Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files, #8)

by Jim Butcher

Investigate the faeries. Great. That was absolutely guaranteed to get complicated before I got any useful answers. If there was one thing faeries hated doing, it was giving you a straight answer, about anything. Getting plain speech out of one is like pulling out teeth. Your own teeth. Through your nose.

My shadow wasn’t exactly going out of his way not to be noticed, which meant that he almost certainly wasn’t a hit man. A hired gun would do everything he could to stay invisible, preferably until several hours after I was cold and dead. Of course, he could be trying reverse psychology, I supposed. But that kind of circular reasoning could trigger a paranoiagasm and drive me loopy fast.

‘Remind me to lecture you about the interest rate on borrowed trouble,’ I said.

‘Power,’ he said, waving a hand in an all-encompassing gesture. ‘All power is the same. Magic. Physical strength. Economic strength. Political strength. It all serves a single purpose – it gives its possessor a broader spectrum of choices. It creates alternative courses of action.’

There is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.’ ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

I don’t care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching – they are your family.