Small Favour (The Dresden Files, #10)

by Jim Butcher

‘That makes the suspect pool a little larger than is useful,’ I said. ‘Indeed it does.’ ‘Stop,’ I said. ‘Occam time.’ Gard gave me a blank stare. Maybe she’d never heard of MC Hammer. ‘Occam?’ she asked. ‘Occam’s razor,’ I said. ‘The simplest explanation is most often correct.’ Her lips quivered. ‘How charming.’

Anybody with an ounce of sense knows that fighting someone with a significant advantage in size, weight, and reach is difficult. If your opponent has you by fifty pounds, winning a fight against him is a dubious proposition, at best. If your opponent has you by eight thousand and fifty pounds, you’ve left the realm of combat and enrolled yourself in Roadkill 101. Or possibly in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.

I hadn’t really thought of her in terms of her first name before. Just as ‘Luccio’ or ‘the captain’ or ‘Captain Luccio.’ Come to think of it, she’d been out of the dating game for even longer than I had. Could be that she hadn’t exactly been brimming with self-confidence last night, either. The situation bore thinking upon.

That’s my Murphy, manufacturing her own damned silver lining when the clouds didn’t cough one up.

I’ve lived my entire adult life in Chicago. I’m used to the city, to its rhythms, its music. The hum and hiss of traffic, the clatter of elevated trains, the blaring radios, the beeping horns, cell phones, sirens, music, animals, and people, people, people.

Body or mind, heart or soul, we’re all human, and we’re supposed to feel pain. You cut yourself off from it at your own risk.

Then she winked at me, blew me a kiss, and opened fire on Michael with the Kalashnikov on full automatic from no more than ten feet away. My friend didn’t scream as bullets tore into him. He just jerked once in a spray of scarlet and went limp. Fidelacchius tumbled from his fingers and fell to the ground.

Oh no!

Thump. Thump. Thump.

…. Went the eldest Billy goat gruff haha

Thump. Thump. This was just getting ridiculous, now. Thump. Thump. And Eldest Gruff appeared in the opening. He was five feet tall. Five-two, tops. He wore a robe with a cowl, pulled back so that I could clearly see his curling ram’s horns, the goatlike features, the long white beard, the yellow eyes with their hourglass pupils. And in his right hand he carried a wooden staff carved with runes that looked almost precisely like my own. He took a limping step forward, leaning on his staff, and when he planted the tool on the ground, it flickered with green light that then splashed out onto the earth beneath it, spreading outward in a resonating wave. Thump. The floorboards creaked beneath him, and he came to a cautious stop and faced me quietly, both hands on his staff. His robe was belted with an old bit of simple rope. There were three stoles hanging through it - purple ones, faded and frayed with the passage of time. Those were the mantles worn by members of the Senior Council, the leaders of the White Council of Wizards. They were, generally speaking, the oldest and strongest wizards on the planet. And Eldest Brother Gruff had, evidently, killed three of them in duels.

Eldest Gruff stared at me blankly for a second. Then he threw back his head and made a sound that . . . well, more than anything it sounded like a donkey. Hee-haw, hee-haw, hee-haw. He was laughing.

‘They tell children stories about you guys, you know,’ I said. ‘Still?’ he said. I nodded. ‘Stories about clever little billy goats outsmarting big mean trolls until their bigger, stronger brothers come along and put the trolls in their place.’ The gruff grunted. He said, ‘We hear tales of thee, young wizard.’ I blinked. ‘You, uh?’ ‘We too like stories about . . .’ His eyes searched his memory for a moment before he smiled, pleased. The gesture looked pleasantly nonviolent on his face. ‘Underdogs.’ I snorted. ‘Well. I guess this is another one.’

I eased into the driver’s seat and reached for the ignition key. But it was gone. I felt around for it. Rosanna had left it in the ignition. I specifically remembered that she had done so. The shadows rippled away from the passenger seat opposite the driver’s seat, revealing Nicodemus. He sat calmly in his black silk shirt and dark trousers, the grey noose worn like a tie around his throat, a naked sword across his lap, his left elbow resting on his left knee. In the fingertips of his left hand he held a key ring, dangling the grease-smeared ignition key of the boat. ‘Good evening, Dresden,’ he said. ‘Looking for this?’

Does Harry ever catch a break?!

‘Murph!’ I said. I twisted my shoulders and thrust the end of Fidelacchius to within reach of her hand. Murphy’s fingers closed on the hilt of the holy blade. She drew it maybe an inch from the scabbard. White light blinded me. Blinded Deirdre. Blinded Murphy. Blinded Thomas. Blinded everyone.

wow murphy?

‘What the fuck was that?’ I slipped the sword off my shoulder. I felt really tired. I hurt everywhere. ‘Offhand,’ I mumbled, ‘I’d say it was a job offer.’

HA! I was right

And there’s always a clock in sight. The clock has superpowers. It always seems to move too slowly. Look up at it and it will tell you the time. Look up an hour and a half later, and it will tell you two minutes have gone by. Yet it somehow simultaneously has the ability to remind you of how short life is, to make you acutely aware of how little time someone you love might have remaining to them.