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“Harry Dresden,” he said. “You, of all people, should know the power of words.”
Michael half-smiled. “The Lord will never give you a burden bigger than your shoulders can bear, Harry. All we can do is face what comes and have faith.”
“Hello, angel,” Michael rumbled, and leaned over to give the woman a kiss on the cheek. She accepted it with all the loving tolerance of a Komodo dragon.
Thirty pounds of cat is a lot of fondness, and I had to have Susan’s help to keep from falling over. “Eating small children again, Mister?” My cat meowed, then padded down the stairs and pawed at the door.
“Vampires. They can be a couple hundred years out of style and not notice.”
Hi, God, it’s me, Harry. Please don’t turn me into a pillar of salt.
And, if not . . .” I left the words hanging. One thing about intimidation is that people can always think up something worse that you could do to them than you can, if you leave their imagination some room to play.
All power, no matter how terrible or benign, whether its wielder is aware of it or not, has a purpose.
Karrin Murphy headed up Special Investigations, a post that had traditionally resulted in a couple of months of bumbling and then a speedy exit from the police force. Murphy hadn’t bumbled—instead, she’d hired the services of Chicago’s only professional wizard as a consultant. She was getting to where she had a pretty good grasp on the local preternatural predators, at least the most common of them, but when things got hairy she still called me in. Technically, I show up on the paperwork as an investigative consultant. I guess the computer records system doesn’t have numerical codes for demon
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Shadows fell in sharp slants from all the tall trees and tall houses, turning the streets and sidewalks into candy canes of light and darkness.
in the circles of the supernatural community, an Old World code of conduct still ruled. When you have a problem, you settle it face to face, within the circle. You don’t bring in the cops and the other mortals as weapons. They’re the nuclear missiles of the supernatural world. If you show people a supernatural brawl going on, it’s going to scare the snot out of them and the next thing you know, they’re burning everything and everyone in sight. Most people wouldn’t care that one scary guy might have been right and the other was wrong. Both guys are scary, so you ace both of them and sleep
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Micky stared at me for a second and then thrust his head at my hand, his teeth making snapping motions. I jerked back even though he couldn’t have reached me. Someone trying to bite you makes you react, more than if they take a punch at you. Biting is just more primal. Spooky.
“Damn,” Murphy said. “I get sick of playing catch-up, sometimes.” “Yeah. So do I.”
“There is such a thing as evil, Harry, in spite of what many people say. Just remember that there’s good, too.”
“There are only a couple of possibilities. A, we’re dealing with some kind of godlike being in which case we’re screwed.” “And the Absurd Understatement Award goes to Harry Dresden.”
“You’re forgetting the third possibility,” Bob said amiably. “C, it’s something new that neither of us understand and you’re sailing off in ignorance to plunge into the mouth of Charybdis.”
“Come on, guys,” I said. “We’re on the trail. We have the advantage. What could possibly go wrong?”
If, if, if. I had a lot of ifs. But I didn’t have much time.
My heartbeat slowly eased down to something less than that of a terrified rabbit.
“Oh. Damn. This is one of those right and wrong issues again, isn’t it.” “Yeah, one of those.” “I’m still confused about this whole morality thing, Harry.” “Join the club,” I muttered.
“Okay,” Bob said, meekly. “We have now left Reason and Sanity Junction. Next stop, Looneyville.”
There’s a kind of mathematics that goes along with saving people’s lives. You find yourself running the figures without even realizing it, like a medic on a battlefield. This patient has no chance of surviving. That one does, but only if you let a third die.
I leaned back against the column, gasping for breath through the rain, and tried to gather my strength. It didn’t take long—there just wasn’t all that much strength left to gather.
Five white candles surrounded my summoning circle, the points of an invisible pentacle. White for protection. And because they’re the cheapest color at Wal-Mart. Hey, being a wizard doesn’t make money grow on trees.
I don’t have anything against God. Far from it. But I don’t understand Him. And I don’t trust a lot of the people that go around claiming that they’re working in His best interests. Faeries and vampires and whatnot—those I can fathom. Even demons. Sometimes, even the Fallen. I can understand why they do what they do. But I don’t understand God. I don’t understand how He could see the way people treat one another, and not chalk up the whole human race as a bad idea.
Michael buckled on the white cloak with its red cross as he went. He had a matching surcoat, boots, and armored guards on his shoulders. He had a pair of heavy gauntlets tucked through his boots, and wore a pair of knives on his belt, one on either side. He smelled like steel and he clanked a little bit when he walked. It sounded comforting, in a friendly, dreadnought kind of way.
But we couldn’t have it descending into a general brawl, now could we?” “We couldn’t?” “No, of course not. There would be far fewer opportunities to seduce and deceive and backstab.”
“Michael. Chill out. We’re here to get information, not bring the house down on a bunch of nasties.” “Samson did,” Michael said. “Yeah, and look how well things turned out for him.
“Relax, Harry. I’m not letting anyone lick me, and I’m not looking anyone in the eyes. It’s kind of like visiting New York.”
It’s tough to say no to peace, to the comfort of it. All through history, people have traded wealth, children, land, and lives to buy it. But peace can’t be bought, can it, chief, prime minister? The only ones offering to sell it always want something more. They lie.
Her eyes fastened calmly on my face, evidently not fearing to meet my gaze. I figured that whatever she was, she probably had an advantage on me in the devastating gaze department.
Fear has a lot of flavors and textures. There’s a sharp, silver fear that runs like lightning through your arms and legs, galvanizes you into action, power, motion. There’s heavy, leaden fear that comes in ingots, piling up in your belly during the empty hours between midnight and morning, when everything is dark, every problem grows larger, and every wound and illness grows worse.
Fear and anger always come hand in hand. Anger is my hiding place from fear, my shield and my sword against it. I waited for the anger to harden my resolve, put steel into my spine. I waited for the rush of outrage and strength, to feel the power of it coalesce around me like a cloud.
The words poured out of my mouth before I’d had time to run them past the thinking part of my brain, but they had that solid, certain ring of truth. Oh, hell.
“Dammit,” I swore, earning a glare from Michael. “Dammit, dammit, dammit, woman. All women, for that matter.” That earned me a glare from Susan.
I hate it when a woman asks me for help and I witlessly decide to go ahead and give it, regardless of dozens of perfectly good reasons not to. I hate it when I get threatened and strong-armed into doing something stupid and risky. And I hate it when someone takes the moral high ground on me and wins.
In games and history books and military science lectures, teachers and old warhorses and other scholarly types lay out diagrams and stand-up models in neat lines and rows. They show you, in a methodical order, how this division forced a hole in that line, or how these troops held their ground when all others broke. But that’s an illusion. A real struggle between combatants, whether they number dozens or thousands, is something inherently messy, fluid, difficult to follow. The illusion can show you the outcome, but it doesn’t impress upon you the surge and press of bodies, the screams, the
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The darkness swallowed me and kept me for a long time. There was nothing but silence where I drifted, nothing but endless night. I wasn’t cold. I wasn’t warm. I wasn’t anything. No thought, no dreams, no anything. It was too good to last.
People who have near-death experiences often talk about moving toward the light at the end of the tunnel. Or ascending toward the light, or flying or floating, or falling. I didn’t get that. I’m not sure what that says about the state of my soul. There was no light, no kindly beckoning voice, no lake of fire to fall into. There was only silence, deep and timeless, where not even the beating of my heart thudded in my ears. I felt an odd pressure against my skin, my face, as though I had pressed into and through a wall of plastic wrap.
“For the sake of one soul. For one loved one. For one life.” I called power into my blasting rod, and its tip glowed incandescent white. “The way I see it, there’s nothing else worth fighting a war for.”
Vampires died. Ghosts swarmed and screamed everywhere, terrible and beautiful, heartbreaking and ridiculous as humanity itself. The sound banished any thought of speech, hammered upon my skin like physical blows.
The woman’s tongue was sharper than any sword. Even Amoracchius.
“I’m not a philosopher, Harry,” he said. “But here’s something for you to think about, at least. What goes around comes around. And sometimes you get what’s coming around.” He paused for a moment, frowning faintly, pursing his lips. “And sometimes you are what’s coming around. You see what I mean?”
