by Jim Butcher
She stepped away from me much more slowly, her eyes down. She brushed her hand over her mouth and muttered, “Mab’s going to be furious if I don’t get the leshyie numbers up, but …” She nodded. “I’ll build your toy for you.”
“You’re the best.”
“I’m awesome,” she agreed. “But this is a mess. I don’t know how much direct help I’ll be able to give.”
“At this point,” I said, “I’ll take whatever I can get.”
Chapter
Seventeen
I drove Molly back to town and dropped her off at the svartalf embassy, where the security guard, a conspicuously unfamiliar face, welcomed her at once and with tremendous deference. I still wasn’t clear on what the grasshopper had done for the svartalves to make them so gaga over her, but it was clear that whatever she’d done, she had impressed them with the fact that she was more than a pretty face.
I watched her go in and made sure she was safely in the building, as if I were a teenager dropping off his date five minutes early, and then started driving.
I felt awful.
I felt really, really awful.
And I wanted to go home.
Home, like love, hate, war, and peace, is one of those words that is so important that it doesn’t need more than one syllable. Home is part of the fabric of who humans are. Doesn’t matter if you’re a vampire or a wizard or a secretary or a schoolteacher; you have to have a home, even if only in principle—there has to be a zero point from which you can make comparisons to everything else. Home tends to be it.
That can be a good thing, to help you stay oriented in a very confusing world. If you don’t know where your feet are planted, you’ve got no way to know where you’re heading when you start taking steps. It can be a bad thing, when you run into something so different from home that it scares you and makes you angry. That’s also part of being human.
But there’s a deeper meaning to home. Something simpler, more primal.
It’s where you eat the best food because other predators can’t take it from you very easily there.
It’s where you and your mate are the most intimate.
It’s where you raise your children, safe against a world that can do horrible things to them.
It’s where you sleep, safe.
It’s where you relax.
It’s where you dream.
Home is where you embrace the present and plan the future.
It’s where the books are.
And more than anything else, it’s where you build that world that you want.
I drove through Chicago streets in the early morning and wished that I felt numb. My head hurt from lack of sleep and insufficient amounts of insufficiently nourishing food. My body ached, especially my hands and forearms. My head still spun with motion sickness, my guts sending up frequent complaints.
My brother was in trouble, and I didn’t know if I could get him out.
I thought of Justine’s misery and fear and the trust in her eyes when I’d promised to help Thomas, and suddenly felt very tired.
I very much wanted to go home.
And I didn’t have one.
My comfy, dumpy old apartment was gone, flattened by Gentleman Johnnie Marcone to make way for his stupid little castle and the Bigger Better Brighter Future Society. I mean, that had only been after the Red Court of Vampires had burned my home down, but I guess I’d settled their hash not long after. I was willing to call that one even.
But I missed my couch and the comfy chairs in front of my fire. I missed reading for hours on end with Mouse snoozing comfortably beside me and Mister purring between my ankles. I missed my cluttered, thoroughly functional little magical laboratory in the subbasement, and Bob on the shelf. I missed problems as simple as a rogue sorcerer trying to run his own drug cartel.
And I missed not being afraid for the people I loved.
I bowed my head at a light and wept. The guy behind me had to honk to get me to look up again. I considered blowing out his engine in a fit of pure pique and decided against it: I was the one who wasn’t moving at a green light.
I didn’t know what else to do.
I felt tired and lost and sick. Which left me only one place to go.
The sky had just begun to turn golden in the east when I pulled up to the Carpenters’ house. As I got out of the car, a neighbor a few doors down, an elderly gentleman in a flannel shirt and a red ball cap, came out of the door and stumped down the driveway to get his morning paper. He gave me a gimlet glower as he did, as if I’d personally come and put all his newspaper pages out of order, then carefully folded it up again and walked stiffly back into his house.
Man. I wished I was old enough to be irrationally grumpy at some random guy on the street. I could have blown out his engine.
I didn’t knock on the door. I went around to the backyard. There I found the Carpenter treehouse, which looked like something out of a Disney movie, in a massive old oak tree in the backyard. A bit behind it was the workshop, the rolling door of which was currently wide open. An old radio played classic rock in the background, and one of the better human beings I knew was on a weight bench, working out.
Michael Carpenter was in his fifties from the neck up, with silvering hair, grey eyes, and a well-kept salt-and-pepper beard. From the neck down, he could have been twenty or thirty years younger. He was performing basic bench presses with around two hundred and fifty pounds on the bar. Michael was doing slow reps with it.
I hadn’t seen the start of his set, but I counted fourteen repetitions of the movement before he carefully set the bar back onto the rack, so he was probably doing twenties. The struts of the bench creaked a bit as the weight settled onto them.
Michael glanced up at me and smiled. He sat up, breathing heavily but in a controlled manner, and said, “Harry! Up early or late?”
“Late,” I said, and bumped fists with him. “Going light this morning?”
He grinned a bit wider. “Most mornings. It’s my shoulders. They just can’t take the heavy stuff anymore.”
I eyed the weights and said, “Yeah, you wimp.”
He laughed. “Want a turn?”
I felt awful. And angry about it. The Winter mantle didn’t care if I’d missed sleep and felt terrible. It wanted me to kill or have sex with something. Feeding it exercise was as close as I could get. Dammit. “Sure.”
He got up amiably, using an aluminum cane lying beside the bench to stand. Michael had taken multiple hits from an AK-style assault rifle out on the island a few years back. He shouldn’t have survived it. Instead, he’d come out of it with a bad hip, a bum leg, a bad eye, a severe limp, and the only non-posthumous retirement I’d ever heard about for a Knight of the Cross.
He limped gamely over to the head of the bench to spot me. I took off my duster, lay down, and started working.
“You look”—Michael paused, considering his words—“distracted.”
He was my friend. I told him what was up. He listened gravely.
“Harry, you idiot,” he said gently. “Go get some sleep.”
I glared at him and kept working.
He was one of a relatively few people in my life upon whom my glare had no effect. “You aren’t going to muscle your way through this one, and you aren’t going to be able to think your way through it in your current condition. Help your brother. Get some sleep.”
I thought about that one until the frozen chill of Winter had seeped into my arms and chest and I was breathing like a steam engine. Then I put the weight down.
“How many was that?” I asked.
“I stopped counting at forty.” Michael put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Enough, Harry. Get some rest.”
“I can’t,” I said, my voice suddenly harsh. I sat up, hard. “Somebody pushed my brother into this. Somehow. I have to stop them. I have to fight them.”
“Yes,” Michael said, his tone patient. “But you need to fight them smarter, not harder.”
I
scowled and glanced back over my shoulder at him.
“You’re no kid anymore, Harry. But take it from someone who did this kind of thing for a very long time: Take your sleep wherever you can get it. You never know when you’ll have no other choice.”
I shook my head. “What if something happens while I’m sleeping? What if those lost hours are the difference between saving him and …”
“What if a meteor hits the planet tomorrow?” Michael replied. “Harry, there is very little in this world that we can control. You have to realize when you’ve reached the limits of what you can choose to do to change the situation.”
“When you reach the limits,” I said quietly, “maybe it’s time to change your limits.”
Those words fell on a very long silence.
When Michael spoke, his voice was frank. “How well did that work out for you, the last time?”
I tilted my head a little, in acceptance of the hit.
“Harry,” he said, “over the years, I’ve talked to you many times about coming to church.”
“Endlessly,” I said.
He nodded cheerfully. “And the invitation is a standing one. But all I’ve ever wanted for you was to help you develop in your faith.”
“I’m not sure how much Catholicism I’ve got to develop,” I said.
Michael waved a hand. “Not religion, Harry. Faith. Faith isn’t all about God, or a god, you know.”
I peered at him.
“Mine is,” he said. “This path is, to me, a very good path. It’s brought me a very wonderful life. But maybe it isn’t the only path. Many children learn things very differently, after all. It seems to me that God should be an excellent teacher enough to take that into account.” He shook his head. “But faith is about more than that. Like Waldo, for example.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
“He’s not particularly religious,” Michael said. “But I’ve never, ever met an individual more dedicated to the idea that tomorrow can be better than today. That people, all of us, have the ability to take action to make things better—and that friends always help. Despite all the ugliness he’s seen, in his job and in his other, ah, interests. He holds on to that.”
“Polka in the morgue,” I said.
Michael smiled. “Yes. Yes, exactly. But I think you miss my point.”
I tilted my head at him.
“He has faith in you, Harry Dresden,” Michael said. “In the path you’ve walked, and in which he now emulates you.”
I felt my eyebrows slowly climb in horror. “ He … what now?”
Michael nodded, amused. “You’re an example. To Waldo.” His voice softened. “To Molly.”
I sighed. “Yeah.”
“You might think about them, when you consider your next steps. And you might try to have a little faith, yourself.”
“In what?”
“In you, man,” he said, almost laughing. “Harry, do you really think you’ve found yourself where you have, time and time again, at the random whims of the universe? Have you noticed how often you’ve managed to emerge more or less triumphant?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sort of.”
“Then perhaps you are the right person, in the right place, at the right time,” Michael said. “Again. Have faith in that. And get some sleep.”
I glared at him for a minute. “Seems an awfully egotistical way to look at the universe,” I said darkly.
“How can it be egotistical when I’m the one who had to point it out to you?” Michael countered.
Michael was just better at this kind of talk than me. I glowered at him and then sneered in concession. “I’ll try to sleep. No promises.”
“Good,” he said. He limped over to a small refrigerator and got out a couple of bottles of water. He brought one to me and I accepted it. We drank them together in silence. Then Michael said, “Harry?”
“Yeah?”
“Have you seen much of Molly lately?”
“A little,” I said.
He hesitated for a long moment before saying slowly, “You might … ask her to check in with us?”
I lifted my eyebrows. “Hasn’t she?”
“Not face-to-face,” he said. “Not in some time.”
“She’s been very busy in her new job, I know, a lot of travel …” I began.
Michael gave me a very direct look. “Harry. Please don’t assume that I do not realize secrets are being kept from me. Tolerance is not the same as ignorance. But I trust you. I trust Molly.”
I keyed into what was going on. “Ah. But Charity doesn’t.”
Michael hedged. “ She … is worried that her daughter is a very young person moving in a world that rewards inexperience with pain. She very much wants to be sure her daughter is all right. And I am not sure that is an unreasonable position.”
It had begun to dawn on me, through all the awful, that Molly still hadn’t told her mom and dad about her new gig as the Winter Lady. And it had been … how long now?
Hell’s bells. My stomach sank a little. I wasn’t at all sure how well Charity and Michael would react to the news that their daughter had gotten herself knit to the wicked Winter Fae. That was a far, far cry from merely hanging out with the wrong crowd. If she’d come directly to them, at the beginning, it might have been talked through immediately. But after a year and more of doubt and silence and avoidance and worry … Wow.
Family complicates things.
And, after all, they were both absolutely right to be worried about their daughter.
Hell. I was.
“Maybe it isn’t,” I allowed.
“Thank you,” he said. “I know she’s a grown woman now, but … she’s also still our little girl.”
“I’m sure she’d roll her eyes to hear it,” I said.
“Likely,” Michael said, his smile a little sad. “But perhaps she’ll humor us.”
“I’ll talk to Molly,” I promised.
And yawned.
Yeah. That’s what I would do. Be sane. Be smart. Get some rest and come at them fresh, Harry.
Assuming you figure out who they are.
Chapter
Eighteen
The Carpenters had a number of empty bedrooms these days, and I crashed in Daniel’s old room. After recovering from his injuries, and avoiding what could have been a serious scrape with the law, Daniel had re-upped with the military. He was on a base in the Southwest somewhere, married, with the family’s first grandchild on the way.
There was a very lonely quality to his old room—posters on the wall advertised bands that few people cared about anymore. The clothes hanging in the closet were years out of style, waiting faithfully for someone who might not even fit into them anymore. The bed seemed too small for the man I knew, who I’d seen fighting some genuine darkness, and paying the price for his courage, and it was certainly too small for the husband and father he’d become.
But I bet it would make a great room for grandkids to stay in when they visited fussy old Grandma and Grandpa Carpenter, the boring squares who never did anything interesting.
Hah.
And meanwhile, it would do quite well for a worried, world-weary wizard.
I slept, not long enough but very hard, and woke to a small face about two inches from mine and late-afternoon sunlight coming through the window.
“Hi,” Maggie said when I managed to get an eye to creak open.
“Hmph,” I said, in as gentle a tone as I could manage.
“Are you awake now?” she asked.
I blinked. It took about five minutes to accomplish that much. “Apparently.”
“Okay,” she said seriously. “I’m not supposed to bother you until you’re awake.” She pushed back from the bed and ran out of the room.
I took that under advisement for a sober moment and then heard her feet pounding back up the stairs. She was carrying a large box, wrapped in white paper and tied with a length of silver cord. She grunted and hefted it onto the general vicinit
y of my hips, with the inherent accuracy that small children and most animals seemed to possess.
I flinched and caught the box, preventing any real damage, and sat blearily up. “What is this?”
“It was on the porch this morning,” Maggie said. “Mouse doesn’t think there’s a bomb or poison or anything.”
I eyed the box. There was a paper tag on it. I caught it and squinted until I could make out Molly’s handwriting:
I KNOW YOU MEANT TO GET ONE EVENTUALLY. M.
“Hmmm,” I said, and opened the box with Maggie looking on in eager interest.
“Awww,” she said in disappointment a moment later, as I drew a new suit out of the box. “It’s just clothes.”
“Nothing wrong with clothes,” I said.
“Yeah, but it could have been a knife or a gun or a magic sword or something.” She sighed. “You know. Cool wizard stuff to help you fight monsters.” She picked up the silver-grey rough silk of the suit’s coat. “And this is weird fabric.”
I ran my hand over the cloth, musing. “Weird how?”
“It just … feels weird and looks weird. I mean, look at it. Does that look like something you’d see on TV?”
“It’s spider silk,” I mused. “I think it’s a spider-silk suit.”
“Ewg,” Maggie said, jerking her hand back. Then she put it on again, more firmly. “That’s so gross.”
“And it’s enchanted,” I mused. I could feel the subtle currents of energy moving through the cloth, beneath my palms. I closed my eyes for a moment and felt the familiar shapes of my own defensive wardings, the same ones I worked into my leather coat. I’d taught the grasshopper the basics of enchanting gear by using my own most familiar formulae. She was probably the only person alive who could have duplicated my own work so closely. “Yeah, see? Once I’m wearing this, it’s going to store the energy of my body heat, of my movements, and use it to help redirect incoming forces.”
Maggie looked skeptical. “Well. Enchanted armored bug suit is better than just a suit, I guess.”
“Yes, it is,” I said. I checked the box. It included all the extras, including buttons and cuff links and a pinky crest ring in the glittering deep blue opals favored by the Winter Court.