Jim Butcher: White Night

"Apparently," Butters said. "But why?"

I shrugged. "Must have been something on them he didn't want found." I pursed my lips. "Or something on them he didn't want me to find."

Molly abruptly sat up straight. "Harry, I remember something."

"Yeah?"

"Sensation," she said, resting one hand over her belly button. "It was like… I don't know, like hearing twenty different bands playing at the same time, only tactile. But there was a prickling sort of sensation over her stomach. Like one of those medical pinwheel things."

"A Wartenberg Pinwheel," Butters supplied.

"Eh?" I said.

"Like the one I use to test the nerves on your hand, Harry," Butters supplied.

"Oh, ow, right." I frowned at Molly. "How the hell do you know what one of those feels like?"

Molly gave me a lazy, wicked smile. "This is one of those things you don't want me to explain."

Butters let out a delicate cough. "They are sometimes used recreationally, Harry."

My cheeks felt warm. "Ah. Right. Butters, you got a felt-tip marker?"

He got one out of his desk and tossed it to me. I passed it to Molly. "Show me where."

She nodded, lay back down on her back, and pulled her shirt up from her stomach. Then she closed her eyes, took the lid off the marker, and traced it slowly over the skin of her abdomen, her eyebrows furrowed in concentration.

When she was finished, the black ink spelled out clear, large letters:

EX 22:18.

Exodus again.

"Ladies and gentlemen," I said quietly. "We have a serial killer."

Molly said little on the way back. She just leaned against the window with half-closed eyes, probably basking in the afterglow.

"Molly," I told her in my gentlest voice. "Heroin feels good, too, Ask Rosy and Nelson."

The little smile of pleasure faded into blankness, and she stared at me for a while. By degrees, her expression changed to a frown of consideration, and then to a nauseated grimace.

"It killed her," she said finally. "It killed her. I mean, it felt so good… but it wasn't."

I nodded.

"She never knew it. She never had a chance." Molly looked queasy for a minute. "It was a vampire, right? From the White Court? I mean, they use sex to feed on life energy, right?"

"That's one of the things it could be," I said quietly. "There are plenty of demonic creatures in the Nevernever that groove on the succubus routine, though."

"And she was killed in a hotel," she said. "Where there was no threshold to protect her from a demon."

"Very good, grasshopper," I said. "Once you consider that the other victims weren't done White Court style, it means that either there is more than one killer or the same one is varying his techniques. It's too early for anything but wild guesses."

She frowned. "What are you going to do next?"

I thought about it for a minute. "I've got to figure out what all of the killer's victims have in common, if anything."

"They're dead?" Molly offered.

I smiled a little. "Besides that."

"Okay," she said. "So what do you do?"

I nodded to the papers Butters had given me, now resting on the dashboard. "I start there. See what I can extrapolate from the data I've got. Then I look people up and ask questions."

"What do I do?" she asked.

"That depends. How many beads can you move?" I asked her.

She glowered at me for a minute. Then she unbound the bracelet of dark beads from her left wrist and held it up. The beads all slipped down to the bottom of the bracelet, leaving three or four inches of bare cord.

Molly focused on the bracelet, a device I'd created to help her practice focusing her mind and stilling her thoughts. Focus and stillness are important when you're slinging magic around. It's a primal force of creation, and it responds to your thoughts and emotions—whether you want it to or not. If your thoughts get fragmented or muddled, or if you aren't paying complete attention to what you're doing, the magic can respond in any number of unpredictable and dangerous ways.

Molly was still learning about it. She had some real talent, don't get me wrong, but what she lacked was not ability, but judgment. That's what I'd been trying to teach her over the past year or so—to use her power responsibly, cautiously, and with respect for the dangers the Art could present. If she didn't get a more solid head on her shoulders, her talent with magic was going to get her killed—probably taking me with her.

Molly was a warlock.

She'd used magic to tinker with the minds of two of her friends in an effort to free them from drug addiction, but her motives had been mixed, and the results were moderately horrific. One of the kids still hadn't recovered enough to function on his own. The other had pulled through, but was still facing a lot of problems.

Normally, the White Council of wizards kills you for breaking one of the Laws of Magic. Practically the only time they didn't was when a wizard of the Council offered to take responsibility for the warlock's future conduct, until they could satisfy the Council that their intentions were good, their ways mended. If they could, fine. If not, the warlock died. So did the wizard who had taken responsibility for him.

I'd been a warlock. Hell, plenty of the Council wondered if I still w as a ticking bomb getting ready to blow. When Molly had been bound and hooded and dragged before the Council for trial, I'd stepped in. I had to.

Sometimes I regretted the hell out of that decision. Once you've felt the power of dark magic, it could be awfully hard to resist using it again, and Molly's errors tended to run in that direction. The kid was good at heart, but she was just so damned young. She'd grown up in a strict household; she'd gone insane with freedom the minute she ran away and got out on her own. She was back home now, but she was still trying to find the balance and self-discipline she'd need to survive in the wizarding business.

Teaching her to throw a gout of fire at a target really wasn't terribly difficult. The hard part was teaching her why to do it, why not to do it, and when she should or should not do it. Molly saw magic as the best solution to any given problem. It wasn't, and she had to learn that.

To that end, I'd made her the bracelet.

She stared at it for a long minute, and one of the beads slid up the string and stopped when it touched her finger. A moment later, the second bead joined the first. The third quivered for several seconds before it moved. The fourth took even longer. The fifth bead jumped and twitched for several moments before Molly let out her breath in a snarl, and the others once more succumbed to gravity.

"Four of thirteen," I noted, as I pulled into a driveway. "Not bad. But you aren't ready yet."

She glared at the bracelet and rubbed at her forehead for a moment. "I got six last night."

"Keep working," I said. "It's about focus, stillness, and clarity."

"What does that mean?" Molly demanded in exasperation.

"That you have more work to do."

She sighed and got out of the car, glancing up at her family's home. It was a gorgeous place, white picket fence and everything, somehow preserving a suburban appearance despite the city all around us. "You aren't explaining it very well."

"Maybe," I said. "Or maybe you aren't learning it very well."

She gave me a glower, and what might have been a hot answer came to her lips—but she shut them and shook her head in irritation. "I'm sorry. For putting up that veil and trying to follow you. No disrespect intended."

"None taken. I've been where you are. I don't expect you to be perfect all the time, kid."

She smiled a little. "What happened today…"