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My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. I’m a wizard. I work out of an office in midtown Chicago. As far as I know, I’m the only openly practicing professional wizard in the country. You can find me in the yellow pages, under “Wizards.”
Science, the largest religion of the twentieth century, had become somewhat tarnished by images of exploding space shuttles, crack babies, and a generation of complacent Americans who had allowed the television to raise their children.
It is the prerogative of wizards to be grumpy.
But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that there isn’t an invisible demon about to eat your face.
I think that men ought to treat women like something other than just shorter, weaker men with breasts.
Evocation is the most direct, spectacular, and noisy form of expressed magic, or sorcery. Explosions, fire, that sort of thing.
“Thaumaturgy,” I said. “As above, so below. Make something happen on a small scale, and give it the energy to happen on a large scale.”
Smiling always seems to annoy people more than actually insulting them. Or maybe I just have an annoying smile.
They say we wizards are subtle. But believe you me, we’ve got nothing, nothing at all, on women.
Potions are all made pretty much the same way. First you need a base to form the essential liquid content, then something to engage each of the senses, and then something for the mind and something else for the spirit. Eight ingredients, all in all, and they’re different for each and every potion, and for each person who makes them.
The next step was where the effort came in. Once all the ingredients are mixed together, you have to force enough energy through them to activate them. It isn’t the actual physical ingredients that are important—it’s the meaning that they carry, too, the significance that they have for the person making the potion, and for those who will be using it.
You don’t go walking into the proverbial lion’s den lightly. You start with a good breakfast.
Kids. You gotta love them. I adore children. A little salt, a squeeze of lemon—perfect.
Have you ever felt despair? Absolute hopelessness? Have you ever stood in the darkness and known, deep in your heart, in your spirit, that it was never, ever going to get better? That something had been lost, forever, and that it wasn’t coming back?
To have the Third Sight suddenly opened to you like that, not knowing what it was, what was happening to you; to look on the man you had wed, who had given you children, and to see him for what he truly was, obsessed with power, consumed by greed—it had to have been hell. And it would remain with her. Always.
She sipped water, then continued, as if desperate to finish, to get the taste of the words out of her mouth.
Where she was, there was nothing but an endless, hopeless darkness full of fear, pain, and defeat.
I withdrew in silence and left her to her weeping. Perhaps it would help her start to heal. To me, it only sounded like pieces of glass falling from a shattered window.
Furious and sad. I didn’t know if I wanted to scream or to cry.
I stuffed down all the feelings, all the fear, all the anger into a tight little ball. I didn’t have time to let those feelings blind me now. I needed clarity, focus, purpose. I needed a plan.
If I was going to go out, it wasn’t going to be while I was lying around moaning and bitching about how useless it all was. If Victor Sells wanted to take out Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, he was going to have to shove his magic right down my throat.
I shoved the door open with my staff and stalked into the office, my blasting rod extended before me and words of power upon my lips.
“You stubborn bitch from hell.” I felt at a loss for a second, then shook my head.
Thunder growled, near at hand. Lightning danced overhead, somewhere in the clouds, casting odd light and spectral shadows through the roiling overcast. The storm had arrived.
There is no truer gauge of a man’s character than the way in which he employs his strength, his power.
Where trolls stay the hell under their bridges and where elves don’t come swooping out to snatch children from their cradles. Where vampires respect the limits, and where the faeries mind their p’s and q’s.
My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. When things get strange, when what goes bump in the night flicks on the lights, when no one else can help you, give me a call. I’m in the book.
