Fool Moon (The Dresden Files, #2)

by Jim Butcher

I didn’t know why Murphy hadn’t been calling me in as often. I had my suspicions, but I hadn’t gotten the chance to confront her about them yet. Maybe it wasn’t anything I’d done. Maybe the monsters had gone on strike. Yeah, right.

My belly protested again, growling its neolithic craving for charred meat.

I was sipping ale and thinking dark thoughts when the door opened again. I didn’t look up, occupied as I was with brooding, a famous pastime of wizards everywhere.

I looked up through the clear night at the almost-full moon. Werewolves jumping through windows at gangster’s lackeys in unfinished restaurants. A mangled corpse in the middle of a blood-drenched floor. Berserk FBI field agents drawing guns and shooting to kill. A little kung fu, a little John Wayne, and a few casual threats. So far, I thought, my nerves jangling, just one more night on the job.

Murphy wasn’t a wizard. She had almost no knowledge of the world of the supernatural, the world that the great religion of Science had been failing to banish since the Renaissance.

The FBI was not in any sense prepared to deal with a pack of ravening werewolves stalking down victims in the midst of a Chicago autumn. That was more my department.

I found him in a Dumpster one day when he was a kitten and he promptly adopted me. Despite my struggles, Mister had been an understanding soul, and I eventually came to realize that I was a part of his little family, and by his gracious consent was allowed to remain in his apartment. Cats. Go figure.

Bob heaved a sigh. “A gorgeous woman like that, and here you are, down in your musty old lab, getting ready to do more ridiculous nonsense.” “Precisely,” I said. “Now, shut up and let’s get to work.” Bob grumbled something in Latin, but rattled a few times to shake the dust off of the skull. “Sure, what do I know? I’m just a pathetic little spirit, right?” “With a photographic memory, three or four hundred years’ worth of research experience, and more deduction capacity than a computer, Bob, yeah.” Bob almost seemed to smile. “Just for that, you get my best effort tonight, Harry. Maybe you’re not such an idiot after all.”

“You’ve never been a peasant in medieval France, Harry,” Bob said. “Life was hard for those people. Never enough food, shelter, medicine. If you could give yourself a fur coat and the ability to go out and hunt your own meat, you would have jumped at the chance, too.”

Ever heard of the Norse berserkers? Those guys were lycanthropes, I think. And they’re born, not made.”

Aside from all of that, there was a monster of one kind or another lurking in the dark, and the police and the FBI had been helpless to stop it. That left only me, Harry Dresden, your friendly neighborhood wizard, to step in and do something about it. And, if the killer figured out that I was getting involved, he would doubtless start gunning for me next. My troubles were multiplying. Hexenwolves. Werewolves. Lycanthropes. Loup-garou. What will they think of next?

I’ve had worse days. That’s the great thing about being a wizard. I can always tell myself, honestly, that things could be worse.

“It worked,” I said. “We did it.” “Of course it worked,” Tera said. “Men are foolish. They will stare at anything female and naked.”

My thoughts were rambling now, panic making them scamper around like a frightened chipmunk.

The loup-garou was a wolf, in the same way that a velociraptor is a bird—same basic design, vastly different outcome.

“Don’t mess with a wizard when he’s wizarding!”

“Look, I’ve had a long night.” “I know,” my double said. “Believe me, I know. That’s why it’s important to get some of this out now, before it settles in. Before you blow a gasket on your sanity, man.” “I’ve not worried about that,” I lied. “I’m as solid as a brick wall.” My double snorted. “If you weren’t getting pretty close to crazy, would you be talking to yourself right now?” I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Shrugged. “Okay. You’ve got a point.” “I’ve got more than that,” my double said.

Concentrate on what you will do, not what you should have done.

Eight ounces of cold coffee, I thought, dimly. Yum. It tasted like stale cardboard and too-old pizza and burned coffee beans. But as it went down my gullet, I could feel the power in the brew spreading out into me, active and alive, as though I had swallowed a huge, hyperkinetic amoeba. My fatigue quite simply vanished, and energy came rushing into me, like it sometimes does at the end of a really good concerto or overture. The pain receded down to levels that I could manage. The soreness lifted out of my muscles, and my cloudy, cloggy thought processes cleared as though someone had flushed my synapses with jalapeño.

Two people sat in the cab with him, faces I didn’t recognize from here, and they evidently didn’t believe in seat belts. They were tossed about the inside of the truck like toys.

It didn’t matter to me, at that moment, that I couldn’t work any of my spells against them. I might not have any magic available to me, but that didn’t make me any less of a wizard, one of the magi, the wise. That’s the true power of a wizard. I know things. Knowledge is power. With power comes responsibility.

“You were wrong, wizard,” she said. I looked down at her, and she met my gaze with her soulless amber eyes. “How so?” “They have not become animals.” She looked over her shoulder, her eyes narrowed. “Animals do not do what they have done. Animals kill to eat, to defend themselves or their own, and to protect their territory. Not for the joy of it. Not for the lust of it.” She looked back up at me. “Only humans do that, wizard.”

The house wasn’t large, by the neighborhood’s standards, but that was like saying that a bale of hay isn’t much to eat, by elephant standards.

There was no doubt in him, when he should have been afraid. Only fools and madmen know that kind of certainty. And I had already noted that Denton was no fool.

The barrel of Denton’s gun looked bigger and deeper than the national debt as it swung to bear on my face.

“All right,” she said. “But God, this smells like you’re trying to set me up, Dresden. If you get me killed, there’s no one left who saw what happened here, is there?” “If you want to be safe, go after Susan,” I said bluntly. “We split up. One of us attracts its attention, maybe the other one will get through.” “Fine,” Murphy snarled. “Fuck you, Harry Dresden.” Famous last words, I thought, but I didn’t waste any breath on voicing it. It was time to face the loup-garou.

I searched inside of me, where everything was numb and empty and tired. Magic comes from the heart, from your feelings, your deepest expressions of desire. That’s why black magic is so easy—it comes from lust, from fear and anger, from things that are easy to feed and make grow. The sort I do is harder. It comes from something deeper than that, a truer and purer source—harder to tap, harder to keep, but ultimately more elegant, more powerful.

My magic. That was at the heart of me. It was a manifestation of what I believed, what I lived. It came from my desire to see to it that someone stood between the darkness and the people it would devour. It came from my love of a good steak, from the way I would sometimes cry at a good movie or a moving symphony. From my life. From the hope that I could make things better for someone else, if not always for me.

Later, I went with Murph to Carmichael’s funeral. She went with me to Kim Delaney’s. Those are the kind of things friends do for each other.

Maybe, in a few hundred years, people might actually be willing to consider what was real in the world with an open mind. But I doubted it.

They’re just itching for me to lead them in some meaningful crusade against evil. Hell, I have trouble just paying the bills.