Storm Front (The Dresden Files, #1)

by Jim Butcher

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.

If you’ve never touched it, it’s hard to explain. Magic is created by life, and most of all by the awareness, intelligence, emotions of a human being. To end such a life with the same magic that was born from it was hideous, almost incestuous somehow.

“The world’s falling apart at the seams, Harry. I guess I just think people are pretty arrogant to believe we’ve learned everything there is to know in the past century or so. What the hell. I can buy that we’re just now starting to see the things around us in the dark again. It appeals to the cynic in me.”

They say we wizards are subtle. But believe you me, we’ve got nothing, nothing at all, on women

Well, where instinct fails, intellect must venture.

I’ve often wished that I had some suave and socially acceptable hobby that I could fall back on in times like this.

I was tired and cranky, and under the best of circumstances I am not exactly a type A personality.

“Harry,” Bob lectured me, “I was seducing shepherdesses when you weren’t a twinkle in your great-grandcestor’s eyes. I think I know what I’m doing.”

I had a lot of worry to use to fuel the magic, and a lot of annoyance and one hell of a lot of stubbornness.

She was angry. Not that this was unusual for Murphy, but it told me that something else was going on. Some people panic when things get rough, harried. Some people fall apart. Murphy got pissed.

I had to maintain a fine balance between going in ready for trouble and going in asking for trouble.

I swerved the old Studebaker into a parking place, racing a Volvo for it and winning by dint of driving the older and heavier vehicle and having the more suicidal attitude.

I pulled the Studebaker into my drive and killed the engine. I tallied the score for the evening. Enigmas: lots. Harry: zero.

“You’re saying that some sort of wizard version of Arnold Schwarzenegger pulled this off?”

“Gang war in the streets,” Murphy said. “And now the outfit is bringing sorcery into it as well. Mafioso magic spells. Jesus Christ.”

Rain was coming down in sheets. I could hear it on the concrete outside and on the old building above me. It creaked and swayed in the spring thunderstorm and the wind, timbers gently flexing, wise enough with age to give a little, rather than put up stubborn resistance until they broke. I could probably stand to learn something from that.

Susan’s mouth quirked in a malicious, predatory little smile, and she came in, folding down her umbrella and brushing past me. “This is your apartment?” “Nah,” I told her. “This is my summer home in Zurich.”

“Harry!” Bob gulped as we worked. “There’s, a, um. A seriously badass toad-demon coming down the ladder.”

The men and women of the forensics team, all five of them, were looking up at me. Waiting. As I looked around, they all averted their gazes, but you didn’t have to be a wizard to see what was in their faces. Fear, pure and simple. They had been faced with something that science couldn’t explain. It rattled them, shook them to their cores, this sudden, violent, and bloody evidence that three hundred years of science and research was no match for the things that were still, even after all this time, lurking in the dark.

My thoughts were on that topic and similar issues of doom and gloom when a man with a hat pulled low over his face began to walk past me, stopped halfway, then turned and drove his fist into my belly.

There is no truer gauge of a man’s character than the way in which he employs his strength, his power.

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.