Jim Butcher - Side Jobs

Jenny tried to run, but the lean wolf ripped across the back of her unwounded leg with its fangs, severing the hamstring. The faerie went down. The wolves were on her before she could scream again. The wheel turns, and Jenny Greenteeth never had a chance. The wolves knew what they were doing.

This was what they did.

I crawled over to Murphy. Her eyes were open and staring, her body and features slack. Some part of my brain remembered the steps for CPR. I started doing it. I adjusted her position, sealed my lips to Murphy’s, and breathed for her. Then compressions. Breathe. Compressions.

“Come on, Murph,” I whispered. “Come on.”

I covered her mouth with mine and breathed again.

For one second, for one teeny, tiny instant, I felt her mouth move. I felt her head tilt, her lips soften, and my oh-so-professional CPR—just for a second, mind you—felt almost, almost like a kiss.

Then she started coughing and sputtering, and I sank back from her in relief. She turned on her side, breathing hard for a moment, and then looked up at me with dazed blue eyes. “Harry?”

I leaned down, causing runnels of punch to slide into one of my eyes, and asked quietly, “Yeah?”

“You have fruit-punch mouth,” she whispered.

Her hand found mine, weak but warm. I held it. We sat together.

BILLY AND GEORGIA got married that night in Father Forthill’s study, at St. Mary of the Angels, an enormous old church. No one was there but them, the padre, Murphy, and me. After all, as far as most anyone else knew, they’d been married at that disastrous travesty of a farce in Lincolnshire.

The ceremony was simple and heartfelt. I stood with Billy. Murphy stood with Georgia. They both looked radiantly happy. They held hands the whole time, except when exchanging rings.

Murphy and I stepped back when they got to the vows.

“Not exactly a fairy-tale wedding,” she whispered.

“Sure it was,” I said. “Had a kiss and an evil stepmother and everything.”

Murphy smiled at me.

“Then by the power vested in me,” the padre said, beaming at the pair from behind his spectacles, “I now pronounce you man and wife. You may kiss th—”

They beat him to it.

—from Many Bloody Returns, edited by Charlaine Harris

Takes place between White Night and Small Favor

I’ve met people who are sweeter and nicer and more likeable than Charlaine Harris—but I really can’t remember when. Every author I’ve ever talked with who knows Charlaine just couldn’t be happier about the success of her books and the HBO series True Blood . She’s that nice. I can’t even bring myself to be jealous. She’s that nice.

So when she invited me to contribute, I said, “Heck, yeah!”

Using a birthday theme (since the book, originally, was supposed to be published on Vlad Dracula’s something-hundredth birthday) was sort of a challenge. Birthdays are about families. Whether they’re a biological family or one that’s come together by choice, it’s your family who gathers to celebrate the anniversary of you .

It’s kind of a profound thing, when you think about it.

But Dresden hadn’t ever really associated his birthday with that kind of joy—only with the knowledge that he’d never really had a family. So I decided to do a story about Harry coping with the unfamiliar role of being the guy celebrating the life of his half brother. I found a very good mall in Chicago that I could demolish with the usual Dresdenesque shenanigans, set the story against the backdrop of a vampire-ish LARP, and knocked this one out over the course of about three weeks.

“ Hey, Miyagi-san,” my apprentice said. Her jeans still dripped with purple-brown mucus. “You think the dry cleaner can get this out?”

I threw my car keys down on my kitchen counter, leaned my slimed, rune-carved wooden staff next to them, and said, “The last time I took something stained by a slime golem to a cleaner, the owner burned his place down the next day and tried to collect on the insurance.”

Molly, my apprentice, was just barely out of her teens, and it was impossible not to notice what great legs she had when she stripped out of her trendily mangled jeans. She wrinkled her nose as she tossed them into the kitchen trash can. “Have I told you how much I love the wizard business, Harry?”

“Neither of us is in the hospital, kid. This was a good day at work.” I took my mantled leather duster off. It was generously covered in splatters of the sticky, smelly mucus as well. I toted it over to the fireplace in my basement apartment, which I keep going during the winter. Given that I have to live without the benefits of electricity, it’s necessary. I made sure the fire was burning strongly and tossed the coat in.

“Hey!” Molly said. “Not the coat!”

“Relax,” I told her. “The spells on it should protect it. They’ll bake the slime hard and I’ll chisel it off tomorrow.”

“Oh, good. I like the coat.” The girl subsided as she tossed her secondhand combat boots and socks into my trash after her ruined jeans. She was tall for a woman and built like a schoolboy’s fantasy of the Scandinavian exchange student. Her hair was shoulder length and the color of white gold, except for the tips, which had been dyed in a blend of blue, red, and purple. She’d lost a couple of the piercings she’d previously worn on her face, and was now down to only one eyebrow, one nostril, her tongue, and her lower lip. She went over to the throw rug in the middle of my living room floor, hauled it to one side, and opened the trapdoor leading down to my lab in the subbasement. She lit a candle in the fire, wrinkling her nose at the stink from the greasy smoke coming up from my coat, and padded down the stepladder stairs into the lab.

Mouse, my pet saber-toothed retriever, trotted out of my bedroom and spread his doggy jaws in a big yawn, wagging his shaggy grey tail. He took one step toward me, then froze as the smell of the mucus hit his nose. The big grey dog turned around at once and padded back into the bedroom.

“Coward!” I called after him. I glanced up at Mister, my tomcat, who drowsed upon the top of my heaviest bookshelf, catching the updraft from the fireplace. “At least you haven’t deserted me.”

Mister glanced at me, then gave his head a little shake as the pungent smoke from the fireplace rose to him. He flicked his ears at me, obviously annoyed, and descended from the bookshelf with gracefully offended dignity to follow Mouse into the relative aromatic safety of my bedroom.

“Wimp,” I muttered. I eyed my staff. It was crusty with the ichor. I’d have to take it off with sandpaper and repair the carvings. I’d probably have to do the blasting rod, too. Stupid freaking amateurs, playing with things they didn’t understand. Slime golems are just disgusting.

Molly thumped back up the stairs, now dressed in her backup clothes. Her experiences in training with me had taught her that lesson in about six months, and she had a second set of clothing stored in a gym bag underneath the little desk I let her keep in the lab. She came up in a black broomstick skirt—those skirts that are supposed to look wrinkled—and Birkenstocks, inappropriate for the winter weather but way less inappropriate than black athletic panties. “Harry, are you going to be able to drive me home?”

I frowned and checked the clock. It was after nine—too late for a young woman to trust herself to Chicago’s public transportation. Given Molly’s skills, she probably wouldn’t be in any real danger, but it was best not to tempt fate. “Could you call your folks?”