Jim Butcher: Proven Guilty

“I’ve got business tonight. The soonest I can do it is tomorrow. Lunch?”

“Noon,” I replied.

There was a sleepy murmur on the other end of the phone-a woman’s voice.

“Shhhhh,” Fix said. “Sure, Harry. I’ll see you there.”

We hung up, and I regarded the phone with pursed lips. Fix sleeping this late in the day? And with a girl in bed with him, no less. And interrupting wizards without a second thought. He’d come a ways.

Of course, he’d had a lot of exposure to the faeries since the last time I’d seen him. And if he had anything like the power that I’d seen the champions of the Sidhe display before, he’d have had time to get used to his new strength. You can never tell how someone is going to handle power-not until you hand it to them and see what they do with it. Fix had certainly changed.

I got a little twist in my gut that told me I should employ a great deal more than average caution when I spoke to him. I didn’t like the feeling. Before I could think about it for too long, I made myself pick up the phone and move on with what my brain told me was a reasonable step two- checking around to see if anyone had heard anything about bad juju running around town.

I called several people. Billy the Werewolf, recently married. Mortimer Lindquist, ectomancer. Waldo Butters, medical examiner and composer of the “Quasimodo Polka,” a dozen magical small-timers I knew, plus my ex’s editor at the Midwestern Arcane . None of them had heard of anything, and I warned them all to keep an ear to the ground. I even put in a call to the Archive, but all I got was an answering service, and no one returned my call.

I sat and stared at the phone’s base for a moment, the receiver buzzing a dial tone in my gloved left hand.

I hadn’t called Michael, or Father Forthill. I probably should have, working on the basic notion that more help was better help. Then again, if the Home Office wanted Michael on the case, he’d be there regardless of whether or not anyone called him and how many immovable objects stood in the way. I’ve seen it happen often enough to trust that it was true.

It was a good rationalization, but it wasn’t fooling anyone. Not even me. The truth was that I didn’t want to talk to either one of them unless I really, really, really had to.

The dial tone turned into that annoying buzz-buzz-buzz of a no-connection signal.

I hung the phone back up, my hand unsteady. Then I got up, reached down to the clumsily trimmed area of carpet that covered the trapdoor set in the apartment’s floor, and pulled it open onto a wooden stepladder that folded out and led down into my laboratory.

The lab is in the sub-basement, which is a much better name for it than the basement-basement. It’s little more than a big concrete box with a ladder leading up and out of it. The walls are lined with overflowing white wire shelves, the cheap kind you can get at Wal-Mart. In my lab, they store containers of every kind, from plastic bags to microwave-safe plastic dinnerware to heavy wooden boxes-and even one lead-lined, lead-sealed box where I store a tiny amount of depleted uranium dust. Other books, notebooks, envelopes, paper bags, pencils, and apparently random objects of many kinds crowd each other for space on the shelves-all except for one plain, homemade wooden shelf, which held only candles at either end, four romance novels, a Victoria’s Secret catalog, and a bleached human skull.

A long table ran down the middle of the room, leaving a blank section of floor at the far end kept perfectly clear of any clutter whatsoever. A ring of plain silver was set into the floor-my summoning circle. Underneath it lay a foot and a half or so of concrete, and then another heavy metal box, wrapped with its own little circle of wards and spells. Inside the box was a blackened silver coin.

My left palm, which had been so badly burned except for an outline of skin in the shape of Lasciel's angelic symbol, suddenly itched.

I rubbed it against my leg and ignored it.

My worktable had been crowded with material for most of the time it had been down in my lab. But that no longer was the case.

At that point I felt I owed someone an apology. When Murphy had asked me about the money from the Council, the answer I’d given her was true enough. They’d set the pay rate for Wardens in the fifties-but even the Council wasn’t quite hidebound enough to ignore things like standard inflation, and the Warden’s paychecks had kept pace through discretionary funding in-my God, I’m starting to sound like part of the establishment.

Long story short. The Wardens have sneaky ways of getting paid more, and the money I was getting from them, while not stellar, was nothing to sneeze at, either. But I hadn’t been spending it on things like fixing up my apartment.

I’d been spending it on what was on my worktable.

“Bob,” I said, “wake up.”

Orangish flames kindled wearily to life inside the open eye sockets of the skull. “Oh for crying out loud,” a voice from within complained. “Can’t you take a night off? It’ll be finished when it’s finished, Harry.”

“No rest for the wicked, Bob,” I said cheerfully. “And that means we can’t slack off either, or they’ll outwork us.”

The skull’s voice took on a whiny tone. “But we’ve been tinkering with that stupid thing every night for six months. You’re growing a cowlick and buck teeth, by the way. You keep this up and you’ll have to retire to a home for magical geeks and nerds.”

“Pish tosh,” I said.

“You can’t say pish tosh to that,” Bob grumped. “You don’t even know what it means.”

“Sure I do. It means spirits of air should shut up and assist their wizard before he sends them out to patrol for fungus demons again.”

“I get no respect,” Bob sighed. “Okay, okay. What do you want to do now?”

I gestured at the table. “Is it ready?”

“Ready?” Bob said. “It isn’t ever going to be ready , Harry. Your subject is fluid, always changing. Your model must change too. If you want it to be as accurate as possible, it’s going to be a headache keeping it up to date.”

“I do, and I know,” I told him. “So talk. Where are we? Is it ready for a test run?”

“Put me in the lake,” Bob said.

I reached up to the shelf obligingly, picked up the skull, and set it down on the eastern edge of the table.

The skull settled down beside the model city of Chicago. I’d built it onto my table, in as much detail as I’d been able to afford with my new paycheck. The skyline rose up more than a foot from the tabletop, models of each building made from cast pewter-also expensive, given I’d had to get each one made individually. Streets made of real asphalt ran between the buildings, lined with streetlights and mailboxes in exacting detail-and all in all, I had the city mapped out to almost two miles from Burnham Harbor in every direction. Detail began to fail toward the outskirts of the model, but as far as I’d been able to, I modeled every building, every road, every waterway, every bridge, and every tree with as much accuracy as I knew how.

I’d also spent months out on the town, collecting bits and pieces from every feature on my map. Bark from trees, usually. Chips of asphalt from the streets. I’d taken a hammer and knocked a chip or two off every building modeled there, and those pieces of the originals had been worked into the structure of their modeled counterparts.

If I’d done it correctly, the model would be of enormous value to my work. I’d be able to use various techniques to do all kinds of things in town-track down lost objects, listen in on conversations happening within the area depicted by the model, follow people through town from the relative safety of my lab-lots of cool stuff. The model would let me send my magic throughout Chicago with a great deal more facility and with a far broader range of applications than I could currently manage.