Jim Butcher: Changes

Mac pursed his lips. “Hard thing.”

I finished the second glass. Some of the sharper edges had gotten softer. Mac touched a finger to the bottle, watching me. I shook my head.

“She could be lying to me,” I said quietly. “If she’s not . . . then . . .”

Mac closed his eyes briefly and nodded.

“Then there’s this little girl in trouble,” I said. I felt my jaw clench, and the storm inside me threatened to come boiling up. I pushed it down. “My little girl.”

He nodded again.

“Don’t know if I ever told you,” I said. “I was an orphan.”

Mac watched me silently.

“There were times when . . . when it was bad. When I wanted someone to come save me. I wished for it so hard. Dreaming of . . . of not being alone. And when someone finally did come, he turned out to be the biggest monster of all.” I shook my head. “I won’t let that happen to my child.”

Mac folded his arms on the bar and looked at me intently and said, in a resonant baritone, “You’ve got to be very careful, Harry.”

I looked at him, shocked. He’d . . . used grammar.

“Something like this will test you like nothing else,” Mac said. “You’re going to find out who you are, Harry. You’re going to find out which principles you’ll stand by to your death—and which lines you’ll cross.” He took my empty glass away and said, “You’re heading into the badlands. It’ll be easy to get lost.”

I watched him in stunned silence as he finished his drink. He grimaced, as though it hurt his throat on the way down. Maybe he’d strained his voice, using it so much.

I stared down at my hands for a moment. Then I said, “Steak sandwich. And something for the pooch.”

He grunted in the affirmative and started cooking. He took his time about it, divining my intentions with a bartender’s instincts. I didn’t feel like eating, but I had a little time to kill while the buzz faded.

He put my sandwich down in front of me. Then he took a bowl with some bones and some meat out to Mouse, along with a bowl of water. I ate my sandwich and idly noted that Mac never carried food out to anyone. Guess he was a dog person.

I ate my sandwich slowly and paid Mac.

“Thanks,” I said.

He nodded. “Luck.”

I got up and headed back for the car. Mouse followed beside me, his eyes lifted, watching me to see what I would do.

I marshaled my thoughts. I had to be careful. I had to be wary. I had to keep my eyes open. I had to keep the storm inside me from exploding, because the only thing I knew for certain was that someone—maybe Susan, maybe my enemies—was trying to manipulate me.

Either way, Mac was right.

I was heading into the badlands.

Susan arrived at around one in the morning.

I had gone back home from the pub and straight to my lab in the subbasement, and made with the wizardry, which demanded an intense focus on my tasks. Over the next several hours, I prepared a couple of things that might come in handy in the immediate future. Then I went back up the stepladder to my apartment and put on my force rings. Each of them is a braid of three individual rings, and I had enchanted them to store up a little kinetic energy every time I moved my arm. They were pretty efficient, but it wouldn’t hurt to top them off, so I spent half an hour beating the tar out of the heavy bag hanging in one corner of my apartment’s living area.

I showered, cleaned up, made some dinner, and generally never stopped moving. If I did that, thoughts might start to creep in, and I wasn’t sure how I would deal with them.

I didn’t even consider trying to sleep. It just wasn’t going to happen.

So I stayed in motion. I cleaned the kitchen. I bathed Mouse and brushed out his coat. I picked up my living room, my room, my bathroom. I changed out my cat Mister’s litter box. I tidied up the fireplace, and set out fresh candles to illuminate the room.

It took me a couple of hours of that to realize that I was trying to make my apartment look nice because Susan was coming over. Old habits die hard, I suppose.

I was debating with myself whether or not I might need to clean Mister up (and having a narrow-eyed glare bestowed upon me from his perch atop my highest bookshelf) when there was a polite knock at the door.

My heart started being faster.

I opened the door and found Susan facing me.

She was a woman of medium height, which meant she was about a foot shorter than me. Her features were leanly angular, except for her mouth. She had dark, straight hair and even darker eyes, and her skin had a sun-bronzed tone to it far deeper than I had ever seen on her before. She looked thinner. I could see the tendons and muscles beneath the skin of her neck, and her cheekbones seemed starker than they had before. She wore black leather pants, a black T-shirt, and a leather jacket to complement the pants.

And she had not aged a day.

It had been most of a decade since I had beheld her. In that time, you expect people’s appearances to change a little. Oh, nothing major. A few more pounds, maybe, a few more lines, a few silver hairs. People change. But Susan hadn’t changed. At all.

I guess that’s a nifty perk of being a half-turned vampire of the Red Court.

“Hi,” she said quietly.

“Hi,” I said back. I could meet her eyes without worrying about triggering a soulgaze. She and I had looked upon each other already.

She lowered her eyes and slipped her hands into her jacket pockets. “Harry . . . can I come in?”

I took half a step back. “I dunno. Can you come in?”

Her eyes flickered with a spark of anger. “You think I crossed over?”

“I think that taking unnecessary chances has lost its appeal to me,” I said.

She pressed her lips together, but then nodded in acquiescence and stepped over the threshold of my apartment, the barrier of magical energy that surrounds any home—an action that simply would not have been possible for a vampire without first receiving my permission.

“Okay,” I said, backing up to let her enter before I shut the door again. As I did, I saw a sandy-haired, plain-looking man seated casually on the top step of the concrete stairwell that led down to my apartment. He wore khakis, a blue denim jacket, and was reclining just enough to display the lines of a shoulder holster beneath the jacket. He was Susan’s ally and his name was Martin. “You,” I said. “Joy.”

Martin’s lips twitched into the faint and distant echo of a smile. “Likewise.”

I shut the door on him and, just to be obnoxious, clacked the dead bolt closed as loudly as I could.

Susan smiled a little and shook her head. She looked around the apartment for a moment—and then suddenly froze as a growl came rumbling from the darkened alcove of the minikitchen. Mouse didn’t rise, and his growl was not the savage thing I had heard once or twice before—but it was definitely a sound of polite warning.

Susan froze in place, staring at the kitchen for a moment. Then she said, “You got a dog.”

“He kind of got me,” I replied.

Susan nodded and swept her eyes around the little apartment. “You redecorated a little.”

“Zombies,” I said. “And werewolves. Place has been trashed a few times.”

“I never understood why you didn’t move out of this musty little hole.”

“Musty? Little? My home this is,” I said. “Get you something? Coke, beer?”

“Water?”

“Sure. Have a seat.”

Susan moved silently over to one of the easy chairs framing the fireplace and settled down on its edge, her back straight. I got her some ice water, fetched myself a Coke, and brought the drinks over to her. I settled down in the other chair, so that we partly faced each other, and popped the tab on my drink.