Jim Butcher - Cold Days

“Sith?” Butters asked.

“Not what you’re thinking,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, clearly disappointed.

“Besides,” I said to Thomas, “I’m less worried about them using it to follow me than using it to make my heart stop beating. Or you know . . . explode out of my chest.”

Thomas blinked. “They can do that?”

“Oh, my God,” Butters said, blinking. “Is that what that was?”

“Yes, they can do that, and probably, if you mean all those murders around the Three-Eye drug ring bust,” I answered them. “Butters, what’s the story here? You done yet?”

“Empty night,” Thomas said, his manner suddenly serious. “Harry . . . shouldn’t we be putting up circles or something?”

“No point,” I said. “If they’ve got your blood, they’ve got you, period. Maybe if I ran and hid somewhere in the Nevernever, but even then it isn’t certain.”

“How much blood do they need?” Butters asked.

“Depends,” I said. “Depends on how efficient their magic is—their skill level. Depends on how fresh the blood is. Depends on the day of the week and the phase of the moon, for all I know. It isn’t something I’ve experimented with. The more energy they’re sending your way, the more blood they need.”

“Meaning what?” Butters asked. “Sit up so I can dress these.”

I sat up and lifted my arms out of the way as I explained. “A tracking spell is hardly anything, in terms of energy input,” I said. “They wouldn’t need much at all for that.”

Butters wound a strip of linen bandage around my midsection several times. “But if they want to make your head explode, it takes a lot more?”

“Depends how good they are,” I said. “They don’t have to crush your head into paste, sledgehammer style. Maybe they put an ice pick up your nose. Less force but concentrated into a smaller area, see?” I shuddered a little. “If they’ve got my blood and can use it, I’m fucked and that’s that. But until that happens, I’m going to assume that I still have a chance and proceed as if I do.”

There was a silence then, and I realized that both Butters and Thomas were just staring at me.

“What? Magic is dangerous stuff, guys,” I said.

“Yeah, for all of us,” Butters said, “but, Harry, you’re . . .”

“What? Bulletproof?” I shook my head. “Magic is like the rest of life. It doesn’t matter how much a guy can bench-press, or if he can break trees with his hands. You put a bullet through his brain, he dies. I’m pretty good at figuring out where to stand so as to avoid that bullet, and I can shoot back a lot better than most people—but I’m just as vulnerable as everybody else.”

I frowned at that thought. As vulnerable as everybody else. Something nagged at me from beneath the surface of my conscious calculations, but I couldn’t poke it into visibility. Yet.

“Point is,” I said, “if they were going to try to kill me with it, they’ve had time to do that already.”

“Unless they’re saving it for the future,” Butters said.

I made sure not to growl out loud. “Yes. Thank you. Are you finished yet?”

Butters tore off a final piece of medical tape, stuck the end of the bandage down with it, and sighed. “Yeah. Just try not to . . . well, move, or jump around, or do anything active, or touch anything dirty, or otherwise do anything else that I know you’re going to do anyway in the next twenty-four hours.”

“Twelve hours,” I said, swinging my legs down from the table.

“Oy.” Butters sighed.

“Where’s my shirt?” I asked, standing.

Thomas shrugged. “Burned it. You want mine?”

“After you got your guts all over it?” I asked. “Ew.”

Butters blinked and looked at Thomas. “My God,” he said. “You’ve been shot.”

Thomas hooked a thumb at Butters. “Check out Dr. Marcus Welby, MD, here.”

“I’d have gone with Doogie Howser, maybe,” I said.

“Split the difference at McCoy?” Thomas asked.

“Perfect.”

“You’ve been shot !” Butters repeated, exasperated.

Thomas shrugged. “Well. A little.”

Butters let out an enormous sigh. Then he picked up the bottle of disinfectant and a roll of paper towels and started cleaning off the table. “God, I hate this Frankenstein-slash–Civil War medicine crap. Give me a second. Then lie down.”

I left them to pad across the apartment to my bedroom. To Molly’s guest bedroom. I opened the door as quietly as I could so that I wouldn’t wake Karrin, and went in to put on another secondhand shirt.

I found one that was plain black, with the Spider-Man emblem on it in white. The black uniform. The one that made Spidey switch teams for a bit, and which eventually gave him all kinds of grief. It seemed fitting.

I slipped into it and turned and nearly jumped out of my boots when Karrin quietly shut the bedroom door behind her.

I stood there for a long moment. The only light was from a single small, glowing candle.

Karrin faced me with an opaque expression. “You don’t call,” she said, one corner of her mouth quirked into an expression that wasn’t a smile. “You don’t write.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Coma.”

“I heard,” she said. She folded her arms and leaned back against the door. “Thomas and Molly both say it’s really you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “How’d you find me?”

“Scanner. The last time a bomb went off in this town, it was in your office building. I hear another one goes off in the street, and then reports of explosions and gunfire out over the lake just after dawn this morning. Math wasn’t hard to do.”

“How’d you follow me?”

“I didn’t,” Murphy said. “I staked out Thomas’s place and followed the guy who was following you.” She moved a foot absently, touching the back of her other calf with it as if scratching an itch. “His name was Ace . . . something, right?”

I nodded. “You remember.”

“I try to keep track of the bad guys,” she said. “And on an entirely unrelated note . . . I hear you belong to Mab now.”

The words hit me like a slap in the face. Karrin had been a detective for a long time. She knew how to manipulate a suspect.

I guessed I was a suspect, then.

“I’m not a cocker spaniel,” I said quietly.

“I’m not saying you are,” she said. “But there are creatures out there that can do things to your head, and we both know it.”

“You think that’s what happened?” I asked. “That Mab’s bent my brain into new shapes?”

Her expression softened. “I think she’ll do it slower,” she said. “You’re . . . an abrupt sort of person. Your solutions to problems tend to be decisive and to happen quickly. It’s how you think. I’m willing to believe that you found some kind of way to prevent her from just . . . I don’t know. Rewriting you.”

“I told her if she tried it, I’d start being obstreperous.”

“God,” Karrin said. “You haven’t started?”

She half smiled. For a second, it was almost okay.

But then her face darkened again. “I think she’ll do it slower. An inch at a time, when you aren’t looking. But even if she doesn’t . . .”

“What?”

“I’m not angry at you, Harry,” she said. “I don’t hate you. I don’t think you’ve gone bad. A lot of people have fallen into the trap you did. People better than either of us.”

“Uh,” I said. “The evil-Queen-of-Faerie trap?”

“Christ, Harry,” Murphy said quietly. “No one just starts giggling and wearing black and signs up to become a villainous monster. How the hell do you think it happens?” She shook her head, her eyes pained. “It happens to people. Just people. They make questionable choices, for what might be very good reasons. They make choice after choice, and none of them is slaughtering roomfuls of saints, or murdering hundreds of baby seals, or rubber-room irrational. But it adds up. And then one day they look around and realize that they’re so far over the line that they can’t remember where it was.”