40Chapter One
The world's a strange place. War, famine, tectonic plates, electric toothbrushes. The strangest things surround us every day. We see it, and just lump it into the baseline we call 'normal.' Some things just show up as a product of the times and get labeled 'progress.' Older things, like the tectonic plates, are filed under 'old news.' And sometimes we forget the classic stuff. We forget how things used to be, in favor of how things are. Ideas change, so the world changes.
Or so some people think.
But there are forces out there older than humanity itself that play around in plain sight. Things that nobody notices. And if they do notice, it's written off; buried. Things like magic. And I'm here to tell you, the world is a lot stranger than you think. My name is Harry Dresden, and I'm a wizard. Conjure by it at your own risk.
Beneath my heavy blankets in my basement apartment, I, the savior of Chicago many times over from nightmares, necromancers, vampires, and fallen angels, slept. In my profession a good night's sleep is hard to come by, so I savor them as much as I can.
A slow whine began to stir me from my dreams. But on a freezing Winter day, nobody wants to wake up when they should, so I tried to ignore it; block it out. But it quickly persisted and intensified until it was a shrill screech echoing inside my head. I bolted upright, clamping my hands to my temples. I looked over to my Mickey Mouse alarm clock, expecting it to be finally exploding after being around magic for so long. But I saw that it was not nearly nine-o-clock, nor was the buzzer going off. But before I could process this, the screech turned into a full deafening scream. I clamped my eyes shut as the sound dug into my brain like hot needles, forcing out a roar of my own.
Wizard's don't scream. It's bad for the image.
I felt the world spinning around me, and my legs tangling in my blanket as the sound continued. But rather than the hard concrete floor bashing my skull in, as I expected, I felt the warm shaggy body of a miniature anklosaurus come beneath me. I opened my eyes to see my dog, Mouse, laying under me like a rug. A concerned look passed through his eyes, and he licked my face until the scream died away. When I felt comfortable enough to remove my hands from my head, I placed one around his neck and scratched behind his ears. "Good boy" I whispered to him. A great big doggy grin covered his face.
Slowly I began to reorient myself, untangling from my blankets and climbing, with a little help, back into my bed. I sat up, placed my face in my hands and wished for the world's biggest aspirin. "Hell's Bells" I breathed aloud. "What was that?"
As a wizard, I'd come into contact with a lot of nasty things. The kind of things that went bump in the night, and the things that bumped them. And as a wizard, I'd seen my fair share of magic. Curses, hexes, spells, enchantments, you name it. And as I sorted my thoughts through the pain echoing around the inside of my skull, I decided that whatever that was had to be some kind of psychomancy. The kind of magic that works on the mind. It's a nasty, invasive kind of magic that violates one of the Laws of Magic. And the White Council, the governing body of the wizarding world, is particularly keen on playing guillotine with anyone who uses it. And as my thoughts cleared, they gathered around the one person I knew that specialized in psychomancy: my apprentice, Molly Carpenter.
You see, two years before, I found out she'd been using psychomancy to free her friends from drug addiction. While noble, it was also pretty stupid, and affected their minds a lot more than she had intended. The White Council, showed up. And trust me, when they find reason enough to come out of their hole in the ground, they leave a mess behind. I stepped in and vouched for her, being the stand-up guy that I am. Thankfully they bought it, but they saddled me with making sure she didn't put another magical toe out of line. Otherwise we'd both be killed on the spot.
A cheery group, the White Council.
As I considered whether or not Molly could have been involved with this particular headache (her apprenticeship hadn't exactly been easy on either of us), another ringing invaded my ears. I groaned angrily and clamped my hands to my ears. This ringing, though, I recognized immediately. Throwing back the blankets, I stalked out of my bedroom into the darkness of my living room, with Mouse at my heels. And with a muttered 'Fliccum Biccus' and a mild infusion of will, the candles around me glowed to life.
It was a modest setup. A few rugs of various styles and cultures lay over the cold concrete floor. An original, mint-condition Star Wars poster hung from one of my walls. Half-melted candles sat scattered across the room. A comfy old couch lay in front of a fireplace whose embers had died away the night before. And on a stand next to the couch sat my telephone, probably the most advanced piece of technology in my apartment. Next to the alarm clock, that is.
You see, magic and science don't mix very well. Basically everything produced after World War II breaks down pretty quickly in the presence of magic. The more moving parts it has, the more likely it is to foul up. Which makes it difficult for wizards like myself to use a lot of modern conveniences. Like, for instance, hot water. Streetlights can start exploding if I walk by with a temper. I don't even want to think about what would happen with a gas-powered water heater.
I picked up the noisy telephone and grumbled "Dresden." But what I heard on the other end was the last thing I would have expected on an early winter morning after a fairly calm season. "Harry, thank God!"
Michael Carpenter was one of the burlier, manlier men I'd come across in my lifetime, and the frightened squeak that followed his voice snapped me to immediate attention. "Michael? What is it, what's wrong?" I heard a pained scream in the background, along with a few childlike cries.
"It's Molly! I don't know what's wrong with her, she's..." Another agonized cry carried over the line. "Harry, come quickly, please!"
The ache in my mind was put on hold instantly, and I didn't bother to say a word before snapping the receiver back down. I hopped into a set of clothes, threw on my duster, and stuffed my usual items from the basket beside my door into my pockets. And in precisely three seconds flat, I'd charged through my stubborn steel-plated siege door and urged my car up to full speed down the streets of early-morning Chicago.
I may be a poor wizard living in a hole-in-the-ground apartment, driving a beat-up little Volkswagon and completely deprived of the nicer things in life, but I'd be damned if I'd let anything happen to my friends.
Michael Carpenter and I had been (almost literally) through Hell and back together. If he wasn't a friend, I wouldn't know what one was. He was one of the three Knights of the Cross, and as such carried one of the three legendary swords whose blades were forged from the capital-C Crucifixion nails. He'd fought the forces of evil on a regular basis in the name of the Almighty, and he did it with little more than his experience as a swordsman and his faith.
At least, he had been a Knight of the Cross. The last time we'd fought together, he had been torn up pretty bad. A bullet from a demon's machine gun had bounced around inside him, doing all kinds of nasty things that had nothing to do with magic. And it had been my fault. He'd been crippled, and unable to carry on as a Knight.
Michael Carpenter had been my friend for a long time, and stood by me when nobody else had. Hell, I would have dumped me from the way I sounded back then. Not to mention that his wife Charity had, until recently, never held anything but a balance between distaste and hatred for me. So if he was in need, I'd come running. If I had to take a detour straight through the Underworld itself, I'd be there for him. I owed it to him, not only for everything he'd done for me, but for everything I'd put him through.
Plus, his daughter was my apprentice. It was my responsibility to make sure she was alright and not, you know, trying to get us both killed by meddling with psychomancy again.
It took way too long, but eventually I screeched the Blue Beetle to a halt in front of the Carpenter home. A two-story Victorian dream house in ivory and burgundy, with a genuine white picket fence around the lawn. My long legs allowed me, with only slight difficulty, to leap directly over that fence and sprint straight across the lawn. As soon as my shoes hit the wooden porch, Michael had opened the front door for me. "Thank goodness. Come inside!"
One of the few things that a lot of supernatural writers and movie-makers get right about the real supernatural is that thresholds, meaning entrances to homes, have a lot of power. Vampires are notoriously unable to cross a working threshold without an invitation. While wizards aren't quite so dark and, well, evil, it does take a toll. Stepping across a threshold without being invited can all but strip a wizard of their power entirely. A Senior White Council member would be downgraded to Beginner status, meaning a guy like me would hardly be able to make a stiff breeze, much less do any real magic.
Molly lay on the comfy couch in the large living room that overlooked their snow-covered backyard, glowing with the almost-light bouncing off the first clouds that preceded sunrise. Huddled around her in prayer were the other Carpenter children; Daniel, Matthew, Alicia, Amanda, and Hope. And sitting tightly in a chair at the end of the couch was Charity, with baby Harry clutched in her arms. Evidently the entire house had been roused by Molly's screams, though I honestly couldn't be sure whether or not they usually woke up around this time. Charity ran a tight ship.
But at the moment, she looked just as frightened as anyone, as her oldest daughter lay writhing painfully on their living room couch. The last time she looked so concerned, vulnerable, and honestly frightened, was when we'd invaded a frozen faerie fortress.
With a quick exchange of our eyes, I knelt down at Molly's head. Her eyes were squeezed shut, and her brow was wet with sweat, even being down to her pajamas on a cold Winter morning. I put my hands on either side of her temples to steady her movement. "How long has she been like this?" I asked.
"Michael called as soon as we found her" replied Charity. I knew in my head that it had already been way too long to be healthy. If the psychomancy that had hit me was working on Molly now...
Well, I didn't really want to think about it.
Michael moved into the room. I say 'moved' rather than 'stepped' because Michael had been wheelchair-bound for the past few months, since our last little adventure. It was a solemn reminder. "Can you help her?" he breathed, exasperated.
"Yeah" I said. "But I've got to ruin your rug." I looked around at the kids, and dug into one of my duster's cavernous pockets. "Okay, kids. I need you to move your big sister into the middle of the room. Can you do that?"
Before I'd even gotten the words half out of my mouth, Charity's little soldiers had managed to make a human gurney under Molly. I quickly directed them to the nice clear spot in front of the bay window, pushing aside the coffee table and foot stool in the way. "Okay, back up" I commanded, quickly pulling a thick piece of chalk from my pocket, and drawing a solid circle around Molly and myself into the carpet. I knelt down over my apprentice and infused a tiny bit of will into the chalk circle. With a sort of mystical blip, I felt the circle close.
Magical circles are used by wizards for a whole bunch of different things. Usually it's for ceremonies to focus energy. You can contain quite a bit of magical power, or sometimes even physical power, depending on the strength of your circle and your will. But while you normally use it to keep things in, a circle is a pretty good way of keeping things out, too. In this case, harmful psychomancy.
As the circle closed, I felt a sudden gush of pressure against my will, though it quickly faded. Sort of like being bit of tarmac when a car rolls over you. Whatever I felt, it was just the ebb.
Molly's breathing started getting deeper immediately, and she started coughing with the excess force. I helped her into a sitting position, her head over my shoulder and my hand on her back. "You're okay, kid. I gotcha." Her arms lifted and wrapped around me weakly, and she whispered into my ear.
After her fit had finished I broke the circle and stepped away, reactivating it again after I'd passed through, just in case. "Will she be alright?" Michael asked me. It was strange to be looking down now at a man I often looked up to.
I weighed my answer carefully, looking around the room. "Give her some rest, and she'll be as good as new." Charity and Michael both looked in my eyes, and immediately set the children to various duties. The youngsters getting dressed for the day, the older ones grabbing blankets and pillows for Molly.
After the room had cleared, I decided it was safe. "Just before you called, I was hit with some kind of psychomancy. Powerful stuff, to get through my wards and still feel like hot needles in my head. If the same thing hit Molly just now..." I trailed off, not really wanting to think about it. Michael had gotten a haloed security package from his time as a Knight, but Molly's sensitivity to magic is quite a bit higher than mine. Kinda like getting used to living under an elevated train, as opposed to a few blocks away. So if a wave of psychomancy hit me that hard, I could scarcely imagine what it would do to her.
Charity stood up behind her husband and stared at me hard in the eyes, but I noticed her grip tighten on little Harry in her arms. "Will she be okay?"
Trying to lie to Charity Carpenter, especially in Mother Mode, is like trying to win in a fight with a semi-truck at full-speed. It's just a stupid thing to do overall, not to mention nearly impossible. "Her mind needs to heal, and clear. She needs a lot of rest. And aspirin. Beyond that, I can't say."
There was a silence in the air between the three of us. I took another look at the kid, and then at her parents. "I'll be in touch."
I headed for the door, but I heard Michael's wheels squeak as he turned with me. "Would you like to stay for breakfast? It's the least we could do." I turned and looked into Michael's calm, welcoming face, and felt... hungry. I hadn't had much of a dinner last night, and Charity's cooking was heavenly.
But I smiled and looked away. There was too much to do. Not to mention that I'd taken a look at the clock, and realized I'd only eaten my late dinner a few hours ago. I needed to get moving. "Thanks. But nobody plays hit-and-run with my apprentice. I need to find the source of that psychomancy and make sure it doesn't happen again."
Michael smiled softly. "Well then, let me just say 'thank you.'" Michael took my hand and shook it in his powerful grasp. I'm not exactly a wimp, at a little over six feet with a good reach. But Michael Carpenter's handshake was a hardy one you just never get used to. Being a Knight of the Cross wasn't the only reason I called him the Fist of God.
As the younglings reappeared, their various tasks nearly completed, I slipped into the kitchen and made a phone call. Then I said goodbye to Michael and his wife, and slipped out the front door.
I breathed deep the crisp December air as I walked back to my trusty car, the Blue Beetle: stalwart crusader against the forces of evil and alternative fuels. Although, it's hardly blue anymore. The roof and hood were now primer gray since a close encounter with a giant plant monster (I called it a chlorofiend, but nobody ever understands what that means). Some joker had spray-painted a 53 on the roof at some point. The trunk was a bright shade of cautionary yellow, and the two doors were green and white. The originals were shredded by something with claws.
Yep, the ol' Beetle had seen it's day. But thanks to a good mechanic, classic German engineering, and a mass-marketed design, it had kept me going through thick and thin. But as I climbed inside, I was reminded of the overhaul it had been given. It wasn't factory, and it wasn't as comfy as it had been when I'd bought it. But at least there was an interior. Before a few months ago, it had been down to some wooden crates and two-by-fours. Two words: Mold Demons.
Oh yeah, I live the cultured life.
As I shut the door and cranked the engine, I knew exactly what I needed to do. I needed to talk to some of the other local talents, and then head across town for a pow-wow with a werewolf and his wife. Lying to Charity was impossible. But keeping secrets wasn't too hard. Molly was the most mystically-sensitive person I knew. And if what she had said scared the crap out of me, I couldn't imagine what it would have done to her parents. Just one word: "Burning."