Cold Days (The Dresden Files, #14)

by Jim Butcher

She glanced at me. “Yeah. I’m a lot better. I’m still not …” She shrugged. “I’m not exactly Little Miss Stability. At least, not yet. But I’m working on it.” “Sometimes I think that’s where most of us are,” I said. “Fighting off the crazy as best we can. Trying to become something better than we were. It’s that second bit that’s important.”

Fire isn’t always an element of destruction. Classical alchemical doctrine teaches that it also has dominion over another province: change. The fire of my tribulations had not simply been pain to be endured. It had been an agent of transformation. After all that I’d been through, I’d changed.

“Bad things are inside everyone,” I said. “I don’t care how gentle or holy or sincere or dedicated you are. There are bad things in there. Lust. Greed. Violence. You don’t need a wicked queen to make that happen. That’s a part of everyone. Some more, some less, but it’s always there.”

Some guys are born lucky, with mad natural fighting skills, and they hardly ever take a beating—but that’s never been me. I’ve had to learn the hard way. Like every other kind of pain, beatings are educational.

But I could defy absolutely anyone. I could lift my will against that of anything, and know that the fight might be lopsided, but never hopeless. And by thunder, I was not going to allow anyone’s will to stretch me out on the floor like a lamb for slaughter.

No dodges, no delays, no excuses. It would happen or it wouldn’t, depending on me. I looked down at my bruised hands. I slowly closed them into fists and then opened them again. They were battered hands, and they didn’t have anywhere near as much skill as I could have wished were in them—but they were what I had. I had earned the scars on them. They were mine. I’d done this before. Never on this scale, maybe, but I’d done it before. I’d saved the day, mostly, more or less, on several occasions. I’d done it before, and I could do it again. There wasn’t any other way it was going to happen. The only good thing about having your back to the wall is that it makes it really easy to choose which way you’re going to go.

This was not how my life would end. This was not reality. I was Harry Dresden, Wizard of the White Council, Knight of Winter. I had faced demons and monsters, fought off fallen angels and werewolves, slugged it out with sorcerers and cults and freakish things that had no names. I had fought upon land and sea, in the skies above my city, in ancient ruins and in realms of the spirit most of humanity did not know existed. I bore scars that I’d earned in dozens of battles, made enemies out of nightmares, and laid low a dark empire for the sake of one little girl.

Bad things kept happening to me. It was high fucking time I started happening to them.

“It seems unlikely that your cares will lighten,” Queen Mab replied. “Improve your mind.”

Sometimes the things that are good for you, in the long run, hurt for a little while when you first get to them.