Small Favour (The Dresden Files, #10)

by Jim Butcher

I’m always going to be taller than you once you’re lying unconscious on the ground.’

There’s nothing as exhilarating as being shot at and missed.

‘Empty night, Harry. You look like . . .’ ‘Ten miles of bad road?’

Hendricks ignored me. I had a feeling it was his strongest conversational ploy.

‘When I want an opinion from you, Dresden,’ she said, ‘I’ll read it in your entrails.’

Then the ground hit me with an uppercut. Everyone else in the Oceanarium suddenly fell sideways. Or wait. Maybe it was me.

‘I never tell a lady how to accessorize.’

‘So,’ he said, starting down the street. ‘What’s the plan?’ I told him. ‘That is a bad plan,’ he said. ‘There wasn’t time for a good one.’

I’d done a bit of research on fun things you can fire out of a shotgun, and as it turns out, there’s all kinds of interesting stuff you can shoot at people.

‘Playing with the fires of creation. Binding your soul to it, as if you were one of us. How dare you so presume. How dare you wield soulfire against me. I, who was there when your pathetic kind was hewn from the muck.’

‘Likest thou jelly within thy doughnut?’ ‘Nay, but prithee, with sprinkles ’pon it instead,’ I said solemnly, ‘and frosting of white.’

She gave me a faint smile. ‘It’s just . . . the center cannot hold, Harry. I think things are starting to fall apart. I can’t see it, and I can’t prove it, but I know it.’ She shook her head. ‘Maybe I’m just losing my mind.’ I looked intently at her, frowning.