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I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, exhaled, and walled away a small ocean of fear that had begun roiling in my mind. By my own words, that worry was coming, no matter what I did. And I would face it when it arrived. Compartmentalize and conquer.
Lara Raith strode out onto the deck of the Water Beetle. The battle had done for her change of clothing. She’d had to make do with some of Thomas’s stuff, stored in the ship’s cabin—leather-look tights and a big white Byronic poet’s shirt. My brother was not above embracing the classic stereotypes. The pale skin of her arms, where I could see it, was covered with dark, vicious bruises and round, mostly closed wounds, courtesy of the kraken. Lara noticed me looking. “Not one quip about hentai, Dresden.”
Doesn’t matter where you go in the world—if you’re good at your job, people who are good enough at theirs to see it will respect you for it.
Words and magic go hand in hand. Hell, half the words to describe magic practitioners go back to root sources that basically mean speaker. There’s a reason for that. Magic happens mainly in your head, fueled by emotion and shaped by concentration, reason, and raw will.
Marcone took up his suit jacket and shrugged into it. He adjusted it until the cloth fell without revealing the guns. “Do you know the difference between courage and foolhardiness, Dresden?” “Any insurance adjuster would say no.” He waved a hand at my banter, as though that was all the acknowledgment it deserved. “Hindsight,” he said. “Until the extended consequences of any action are known, it is both courageous and foolish. And neither.”
But somewhere deep down inside my guts, there emerged a solid, unalterable realization of truth: Some things should hurt. Some things should leave you with scars. Some things should haunt your nightmares. Some things should be burned into memory. Because that was the only way to make sure that they would be fought. It was the only way to face them.
The real battle for your own soul isn’t about falling from a great height; it’s about descending, or not, one choice at a time.
I found Murphy’s hand and squeezed gently. “What’s going to happen after this, do you think?” “I don’t,” she said. “Because I’m doing today first.” I snorted quietly. Murphy squeezed back. “Harry. You can’t fix tomorrow until it gets here.” “Which is weird, because you can screw it up from decades away.” I heard her laugh gently. “I got used to weird. It’s not so bad.”
“I am Harry, son of Malcolm,” I shouted back. “I have battled dark sorcerers and black knights! I have fought men and beasts in numbers too great for counting, invaded the heart of Winter, confronted necromancers and the living dead, vampires and ghouls and demons in their hordes endless! I have matched wits with the six Queens of Faerie and prevailed, and thwarted the combined will of the White Council! When they came for my child, I smote the Red Court of Vampires, and laid them in ruin for all the world to see. I am Harry, son of Malcolm, and I have entered the vaults of Tartarus, and
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I’m not saying pain is what defines us as human beings. But it is, in many ways, what unites us. We all recognize other people in pain. Damned near all of us are moved to do something about it when we see it. It’s our common enemy, though it isn’t, really, an enemy. Pain is, at least when our bodies are working properly, a teacher. A really tough, really strict, and perfectly fair teacher.
“I know the Sidhe are dangerous,” I said. “But there’s not enough of them. Not for what is coming at us.” The clicking grew louder. The Queen of Air and Darkness cast back her head, her eyes going wild, her smile widening to inhuman proportions. “The numbers stand at one Mab to none. That advantage shall be sufficient.”
The Fomor Sorcerers’ Club chose to attack me when I looked distracted. I mean, who wouldn’t, but especially these jerks. Predictable. They lobbed those bilious green spheres of acid at me. I spun toward them, my hand lifted, fingers spread, and pulled out an old one. I sent forth my power in the same moment that I drew on the silent gale of magic in the air, shouting, “Ventas servitas!”
Titania’s voice rang into the night like a silver bell. “Clever of you, Ethniu, to attack my sister at midsummer, when she is at her weakest.” A growl of thunder added punctuation to the end of her sentence. “But it was shortsighted to assume she would stand alone.”
“Starting,” the Titan said, her beautiful face framed in brilliant blue-white glare and heavy shadow, “with you, little wizard. Empty night, but your breed is annoying enough to be worth killing.” I’d just been proximate to a divine beatdown and smiting. I’d just been struck by lightning. My snark projectors were out of alignment. But that was no reason not to try. Heck, every insult was essentially a different way of saying the exact same thing. “Yeah?” I wheezed. “Well. You suck.”
“You aren’t anyone,” the Titan said. “You’re nothing. Just an animal. An animal near the top of its class on one little world.” “And yet, I walk where I will,” Marcone said. “I sleep where and when I please. I eat when I hunger. I choose what to make of my life. I am free.”
“Death isn’t when your body stops working. It’s when there’s no more future. When you can’t see past right now, because you stopped believing in tomorrow.”
Yeah, darkness could make things really, really bad. Frightened people in large groups rarely acted wisely. But sometimes that foolishness came out as kindness and compassion, when there was every reason to look out only for yourself. Sometimes it came out as irrational courage in the face of overwhelming terror. Sometimes our madness leads us to choices that make us better and nobler and kinder than we were before.
Mab raised a hand as I began to speak and said, her voice tired and uninflected, “Yes. You defy me. Obviously. You always do. In the interests of efficiency, let us assume you have uttered some mystifying reference to mortal popular nonsense, I have glared at you and reminded you of the power I hold over you, you have confirmed that you continue to understand the circumstances that require me to tolerate your insouciance, and we have both agreed to continue this ridiculous dance in the future, presumably for the remainder of time.” Which made me blink.
She stared up at the light, ignoring me. Click, click, click. “Thank you,” I said. “You fought for my city. My people. Thank you.” She looked at me in sudden confusion. “Thank you,” I said, for the third time. Three repetitions separate the random from the intentional. Repeat something three times, and you make it more real. Mab shivered at my gratitude. She closed her eyes. And for a second, raindrops fell through the hole in the roof. Then they went click, click, click again. And Mab opened her eyes. “Child,” she said. “You are welcome.”
There are a lot of ways to get ready for trouble. You get ready to fight. That’s one of them. But it’s even more important that you build something worth fighting for.
“Don’t forget being woken at the crack of dawn by excited children,” he said. I groaned. Michael smiled faintly. “Don’t moan about it, Harry. I got pretty used to my Molly showing up at my bedside at five a.m. with a cup of burnt coffee she made herself.” Something sad and tired touched the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “It’s the most annoying thing you’ll ever miss once it’s gone.”
“What about the funerals?” I asked. My voice was bitter. Molly was quiet for a long moment before she said, gently, “Those, too.” I bowed my head. I counted my breaths. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’re trying to be kind and I’m just …” “Don’t,” she said. “It’s supposed to hurt, Harry. I’m glad you hurt. It means you’re still you.”
I watched her chest rise and fall for a little while, and the pain receded. I took a deep breath. I’ve fallen apart before. I’ve let the madness have me. But I was a father now. I no longer had that luxury. Thank God. Nothing you ever do can change the past. Can’t live your life looking backwards or you’ll spend it walking in circles. That little girl was the future. I nodded. And then I went back to the bicycle.
