouble coming, and had proved it on multiple occasions.
He stayed staring for a minute, then exhaled slowly and looked up at me. His ears perked up and he wagged his tail. I took that to mean that all was well. “All right,” I said, and wagged my finger at him. “Be good.”
“Whuff,” Mouse said.
“He’s always good,” Maggie said, and kissed his ear. She had to lean down only a little to do it, and he lifted his head obligingly.
“Okay,” I said.
We got seats in the restaurant, and I ordered some French fries and left Maggie with a twenty to pay for more if she needed it. I made sure she was comfortable, got Mouse settled in at her feet, and strode briskly outsi
de, carefully opening my wizard’s senses.
Magic is a living, breathing force, but nothing makes it stir and swirl as much as human beings, and especially human emotion. Based on what a given person is feeling and how strong an emotion they are experiencing, magic can quiver and pulse like the cover to a rock-concert speaker, vibrating hard against the senses of anyone born with the ability to sense it. More people have that than you’d think: folks who get unexpectedly creeped out in the woods, who sense that something seems particularly ominous about a darkened parking garage, who sometimes feel something in the air that grates against them and makes them abruptly cross the street for no particular reason—they’re mostly gifted with sensitivity. If they trust their instincts, such senses can help them avoid no end of possible trouble.
For example, I could, with a little concentration, feel an intense and unpleasant sense of unease off to my right, along one of the park’s paths. Even as I watched, I saw half a dozen people either swerve off to one side, apparently distracted by something else, or else simply change their minds and not follow the path. Their instincts were serving them well.
My instincts frequently roll their eyes at the decisions my brain makes. I walked firmly, directly, into the unpleasant energy and started looking for trouble.
I found it within fifty yards, in the shadiest part of the path, where the park’s trees and bushes and the walls of the various buildings and enclosures hoarded a cluster of shadow that shouldn’t have been quite as dim as it was.
A young man in a black hoodie stood in the shade, hands thrust deep into his pockets. The air around him pulsed with anger and a fear that was near panic. The air around him thrummed with tension and energy, far more of it than a vanilla mortal should be able to emit. He was slender, and though I could only see a bit of his face in profile, the acne was visible enough.
Stars and stones.
A warlock.
Magic sort of bursts onto the scene with most youngsters, who find themselves in possession of talents and powers that must seem as if they simply emerged from a beloved series of children’s novels. Ideally, word of such gifts gets to the White Council, who dispatches someone to make sure the emerging talent receives training appropriate to prevent them from doing any harm with their powers.