Death Masks (The Dresden Files, #5)

by Jim Butcher

People don’t believe in the supernatural these days. Supernatural things are scary. It’s much more comfortable to rest secure in the knowledge that no one can reach out with magic and quietly kill you, that vampires exist only in movies, and that demons are mere psychological dysfunctions.

Usually being scared out of my mind is kind of useful. Magic comes from emotions, and terror is handy fuel. But this wasn’t the place to start calling up gales of wind or flashes of fire. There were too many people around, and it would be too easy to get someone hurt, even killed.

Hell’s bells. Dedicated, honorable, courageous, self-sacrificial loonies are absolutely the worst people in the world to go up against.

A duel would mean a fair fight, and I hate fair fights. In the words of a murderous Faerie Queen, they’re too easy to lose.

“Mostly I was just trying to save my own ass. The world was a twofer. Maybe I’m getting cynical. I suspect the only thing I accomplished was to keep the faeries from screwing up the place so that we could screw it up ourselves.”

“Going to be a busy week. Half a dozen professional hitters for the outfit are in town. The county morgue is doing double business. City Hall is telling us to bend over backward for some bigwig from Europe or somewhere. And now some kind of plague monster is leaving unidentifiable, mutilated corpses on the side of the road.” “That’s why they pay you the big bucks, Murph.”

There’s a case to be made for prophecy; don’t get me wrong. Mortals, even wizards, all exist at a finite point in the flow of time. Or, to make it simple, if time is a river, then you and I are like pebbles in it. We exist in one spot at a time, occasionally jostled back and forth by the currents. Spirits don’t always have the same kind of existence. Some of them are more like a long thread than a stone—their presence tenuous, but rippling upstream and down as a part of their existence, experiencing more of the stream than the pebble. That’s how oracle spirits know about the future and the past. They’re living in them both at the same time they’re delivering mysterious messages to you. That’s why they only give brief warnings, or mysterious dreams or prophetic knock-knock jokes, or however they drop their clues. If they tell you too much, it will change the future that they’re experiencing, so they have to give out the advice with a light touch. I know. It makes my head hurt too.

I supposed if the duel could be worked into some kind of pizza-eating contest I might have a shot, but somehow I didn’t think that the Pizza Spress Hungry Man Special was on the list of approved weaponry.

“Life would be unbearably dull if we had answers to all our questions.”

I am just another blind man. I do not get the whole picture of what transpires in all places. I am blind and limited. I would be a fool to think myself wise. And so, not knowing what the universe means, I can only try to be responsible with the knowledge, the strength, and the time given to me. I must be true to my heart.”

There’s a reason the tux has weathered a century virtually unchanged. You don’t fix what isn’t broken. Tuxedos make anyone look good, and I was a living testament to it.

Marcone did smile that time. It was a cool expression. Tigers with full stomachs wear smiles like Marcone’s when they’re watching baby deer play.

The blood on their hands does not make it right to bloody my own. My choices are measured against my own soul. Not against the stains on theirs.”

I narrowed my eyes and looked at Thomas. Thomas put on an innocent expression. “Don’t look at me. I’m a drunken, chemical-besotted playboy who does nothing but cavort, sleep, and feed. And even if I had the mind to take a bit of vengeance on the Red Court, I wouldn’t have the backbone to actually stand up to anyone.” He flashed me a radiant smile. “I’m totally harmless.”

Marcone stepped up to

“Apocalypse is a frame of mind,” he said then. “A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is despair for the future. It is the death of hope.”

But dammit, I couldn’t hate him anymore. I couldn’t hate him because I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t have made the same choice in his place. Hate was simpler, but the world ain’t a simple place. It would have been easier to hate Marcone. I just couldn’t do it.

It isn’t good to hold on too hard to the past. You can’t spend your whole life looking back. Not even when you can’t see what lies ahead. All you can do is keep on keeping on, and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should be—even if it isn’t what you expected.