Dead Beat (The Dresden Files, #7)

by Jim Butcher

Mouse liked going places in the car. That the place had happened to be a clandestine meeting in a freaking graveyard didn’t seem to spoil anything for him. It was all about the journey, not the destination. A very Zen soul, was Mouse.

‘Look at history. How long did the scholarly institutions of civilization consider Earth to be the center of the universe? And when people came out with facts to prove that it wasn’t, there were riots in the streets. No one wanted to believe that we all lived on an unremarkable little speck of rock in a quiet backwater of one unremarkable galaxy. The world was supposed to be flat, too, until people proved that it wasn’t by sailing all the way around it. No one believed in germs until years and years after someone actually saw one.

Like I said, magic comes from life, and especially from emotions. They’re a source of the same intangible energy that everyone can feel when an autumn moon rises and fills you with a sudden sense of bone-deep excitement, or when the first warm breeze of spring rushes past your face, full of the scents of life, and drowns you in a sudden flood of unreasoning joy. The passion of mighty music that brings tears to your eyes, and the raw, bubbling, infectious laughter of small children at play, the bellowing power of a stadium full of football fans shouting ‘Hey!’ in time to that damned song – they’re all charged with magic.

It was made of the emptiness at the loss of a loved one, of the silence between the beats of a heart, and of the inevitability of the empty void that waited patiently for the stars to grow cold and burn out.

‘What is the point of having free will if one cannot occasionally spit in the eye of destiny?’

‘I understand your refusal to allow another to control your life. It’s a poisonous, repugnant notion to think of someone who would dictate your every move, impose upon you a code of behavior you could not accept, and refuse to allow you choice, expression, and the pursuit of your own heart’s purpose.’ ‘Pretty much,’ I said. The fallen angel smiled. ‘Then believe me when I say that I know precisely how you feel. All of the Fallen do.’

As advanced as mankind likes to think it is, we all have that age-old, primal, undeniable dread of darkness. Of being unable to see danger coming. We don’t like to think that we’re afraid of the dark anymore, but if that’s true, then why do we work so hard to make sure our cities are constantly lit? We cloak ourselves in so much light that we can barely see the stars at night. Fear is a funny thing. In the right light, even tiny and insignificant fears can suddenly grow, swelling up to monstrous proportions. With the black magic rolling around the way it was, that instinctive fear of the dark would feed upon itself, doubling and redoubling, and with no explanation to tell them why the lights hadn’t come on, people would start to forget their carefully rational reasons not to be afraid in favor of panic.

‘Impossible,’ Morgan said. ‘By that time, they had to know that the Senior Council was back at Edinburgh. The defenses there have been built over thousands of years. It would take . . .’ Morgan paused, frowning.