by Jim Butcher
Maybe he wouldn’t understand, either. He already had a hard job. Maybe being my dad would be too hard.
“Are you nervous?” I heard myself ask.
He blinked at me. “Why would I be nervous?”
He was looking at me like he really liked me. I couldn’t keep looking at him when he was like that. What if he changed his mind?
Things can change. So fast.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m nervous. I haven’t ever gone to the zoo with my dad before. What if I do it wrong?”
He walked along next to me for a second, and then I felt his fingers brush against my hair gently. “I’m pretty sure this isn’t something you get right or wrong.”
Which would make sense, if I didn’t have to worry about turning into a complete spaz if things got too big and loud. “What if … I don’t know. What if I set something on fire?”
“Maybe we’ll roast some marshmallows,” he said.
Which was the kind of goofy thing you’d expect a grown-up to say, but it was nice to hear him say it. “You’re weird.”
Mouse leaned against me with a little huff of a breath that he used when he thought something was funny. He was clearly pleased, though I thought he was a little distracted, too. Must be because Dad was here, and he really, really liked Dad. Dad saved him from a monster when he was a tiny puppy, and then Mouse grew up and helped Dad fight monsters, and then Dad gave him to me to be my protector.
Mouse was good at that. The creeps mostly didn’t bother me—and the particularly old and nasty underhide that had moved into the space beneath my bed had found out the hard way that you don’t mess around with Maggie and Mouse Dresden.
Dad was talking to me about how he had saved a gorilla once, and was leaning over me to pet Mouse when we all but walked right into an entire tribe of haunts.
These had taken a bunch of kids, and you could see it in their eyes—they were entirely black, no color, no whites, no nothing. Just these hollow, empty spaces that were full of the kind of nothing that wanted to suck you into it and watch you spin helplessly and scream. The kids walked around like well-behaved children from a boarding school—but I saw their eyes, suddenly fastening onto me, maybe a dozen sets of them. The eyes stared at me, and they had a horrible power. I suddenly remembered my last nightmare, not just the details of what happened, but the way it made me feel when I was having it, and my legs got weak.
Dad was paying attention to Mouse and vice versa, and neither of them saw the way that the haunts all stared at me for a good second as they went by. I felt each gaze and knew what was happening.
The haunts were marking me for prey.
Oh, great. This was all I needed.
I folded my arms against my stomach and took slow, deep breaths that were supposed to help me not spaz out as much. My dad couldn’t see the haunts. He couldn’t really interact with them. But they were able to hurt him, and he wouldn’t even know what was happening.
I was pretty sure that it was probably a terrible idea to go into the zoo with a bunch of hungry, hunting creeps. Haunts could be dangerous if you didn’t know how to handle them—which was bad enough, all by itself.
I glanced up at him for a second. He was watching me with that concerned look adults get before they carry me off to a dark, quiet room. All I had to do was say something, and he’d do it. I’d be safe and it would be quiet.
And then that would be the end of our first real day together.
Stupid haunts. Stupid, creeping haunts.
I wasn’t going to let them and their stupid faces ruin this for my dad.
I would deal with them myself.
BUT FIRST, I would see a bunch of superawesome animals. I mean, Mouse was cheating, which he does all the time. He’s a Foo dog, and he has a bunch of weird powers. Most of his powers generally relate to telling monsters to back off, and then they do it, but having him around makes everything a little easier. When Mouse is there, there’s always a seat in the restaurant when you’re hungry, and you get the good waiter. TV commercials always have the good movie trailers mixed in them. Cartoons show funnier episodes. If you go to a game, the people around you are always really nice. It doesn’t work at school, because Mouse won’t cheat there, but everywhere else he just makes things happen a lot nicer than they otherwise would.
Nobody seemed to notice it but me, but that was okay. Mouse was the only one to notice when I needed a big furry hug sometimes.
Mouse was using his powers to make the zoo more awesome. The animals were all being super cool. The otters were running and playing, and the monkeys were swinging and making noises, and even the lion roared for us while we were there.
If it hadn’t been for the haunts, it would have been perfect.
They were following me. I mean, they weren’t obvious about it or anything, but their group had split up into pairs and there were always a couple of them within thirty or forty yards, keeping track of me and staring.
Always, always staring.
That was what haunts did. They followed you, sometimes for days and days, and they stared and their empty eyes made you relive the bad things from your life. If they did it long enough, you’d just wind up in a ball on the ground—and when you got up, you’d have big black eyes and the haunt would be telling you what to do from then on.
I thought about telling my dad about them, but … he may have been nice and a wizard, but he was also a grown-up. If you started talking to grown-ups about things they couldn’t see, let’s just say that you didn’t get to go chase fireflies near dark very often.
Besides.
What if he thought I was, you know? Broken. What if he didn’t want a daughter who was all funny in the head?
So I kept quiet and close to Mouse. The haunts didn’t dare get very close as long as he was there. Mouse could sort of see the creeps, if they got close enough and weren’t careful to be super quiet and lowkey. Even though he’s an adult, he’s a grown-up dog, and that makes him a lot like a kid. So far, they’d kept their distance to avoid his notice, and as long as they stayed that far back, their Scare Bear Stare couldn’t do much more than make me grumpy—and the awesome factor in the zoo was kind of countering that.
Maybe today would go smoothly after all.
And then my dad’s head shot up like Mouse when he smells lighter fluid at the Carpenter’s house, and his eyes flicked around him like a big, hungry bear looking for something to tear into.
“Um. Dad?” I asked
He looked down at me, and he did not look like a dad. He looked like the hero of a revenge movie—tense and alert and maybe even a little angry.
Oh.
Oh, wow. There must have been a monster or something for him to look like that. I didn’t see anything, but it seemed like a good idea to get between Mouse and my dad before asking, “Is there something bad?”
He looked away from me and the little muscles in his jaw jumped a bunch of times. I wasn’t sure if maybe I’d made him angry. I didn’t think so. I didn’t think I’d done anything that he could get mad about.
But I didn’t always realize it when I did.
“Maybe,” he said, finally. He looked at me, and his face got softer for a minute. “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.”
Sometimes safe spots were nice and safe, and sometimes they were a room with a locked door. Did he think I was about to have an attack or something? Or maybe he was just being careful.
Grown-ups are always being careful.
But how could I be sure which it was?
“It’s important, isn’t it?” I said.
My dad couldn’t have understood what I was asking. “Maybe,” he said. He 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.”
I needed a big furry hug, and Mouse was right there. I hugged
him and thought. If he was going to stay here instead of taking me somewhere, then he probably didn’t think he had to take care of me. So, you know. That’s good, I thought.
But it would leave me on my own, with creeps all over the place.
Well. That was my problem. And I’d have Mouse with me. Mouse always helped.
I looked up at my dad and nodded. “Yeah. I guess that’s okay.”
“How about it, Mouse?” he asked. “Can you behave yourself around food?”
Mouse was staring out across the park, like he was trying to see something hidden from him. I’m sure he knew the creeps were around, though he left them alone if they left me alone. He made a noise in his chest that was part whine and part rumble.
“Trouble, boy?” my dad asked.
See, my dad is pretty smart. Most grown-ups try to tell you about how limited dogs are and how smart they aren’t. Mouse has been going to school with me since I was little, and he reads better than I do. If he thought there might be trouble, only a dummy would ignore him, and my dad wasn’t a dummy.
Mouse stayed staring for a minute, then exhaled slowly and looked up at my dad. His ears perked up and he wagged his tail.
My dad took that to mean that all was well. “All right,” he said, and wagged his finger at Mouse. “Be good.”
“Whuff,” Mouse said.
“He’s always good,” I said, and kissed his ear. “We’re gonna have to handle these haunts while he’s gone, Mouse,” I whispered. “Real smooth, okay? He worries enough.”
Mouse made a sound that I could feel in his neck but couldn’t hear. I hugged him a little tighter and then let go.
“Okay,” my dad said. He got us seats in the restaurant, which were miraculously open—Good boy, Mouse. He bought me some French fries and handed me a twenty-dollar bill. “To pay for the food if you need more.”
“Okay,” I said. I was pretty hungry, and the fries smelled good.
“Don’t leave until I come back for you. Okay?”
I nodded, and he strode out. He should have had his coat. It would have been all swirly, like Batman. Jeans and an old Battlestar Galactica T-shirt just didn’t make the same impression.
I’d eaten maybe three French fries when the chair across from me scraped on the floor, and the haunt sat down across from me.
It looked like a girl, maybe a year older and a lot bigger than me. She had blond hair and a nice school uniform and her eyes looked like outer space.
“No one likes you,” the haunt said. “They make people be your partner at school.”
Mouse growled, and the saltshaker on the table rattled a little.
I tried to ignore what the haunt said. They all did this. They stared at you and read all your terrible memories like they were a cartoon strip. Then they talked to you about them.
“No one likes you,” the haunt repeated. “You’re weird. You’re different.”
I felt Mouse gathering himself, but I couldn’t let him act. As far as everyone standing around us knew, it would look like an absolutely giant dog attacking a little girl when she hadn’t done anything to provoke it. That would be bad. So I put my foot on his head and pushed down as hard as I could. It barely made him move, but I felt him relax. Mouse is a pretty good dog.
“You’re losing your mind,” the haunt said. “No one wants to be your friend. No one wants to play with you. No one even wants to say your name.”
I put more salt on my fries. Quite a bit of it, actually. Some of it fell into my other hand.
“You should be alone. Then no one would have to put up with you,” said the haunt.
I looked up into its empty eyes and said, “I know what you are. I’m going to give you this one chance to go away and bother someone else. After that, things will get ugly.”
“Don’t you think you should be somewhere safe?” the haunt asked in a calm voice. “Somewhere you can’t hurt yourself when you have a f—”
I interrupted it by throwing salt into its black, empty eyes.
Creeps in general don’t like salt. Don’t ask me why. That’s how it is.
The haunt flinched back so hard that it fell out of the chair. It didn’t make any sound, but the body it was occupying twitched and jerked randomly, the muscles all tight. I felt bad about that, a little. It wasn’t this other girl’s fault that the creeps got her. She probably didn’t even know why she was doing and saying the things she was.
“You should wash your eyes out,” I advised the haunt. “Someplace else.”
The creep stood up, tears streaming down its expressionless face. It stared at me for a moment, eyes all red around the black, then hurried into the café’s ladies’ room.
Mouse let out another growl and rose, pacing restlessly around my chair.
“Hey,” I said. “Settle. It’s okay. They’re in the Book. I know how to handle them.”
Mouse made an unhappy noise. He’d read the Book, too. Molly had started it, back before she’d become a grown-up and forgotten it all, and her little brothers and sisters had added to it. Harry Carpenter, who was kind of my big brother, had passed it on to me when the underhide had come into the house.
Mouse knew what I had to do as well as I did. He just didn’t like it.
“Maybe they’ll leave me alone now,” I said. “Come on. We need mustard.”
I got mustard, which is the best, for my fries. We started eating them, and Mouse settled down a little. He has a very practical attitude about worry—he doesn’t, when there is good food with people you love.
My dad came back in a couple minutes later, looking … older. He didn’t seem like he was angry anymore, just really, really tired. He tried to smile at me but it wasn’t a real smile.
“What was it?” I asked him.
Behind my dad, the door to the bathroom opened. The girl haunt came out, her face dripping with water she hadn’t dried off. She gave me a dirty look, and the power of it brought up a smell, something from my darkest dreams. Kind of rotten and metallic, and I suddenly felt my stomach do swirly loops even though I was standing still.
Then the haunt walked out and just stood there, facing away from me.
The others began to drift closer to her, in ones and twos, until they all stood silently together in a circle, facing one another. Nobody talked. Maybe haunts just think at each other or something.
I ignored them and looked up at my dad, who looked thoughtful. “A warlock,” he said quietly after a moment. “A young wizard whose power is not in control. Dangerous.”
Miss Molly had told me about warlocks. They were awful. “Did you fight it?”
“Him,” my dad said. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because most of the time, they never meant to do anything bad,” he said. He didn’t talk to me in a kid voice, like some grown-ups did. They sound different when they talk to children. My dad sounded like he did when he talked to anyone else. “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,” I said.
“No,” he answered, and he made the word sound sad. “But that doesn’t make them any less dangerous.”
“Can’t you help?”
“Sometimes,” he said very quietly. “I’m not sure.”
I shared a French fry with Mouse, thinking. My dad always helped warlocks if he could. Miss Molly had been a warlock and my dad had helped her. I figured he’d be running to help this one, but …
“But I’m here,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said. “And you’re more important to me.”
That made me feel warm all over, hearing him say that. “They just get powers?”
He nodded. “Born to it, yeah.”
Just like my dad and Miss Molly. And maybe me, someday. Or that’s what Miss Molly told me. “Am I going to get powers?”
“Maybe,” he said. “There’s no way to know for sure.” He sounded honest, like a teacher talking about G
eorge Washington. I tried to imagine him teaching a class, only maybe wearing like a teacher outfit. In my head, it was kind of easy to see him doing it, really.
“Weird,” I said. I passed a fry to Mouse, who snapped it up, and got the next one. “If I do, will you teach me stuff? So no one gets hurt?”
“If you want me to,” he said.
Which wasn’t the same thing as if he said that he wanted to teach me. But he probably just meant that he wouldn’t if I didn’t want to learn. Like that would happen. Only maybe it could happen. That thought made my tummy flip and turn some more. “If … something happens to you, who is going to teach me?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to me,” he said.
“It could,” I told him quietly. Because it could. His work was dangerous. “And maybe there wouldn’t be anyone. Maybe I’d be a warlock.”
He looked at me and took a deep breath. He was wondering about whether he should tell me the kid-safe version of the truth. “Maybe,” he said, finally.
“That could be me.” In the corner of my eye, I watched the circle of haunts regard one another, then turn as one to stare at me. Ugh. It just felt icky.
This warlock boy needed help. And I needed to deal with the haunts before they hurt me again, or maybe hurt someone else, like my dad. That was the right thing. Even though it would be really scary.
It’s what my dad would do. I think. I mean, we’d just met, really.
“I can eat more French fries,” I told him. “Mouse will keep me company.”
He blinked at me as if surprised. “You sure?” he asked. “It could … cut today kind of short.”
“If someone needs your help, you help them,” I said. “Even when it’s really hard. Miss Molly told me that about you.”
Because what if Miss Molly had told me the kid-safe version of the truth about my dad? What if he wasn’t as good as she said he was? What if he didn’t want to take care of a daughter who had issues? Who was really hard to be around?
But he looked at me and then he smiled, and I suddenly felt warm inside, like I’d had all the hot French fries in the world.