Brief Cases (The Dresden Files, #15.1)

by Jim Butcher

“Oh,” Carlos said, stopping short. I could see calculations and connections forming behind his eyes. “Uh-oh.” “What-oh?” “This just got worse.” “Why?” He licked his lips nervously. “Uh. How much Lovecraft have you read?” “I haven’t kept track,” I said. “Somewhere between zero and none. Should I have?” “Probably,” he said. “It’s always the last thing a formally trained apprentice learns about.” “I have a funny feeling my training wasn’t formal,” I said. “Yeah. Neither was Harry’s. Have you heard of the Old Ones?” “I don’t think it’s a very kind nickname for the Rolling Stones. They still put on a great show.” He nodded and squinted at me. “I kind of need you to put on your serious face now.” “That bad?” I asked. “Maybe,” he said. “They’re . . . kind of a collection of entities. Really old, really powerful entities.” “What, like gods?” I asked. “Like the things gods have nightmares about,” he said. “Outsiders.” He nodded. “Only they aren’t outside. They’re here. Caged, bound, and sleeping, but they’re here.”

“One of the Old Ones is known as the Sleeper. It’s said his tomb is somewhere under the Pacific. And that goddamned moron Lovecraft published stories and easy-to-remember rhymes about the thing.” He shook his head. “The signal boost gave the Sleeper enough power to influence the world. It has a number of cults. People get . . . infested, I guess. Slowly go insane. Lose their humanity. Turn into something else.”

I wanted loud noise that was totally out of place and as weird as possible to whatever supernatural critters were riding around inside the fishermen—and the creatures of the supernatural world aren’t exactly pop-culture mavens. Plus, it was dance music from the ’90s. Nobody thinks that stuff is normal.

And then, just as the song screamed, “Everybody dance now!” I leaned back, drew the power of Winter into my body, and kicked the big double doors off their hinges as if they’d been made of balsa and Scotch tape. At which point I learned the real reason Harry keeps doing that. It. Is. Awesome.

Then the captain started to shout something. Before he could, I unleashed power from the heart of Winter into the cathedral, unrestrained, undirected, unshaped, and untamable. It rushed through me, flowed through me, both frozen agony and a pleasure more intense than any orgasm. Ice exploded out from me in swords and spears, in scythes and daggers and pikes. In an instant, crystalline blades and points, a forest of them, slammed into being, expanding with blinding speed. Ice filled the cathedral, and whatever was in its way, living or otherwise, was pierced and slashed and shredded and then crushed against the sanctuary’s stone walls with the force of a locomotive. It was over in less than a second.

It took the captain, impaled against the cathedral ceiling, almost a minute to die. And while he did, I lay on the holy table, laughing uncontrollably.

“What happened?” I asked. “What happened?” Mab regarded Carlos with a calm countenance. “What will happen every time you attempt to be with a man,” she replied.

“Three Queens of Summer; three Queens of Winter,” she said, that alien gaze returning to me. “Maiden, mother, and crone. You are the maiden, Lady Molly. And for you to be otherwise, to become a mother, would be to destroy the mantle of power you wear. The mantle protected itself—as it must.”

She tilted her head and stared at me. “It is all within Winter Law. I suggest you spend a few hours each day meditating on it in the future. In time you will gai...

I had never really considered what the tribute was. But it was there in the law. I turned slowly and stared at Mab in horror. “Their children,” I whispered. “You want me to take their children.” “Yes.” “Their children,” I said. “You can’t.” “I won’t. You will.”

“Lady Molly,” Mab said gently. “Consider the Outer Gates.” I did. Winter Law showed me a vivid image. An endless war fought at the far borders of reality. A war against the pitiless alien menace known simply as the Outsiders. A war fought by millions of Fae, to prevent the Outsiders from invading and destroying reality itself. A war so long and bitter that bones of the fallen were the topography of the landscape. It was why the Winter Court existed in the first place, why we were so aggressive, so savage, so filled with lust and the need to create more of our kind.

“If you have an alternative, I would be more than willing to consider it.” Silence stretched. “I don’t,” I said quietly. “Then do your duty,” Mab said. I opened the door and looked back at her. “I don’t yet,” I said, and I said it hard. “This isn’t over.” Mab gave me the slow blink again. Then she inclined her head by a fraction of an inch, her expression pensive.

While I needed him to be pretty savvy about matters pertaining to the wild side of life so that he could be good at his job, I wanted to make him into a character who was constantly challenged by the most mundane issues—paying his bills, fixing his car, dealing with his landlord, struggling with taxes and the DMV, and all the dumb stuff we grown-ups have to do, which, in our honest moments, we admit that we just hate doing and would much rather have some milk and a cookie and a nap.

“The government isn’t the mob, Harry.” “Aren’t they?” I asked. “Pay them money every year to protect you, and God help you if you don’t.”

Ah well. I wasn’t here to create disorder. I was here to preserve disorder.

I got a cup of bad coffee and grimaced at it while waiting around for a while. Then a guy in a black muumuu showed up and recounted the plot of My Cousin Vinny. Okay, it was a robe, and the guy was a judge, and he gave us a brief outline of the format of the trial system, but it’s not nearly as entertaining to say it that way.

He was well liked by his professional associates and had an extensive family and was owned by an Abyssinian cat named Purrple.

Oh, so very true.

I glanced at the clock as I filed out with the rest of the jury. Nine tomorrow morning. That gave me just under sixteen hours to do what wizards do best. I left, and began meddling.

Her smile faltered slightly. As it should have. When the bloodsucking Red Court had taken my daughter, I took her back—and murdered every single one of them in the process. The entire species. I’m not a halfway kind of person.

Waldo Butters was never supposed to amount to much. No, seriously. He was a throwaway character. I had a particularly gruesome morgue scene that I wanted to leaven with a little humor, so I more or less swiped the medical examiner from the movie The Prophecy, dyed his hair black and curly, made him a Jewish polkaphile, and had him start spreading levity.

At the end of the day, the greatest power Harry has is in lifting up the people around him. As he has gone through his story, the people he trusts and has befriended have themselves grown in knowledge and in power.

OF ALL THE training Michael Carpenter had me doing, the cardio part was what I liked best. Then again, my main Pandora station plays only polka music, so what the heck do I know?

“If you could see it, you wouldn’t have to ask that.” He nodded seriously. “Tell me what you see.” “That homeless guy on the bench?” I asked. “Yes.” I took a breath and said, “There’s a big yellow exclamation point floating over his head.” After a brief pause, I added, “I’m not crazy. My mother had me tested.”

“Yeah, it’s what every NPC in every MMORPG ever looks like when they have a quest to give you.” “There were a great many letters in that, and not much that I understood,” he said soberly.

Michael barked out a laugh and gave the sky a small smile and a shake of his head. “Well, then, Sir Waldo. You’ve just had your first Call.”

“Um. I know we’ve been training pretty hard, but . . . am I really ready for this?” He reached into the backpack, withdrew an old leather messenger bag from it, and offered it to me. “Let’s find out.”

It takes several thousand repetitions of a motion to develop motor-memory pathways in the brain to the point where you can consider the motion a reflex.

My great nightmare is to be stuck somewhere without them, trapped, peering at the sea of fuzzy things that couldn’t possibly be identified.

“Shoot. You ain’t no bigger than a chicken dinner.” “But spicy,” I said.

Lamar had gotten a few peeks at the Twilight Zone, too, over the years, and wanted nothing to do with it, because Lamar was pretty bright.

“I’m a doctor, Michael. My heart doesn’t tell me anything. It’s a muscle that pumps blood. My brain does all of that other stuff.” Michael smiled. “What does your heart tell you?”

“Hell are you doing down here? They kick you out of Corpsesicles ’R’ Us?”

“You’re lucky it happened in the morning. We start getting busy come the afternoon.” I started to tell him that luck hadn’t had anything to do with it, and felt myself shiver.

Could God, with all the majesty of the universe at his disposal, with the uncounted myriad of life forms to look after throughout practically uncountable galaxies, really be all that interested in one little drug addict? One little medical examiner, playing at being a hero? Answer that question with a yes or a no, and tell me which is the more terrifying. I’m not sure I can.

He’d been of the opinion that God couldn’t not be interested on a personal level. That He knew each and every one of us too well to be anything less than passionately involved in caring about our lives and our choices.

Just me. I guess maybe this wasn’t a beginner’s quest.

“Hang in there, buddy,” I told him. “Whatever power is given to me, I’ll use it to help you. I promise.”

Her mouth curled up in pure contempt at one corner. “And who is it you think you are, little man?” “All you need to know is this,” I said, and drew out the Sword.

“I offer you a trade for his life.” “Um,” I said. “I’m listening.” “Give me your glasses.”

“I won’t come,” he said quietly. “What?” I asked. “Harry . . .” “Michael told me something once that I thought was utter crap,” he said. “But I’m going to tell it to you now.” “What?” I demanded. “You’re a Knight now, Butters. You’re working for the freaking Almighty. And He won’t give you a burden bigger than your shoulders can bear.”

“Butters,” he snapped. I’d heard him use that tone of voice one other time. Exactly once. It had been in a basement, and zombies had been coming to kill us. “Polka will never die,” I breathed.

“That stuff doesn’t work on Knights,” I said. “Horse crap,” Harry said. “Look, the Knights have power, but you have to choose to use it, man. You don’t get any get-out-of-jail-free cards.

“Harry, I can’t see,” I stammered. And, I swear to God, he shifted to a nearly perfect imitation of Alec Guinness in the original movie. “Your eyes can deceive you,” he said. “Don’t trust them.” I barked out a laugh that felt like it was going to shatter something in my chest.

“Butters,” he said. “Look. I know it’s hard. But there’s one way you deal with fear.” “How?” I asked him. “You stand up and you kick it in the fucking teeth,” he said, and there was a quiet, certain power in his voice that had nothing to do with magic.

So I listened to one of my recent favorites and waited. My inner ten-year-old was screaming at me to run. I told him to shut his mouth and let me work.

The creature’s huge, weird shadow spread onto the wall behind it, even as its human face stared up at me. “Who are you?” the creature asked. The words that came out of my mouth only sort of felt like my own. “Ehyeh ašer ehyeh,” I said quietly.

I never really meant for Harry to be a dad.

So, at the end of the day, the character was a-gonna change, one way or another. I went with the way that felt most true to who he is as a human being. Harry’s a dad now. He might not know too much about it, but at least he has the jokes down.

My name is Harry Dresden. I am possibly one of the more dangerous wizards alive, and I have never once spent a whole day as a dad.

Not only that, but I was pretty sure I’d never really spoken to a ten-year-old girl for any length of time. Nor had I ever been one. I was completely in the woods here, and sure of only one thing: I really, really wanted to get this right.