Changes (The Dresden Files, #12)

by Jim Butcher

The man once wrote: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. Tolkien had that one mostly right.

“Ack!” I said. Fearless master of the witty dialogue, that’s me.

“I think cynics are playful and cute.”

“I could take the prehistoric bitch.”

So we do what a good wizard always does when the odds are stacked up against us: We cheat.

Susan smiled at me, giving Molly the Female Once-Over—a process by which one woman creates a detailed profile of another woman based upon about a million subtle details of clothing, jewelry, makeup, and body type, and then decides how much of a social threat she might be. Men have a parallel process, but it’s binary: Does he have beer? If yes, will he share with me?

She frowned at me in annoyance and said, “You know, I believe it is possible to reference something other than Star Wars, boss.” I narrowed my eyes in Muppetly wisdom. “That is why you fail.”

“Do it or I dock you a year’s pay.” “You know you don’t pay me anything, right?” “Curses,” I said. “Foiled again.”

Unlike me, he’s a people person. Canine. Whatever.

“Wow,” Bob said, in a perfectly calm, matter-of-fact, conversational tone. “That is incredibly unfair.”

“Hey. How did you know where to find me?” “I let Mouse drive.” Thump, thump, thump.

People who ask questions and think about their faith are the last ones to embrace dogma—and the last to abandon their path once they’ve set out on it. I felt fairly sure that the Almighty, whatever name tag He had on at the moment, could handle a few questions from people sincerely looking for answers. Hell, He might even like it.

It is a cold and uncaring universe we live in. Only with strength of body and mind can you hope to control your own fate. Be wary of everyone. Even your protector.”

“That’ll do, pig,” I muttered to myself.

We need a plan B. If we only had a wheelbarrow, that would be something.”

One doesn’t show dangerous predators weakness or fear. It makes them hungry.

“You defy beings that should cow you into silence. You resist forces that are inevitable for no more reason than that you believe they should be resisted. You bow your head to neither demons nor angels, and you put yourself in harm’s way to defend those who cannot defend themselves.” He nodded slowly. “I think I like you.”

There is no sensation to warn you when your soul turns black.

“Wizards don’t giggle,” I said, hardly able to speak. “This is cackling.”

Faith is about what you do. It’s about aspiring to be better and nobler and kinder than you are. It’s about making sacrifices for the good of others—even when there’s not going to be anyone telling you what a hero you are.

There was no way the Beetle was going to resurrect from this one. I found myself blinking tears out of my eyes. It wasn’t an expensive car. It wasn’t a sexy car. It was my car. And it was gone.

I took a big dose of Tylenol the original, since I didn’t have my Tylenol 3 or its lesser-known, short-lived cousin, Tylenol Two: The Pain Strikes Back.

I tried to fall onto my uninjured side, figuring that it deserved a chance to join in the fun, too.

“Come on, Harry,” I said. “You aren’t half-crippled. You’re half-competent.”

“Love your child, Dresden. Everything else flows from there. A wise man said that,” Uriel said. “Whatever you do, do it for love. If you keep to that, your path will never wander so far from the light that you can never return.”

“So many scars,” said my godmother, and her voice had changed subtly, growing cold and precise. “Your scars are beautiful things. Within and without.”

“Polka,” I said, “will never die.”

We’re all so damned fragile.

“There is, I think, humor here which does not translate well from English into sanity.”

“You are a drug dealer. To tiny faeries. Shame.”

I coughed. I waited. “So,” he said. “Mab.” I grunted vaguely in reply. “You hit that,” Sanya said. I did not look at him. My face felt red. “You”—he scrunched up his nose, digging in his memory—“tapped that ass. Presumably, it was phat.” “Sanya!”

“Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.”

The Little Folk love pizza. They love it with a passion so intense that it beggars the imagination. Watching a pizza being devoured was sort of like watching a plane coming apart in midair on those old WWII gun camera reels. Bits would fleck off here and there, and then suddenly in a rush, bits would go flying everywhere, each borne away by the individual fairie who had seized it. It was over in less than three minutes.

Hope is a force of nature. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

I stared up at the Erlking, and with my typical pithy brilliance said, “Uh-oh.”

“Godmother,” I said, staring. “What . . . a big car you have.”

“Love and hate are oft difficult to distinguish between.

“Then you know that Sam was the true hero of the tale,” Sanya said. “That he faced far greater and more terrible foes than he ever should have had to face, and did so with courage. That he went alone into a black and terrible land, stormed a dark fortress, and resisted the most terrible temptation of his world for the sake of the friend he loved. That in the end, it was his actions and his actions alone that made it possible for light to overcome darkness.”

“Shame, child, is for those who fail to live up to the ideal of what they believe they should be.”

And Mouse said, in what sounded to me like perfectly understandable English, “That bitch.” We all stared at him.

In a single moment, I saw the ponderous dance of continents clashing against one another to form mountains, felt the slow sleepiness of the earth, its dreaming shivers felt as disasters by the ephemeral things that lived upon its skin. I saw wealth and riches beyond petty mortal imagination, gold and silver flowing hot in rivers, precious gems by the millions being born and formed.

“More than a century,” Murphy muttered, “and we’ve gone from ‘like a fish needs a bicycle’ to this.”

I’d seen behavior like that before. It was the mark of an addict scoring a fix and full of contentment that he had a body full of booze or drugs or whatever, and therefore the illusion that he could handle emotional issues more capably.

“Stupid, Hoss. Every time. Only so many blackhearted villains in the world, and they only get uppity on occasion. Stupid’s everywhere, every day.”