Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  The ideal was too rare, and getting rarer. As the population increased, more and more gifted children were emerging, and it was just possible that the group of three-hundred-year-olds who commanded the White Council were … somewhat slow to adapt to changing conditions among mortal kind. When a child fell through the (widening) cracks, their talents could emerge in frightening, even violent ways, often to such a degree that they were forced to flee their homes and communities. Those kids were then forced to cope with life alone and their emerging talents all at once.

  A lot of them used their gifts in the worst ways. Unforgiveable ways. Kids like that were known as warlocks, and the Council dealt with them harshly and permanently.

  I stared at the kid for a while.

  I’d been that kid for a while.

  Then I did something I don’t do very often: I turned my back and walked away.

  “WHAT WAS IT?” Maggie asked me when I got back. She looked nervous, and wiggled a bit in her seat.

  I debated whether to play it down. She didn’t need to be any more anxious than she already was. But … Enough time in the saddle as a wizard had taught me that there are bad repercussions when I keep people in my life in the dark, even when I’m only trying to protect them.

  I looked down at her open, earnest face and her huge eyes.

  Yeah.

  I didn’t need to start off my relationship with my daughter by repeating some of my classic mistakes.

  “A warlock,” I said quietly. “A young wizard whose power is not in control. Dangerous.”

  Her eyes widened. “Did you fight it?”

  “Him,” I said. “No.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because most of the time, they never meant to do anything bad,” I said. “They don’t even understand what’s happening to them. No one has warned them what will happen if they break the rules.”

  “That’s not fair,” Maggie said.

  “No,” I said. “But that doesn’t make them any less dangerous.”

  “Can’t you help?”

  “Sometimes,” I said very quietly. “I’m not sure.”

  She picked up a French fry and dipped it in a large mound of mustard. Not ketchup.

  What?

  She licked the mustard off the fry thoughtfully and then said, “But I’m here.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “And you’re more important to me.”

  She darted a look up at my eyes and smiled a little. Then she said, “They just get powers?”

  I nodded. “Born to it, yeah.”

  She nodded again and asked, “Am I going to get powers?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “There’s no way to know for sure.”

  “Weird,” she said. She passed the French fry to Mouse, who snapped it up. She picked up another fry, dipped it in mustard, and began to repeat what was obviously a well-rehearsed cycle. “If I do, will you teach me stuff? So no one gets hurt?”

  “If you want me to,” I said.

  She chewed her lip, looking intently at her fingers. “If … something happens to you, who is going to teach me?”

  An invisible boxer socked me in the gut. “Nothing’s going to happen to me,” I said.

  “It could,” Maggie said quietly. For those two words, her voice sounded older. Way too old for the little body it came from. “And maybe there wouldn’t be anyone. Maybe I’d be a warlock.”

  I took a deep breath. She’d seen her foster family murdered. Horribly. And maybe she’d seen even worse. She knew what the world could be like sometimes. She’d probably seen worse than that kid in the black hoodie.

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “That could be me.” She nodded to herself several times and took a deep breath, as if getting ready to hold it. Then she looked up at me. “I can eat more French fries. Mouse will keep me company.”

  “You sure?” I asked her. “It could … cut today kind of short.”

  “If someone needs your help, you help them,” Maggie said simply. “Even when it’s really hard. Miss Molly told me that about you.”

  Her eyes were searching, studying. I’ll be damned if the kid wasn’t assessing me warily, watching for my reaction. So young yet so cynical.

  She must get it from her mother’s side.

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling my face stretch into a smile. “Yeah. That’s right.”

  I WENT BACK down the dark path, walking briskly. The thing about warlocks is that they really are damned dangerous. Without even knowing what they’re doing, they can turn their wills to the pursuit of black magic, and that has a degenerative, addictive effect on their psyches. Warlocks, caught in the grip of black magic, did the kinds of things that give coroners and psychologists nightmares. They don’t absolutely have to go completely off the rails, but most did. People in that frame of mind suddenly confronted by the White Council’s Wardens rarely chose to put up their hands and come quietly.

  I remembered when the Wardens had come for me. Scary guys. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I’d have been just one more warlock slain while resisting arrest.

  Maybe this kid was a dangerous monster. The sheer malice radiating from him was convincing enough.

  Or maybe he was just a terrified kid.

  I walked up to him quietly, my footsteps audible, cleared my throat, and said, “Hi.”

  Hoodie turned to me, gave me half a glance, and snarled, “Get out of here.”

  There was the force of magic in his voice, subtle power that tugged at my ear, made me want to lift my foot, pivot, and go the other way.

  It wasn’t a very coherent compulsion. I waved it off with a defensive gesture of the fingers of my left hand. “Whoa, kid,” I said. “Save it for the tourists. You and I need to talk.”

  That got his attention, pronto. His spine stiffened and he spun toward me on one heel, his shoulders tightening. He wasn’t tall, maybe five-six, and his shoulders were almost comically narrow, hunched up like that.

  I sidled up and leaned a hip on the railing a few feet out of arm’s reach in front of him, crossing my arms. “When did it happen? Year ago? Year and a half?”

  He had that wary poise of a wild animal, balanced and waiting to see which way would be the best to flee. His eyes were focused on the center of my chest. “Who are you?”

  “Someone who had the same thing happen,” I said. “One day, things changed, and everything got weird. I thought I was going insane. So did my teachers.”

  “You a cop?” the kid asked, his voice suddenly sharp.

  “Kind of,” I said.

  “I didn’t do nothin’,” he said.

  I barked out a quick laugh. “Wow, are you not good at this. People who are innocent don’t have to walk around saying it.”

  His face reddened and darkened at the same time. “You’d better be careful, asshole.”

  “Or what?” I asked.

  “Or something bad is going to happen to you.”

  “Nah,” I said. “Won’t turn out like that.”

  That ticked the kid off. His jaw clenched so hard that I thought he might crack some of his teeth. His fists clenched with audible popping sounds.

  At the same time, the air grew thicker and tighter and more threatening, and there was a sudden rippling sensation against my skin, as if someone had abruptly torn a long strip out of the fabric of my blue jeans. Then there was a sound in the greenery, and my skin began to crawl on the back of my neck. I came on balance in an instant.

  Remember those instincts I was talking about earlier? Mine were telling me that something dangerous had just come into the world.

  The kid staggered suddenly and dropped to his knees, panting. Then his head came up, his eyes wide and everywhere. “Oh no,” he breathed. “Oh no, no, no, no.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I muttered, understanding what had happened.

  The kid had a strong magical talent, and a gift for summoning. Magic is mostly in your head, and unfortunately for anyone who’s got to deal with us, human beings�
�� heads are murky, conflicted places. All kinds of things are going on in there, a lot of them under the surface, a lot of them not entirely in our own control.

  Hoodie’s subconscious had gathered up all that anger and fear he’d been feeling and sent it spiking out of him like a kind of spiritual beacon; a beacon that had attracted the attention of something from the spiritual world—something that had just crossed into the shadows of the walkway.

  The spirit world is the home of an unlimited variety of supernatural beings—but I was going to take a wild guess and assume that this one wasn’t a placid herbivore.

  “Right here? In the park?” I demanded of the warlock in an aggrieved tone. “Hell’s bells, kid.”

  Hoodie just stared at me with frightened, confused eyes. That spiritual dinner bell he’d just unconsciously rung had taken a lot out of him. “I didn’t mean to. I never mean to!” Then his eyes widened. “You have to get out of here. Run!”

  “First lesson,” I said. I took a couple of steps back from the kid and peered around the thick greenery, relying more on my wizard’s senses than on sight or hearing. “Running away from your problems rarely gets them solved.”

  “You don’t get it,” Hoodie babbled. “It’s coming. It’s coming for you.”

  “You don’t get it, kid,” I responded. “I—”

  I had a second’s warning, maybe a little more. It came through the greenery, staying in the heaviest shadow it could. It erupted from the dark and took Hoodie’s legs out from under him as it went by. I had the flickering impression of a wolverine’s squat, powerful legs; a head too wide to be anything from this world; a thrashing, scaled tail; and crocodilian teeth. It went through the kid and straight for me, bounding for my throat.

  I was already moving as it came. I swept my arm up in a vertical line, fingers locked and rigid like claws as I channeled my will into them and barked, “Aparturum!”

  My fingers peeled back reality as they swept up, tearing open the veil between the mortal world and the world of spirit. The berserk whatever-it-was from the Nevernever, the spirit world, let out an abrupt, abbreviated shriek of frustration as it hurtled directly into the opening, passing from the mortal world and back into the spirit realm again.

  “Instaurabos!” I shouted, whipping my hand back down along the rend, this time inverting my will and sealing closed the opening before the vicious little thing could turn and leap back out again. I could feel the normality rushing back in to seal over the rend in the veil, and could faintly sense several thumping protestations from the hungry spirit creature as it found itself sealed away from the mortal world again.

  After a few seconds, the shadows seemed less thick, and the sun emerged from behind the clouds, sending golden shafts streaming onto the path.

  Hoodie lay on the ground where he’d fallen, staring up at me in silence, his mouth open.

  I walked over to him and dropped down to squat on my heels, resting my hands on my knees. “As I was saying,” I said. “You don’t get it, kid. I’m the guy who is ready for it. I’m a wizard.” I offered him my hand.

  He took it, and we rose together. He pulled away from me quickly and scowled—but not precisely at me. “What do you want?”

  “To talk,” I said.

  “What if I don’t wanna talk to you?”

  “Guess you don’t have to.”

  That made him turn a shade warier. “I could just walk away?”

  “Sure,” I said. From this close, I could smell the kid. He needed a shower. His clothes didn’t look like they’d been changed in a while. His shoes were too small and worn-out. I gestured toward where the demon he’d accidentally summoned had been banished. “But how’s that been working out for you so far?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. His voice cracked when he said it. He looked away.

  “Well. I’m not going to make you get help. You hungry?” I asked. As a conversational gambit went, it was a pretty solid one. Kids were hungry about ninety-five percent of the time.

  “No,” he lied, his tone sullen.

  “There’s a restaurant not two minutes from here. My daughter is there, with my dog, eating French fries. But I could just murder a burger right now. How about you?”

  Hoodie didn’t say anything. People had begun to resume using the pathway, and the everyday world began to reassert itself more firmly.

  “Look, I kind of am a cop,” I said, “just not for the usual stuff. For special things. Like today.”

  He shifted his weight warily.

  “Tell you what,” I said. “Let’s eat. Maybe talk a little. You’ve got to be tired of dealing with this stuff on your own.”

  He bowed his head at that, so I couldn’t see him tear up.

  “I’m Harry,” I said, and held out my hand.

  He eyed my hand and then me, huffing out half of a laugh. “Wizard Harry. You’re kidding.”

  “Nope,” I said. I looked at him and lifted a speculative eyebrow.

  “Oh, uh. Austin,” Austin the warlock said. He might have been thirteen and a half.

  “Hi, Austin,” I said, as gently as I could. “It’s nice to meet you. Hey, have you ever seen the gorillas here?”

  HI. MY NAME is Maggie Dresden.

  My dad is okay, I guess, but I wish he were a little more up on his monsters. It’s not his fault, I’m pretty sure, on account of he’s a grown-up, and grown-ups can be awfully dumb about some things. Mainly the creeps.

  Grown-ups are about as thick as you can be when it comes to the creeps.

  Normally, you didn’t see of a lot of them out on a summer day, but today they were everywhere. An elderly couple who had been taken by baglers walked by. I don’t know if that’s their actual name. Me and Mouse kind of made up our own as we went. But there were shrouds over their heads, like a couple of dirty old paper bags that you could kind of see through if you looked hard enough. Baglers weren’t really all that dangerous as creeps went. I had a theory about them, that they just fed on the brain energy of people who talked about politics too much, and made them want to talk about politics more, because that’s just about all that came out of their mouths. You just watch: First chance they get, baglered people start talking politics.

  You’d think even grown-ups could be interesting with some kind of psychic monster eating their faces all the time, but you’d be wrong. So there you go.

  “So, you haven’t been to the zoo before?” my dad asked.

  My dad was a pretty scary-looking guy if you didn’t know him. He was bigger than anyone else I’d ever seen, with scars and dark hair and muscles. I mean, kind of long, stretchy muscles, but you could tell he was strong. Plus, he was a wizard. I mean, most people don’t believe in magic and monsters, which just shows you that most people are pretty dumb. For a grown-up, he didn’t seem too stupid. And he kind of liked me. You could tell sometimes when he talked or looked at me.

  I liked that a lot.

  I waited until the baglered couple were far enough away so that they wouldn’t overhear us, just on general principle, before I said, “Miss Molly tried to take me once, but there were too many people and too much sky, and I cried.”

  I waited to see what he would think about that. My dad fights bad people and monsters professionally. I didn’t want him to think I was a big chicken.

  I mean, we were just getting to know each other. But sometimes, things get really, really loud, or really hectic and fast moving, and I just can’t deal with anything. It helped to have Mouse with me. Mouse always understood when things were getting too big, and tried to make me feel better.

  My dad seemed to think about his words for a minute before he said, “That’s okay, you know.”

  “Miss Molly said that, too,” I said. With that same little pause before she said it. I really didn’t want him to think I was crazy. I wasn’t crazy. It was just that sometimes it was really, really hard to keep from screaming and crying. I slowed down a little so that I could stand in his shadow, where it was darker and cooler
. Summer in Chicago is hot. “I was little then.”

  “That was probably it,” he said. I liked his voice. It rumbled in his chest, and sounded really nice. When he read to me, it sounded like that voice could go on, steady, all night long. “But if you need to, we can leave whenever you like.”

  I looked up at him. Did he really mean that? Because today was looking brighter and louder and shinier every minute. My ears were already itching with all the noises around us, until I wanted to just jam my fingers into them and close my eyes and shut out everything.

  But today was my first day together with my dad. We’d never done that. The Carpenters had been really, really nice to me and given me a home. I loved them. But they weren’t my dad.

  I’m sure he would take me somewhere else if I asked him. But I didn’t want him to think I was some little baby who couldn’t even go to the zoo.

  Mouse, walking next to me like always, walked a couple of inches closer, reassuring me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his jaw drop open in an encouraging doggy smile, and his tail thwacked against my back when he wagged it.

  My dad was pretty strong. Maybe I could be strong, too.

  “I want to see the gorillas,” I said. “So does Mouse.”

  Mouse wagged his tail even harder and smiled up at my dad.

  He smiled at me. The smile really changed how he looked. It made him look more like a dad, I think. “Okay, then,” he said. “Let’s do that.”

  He said it the same way that you hear soldiers say, “Begin operations,” in the movies, and his eyes flicked about, checking all around us and into the nearest trees overhead in maybe a second, as if hunting for a monster to blow up. I’m pretty sure he didn’t even realize he was doing it.

  My dad has fought bad things for a long time. He’s seen bad things happen to people. Miss Molly says that that kind of thing leaves wounds, but that you can’t see them. Sort of like how grown-ups can’t see the creeps. But she said he carried them without complaining or letting it stop him from helping people. Even when it was really, really hard.

  Sort of like being around me.

  I try to be a nice person. But when things get too big, it’s hard to do anything very well. Other kids mostly stay away from me. Even when I can make friends, sometimes, they don’t really understand.