Jim Butcher - Proven Guilty

I stepped back. They got Rosie loaded onto a stretcher. When they laid her arm down by her side, I could see several small, round marks, irregular bruises, and damaged capillaries just under the surface of the skin at the bend of her arm.

Molly stared at me for a second, her eyes wide. Then she helped the EMTs throw a blanket over Rosie and her track marks. The EMTs counted to three and lifted the stretcher, flicked out the wheels underneath, and rolled her toward the doors. The girl stirred and thrashed weakly as they did this, letting out whimpering little cries.

“She’s frightened,” Molly told the EMTs. “Let me ride with her, help keep her calm.”

The men traded a look and then one of them nodded. Molly let out a breath of relief, nodded to them, and went to walk by the head of the stretcher, where Rosie could see her.

“Don’t worry,” said the other EMT “We’ll be right back for you, sir.”

“What, this?” I asked, and waved vaguely at my head. “Nah, I didn’t get hurt here. This is from earlier. I’m good.”

The man’s expression was dubious. “You sure?”

“Yep.”

They took the girl out. I dragged myself to the wall and propped my back up against it. A minute later, a man in a tweed suit came in and walked directly to Rawlins. He spoke to the officer for a moment, glancing over at me once as they talked, then turned and walked over to me. Of only average height, the man was in his late forties, thirty pounds overweight, balding, and had watery blue eyes. He nodded at me, grabbed a chair, and settled down into it, looking down at me. “You’re Dresden?”

“Most days,” I said.

“My name is Detective Sergeant Greene. I’m with homicide.”

“Tough job,” I said.

“Most days,” he agreed. “Now, Rawlins back there tells me you were an eyewitness to what happened. Is that correct.”

“Mostly,” I said. “I only saw what happened at the very end in here.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. He blinked his watery eyes and absently removed a pen and a small notebook from his pocket. Behind him, cops were surrounding the area where the victims had lain with a circle of chairs and stringing crime scene tape between them. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“The lights went out,” I said. “People panicked. We heard screams. Rawlins went to help and I went with him.”

“Why?” he asked.

“What?”

“Why,” Greene said, his tone mild. “You’re a civilian, Mr. Dresden. It’s Rawlins’s job to help people in emergencies. Why didn’t you just head for the door?”

“It was an emergency,” I said. “I helped.”

“You’re a hero,” Greene said. “Is that it?”

I shrugged. “I was there. People needed help. I tried to.”

“Sure, sure,” Greene said, blinking his eyes. “So what were you doing to help?”

“Holding the light,” I said.

“Didn’t Rawlins have his own flashlight?”

“Can’t have too many flashlights,” I replied.

“Sure,” Greene said, writing things. “So you held the light for Rawlins. What then?”

“We heard screams in here. We came in. I saw the attacker over that girl they just took out.”

“Can you describe him?” Greene asked.

“Almost seven feet tall,” I said. “Built like a battleship, maybe three hundred, three twenty-five. Hockey mask. Sickle.”

Greene nodded. “What happened.”

“He attacked the girl. There were other people behind him, already down. He was about to cut her throat with the sickle. Rawlins shot him.”

“Shot at him?” Greene asked. “Since we don’t have a dead bad guy on the floor?”

“Shot at him,” I amended. “I don’t know if he hit him. The bad guy dropped the girl and swung that sickle at Rawlins. Rawlins blocked it with his flashlight.”

“Then what?”

“Then I hit the guy,” I said.

“Hit him how?” Greene asked.

“I used magic. Blew him thirty feet down the aisle and through the projector and the movie screen.”

Greene slapped his pen down onto the notebook and gave me a flat look.

“Hey,” I said. “You asked.”

“Or maybe he turned to run,” Greene said. “Knocked the projector over and jumped through the screen to get to the back of the room.”

“If that makes you feel better,” I said.

He gave me another hard look and said, “And then what?”

“And then he was gone,” I said.

“He ran out the door?”

“No,” I said. “We were pretty much right next to the door. He went through the screen, hit the wall behind it, and poof. Gone. I don’t know how.”

Greene wrote that down. “Do you know where Nelson Lenhardt is?”

I blinked. “No. Why would I?”

“He apparently attacked someone else at this convention today and beat him savagely. You bailed him out of jail. Maybe you’re friends with him.”

“Not really,” I said.

“Seems a little odd, then, that you dropped two thousand dollars to bail out this guy you’re not friends with.”

“Yeah.”

“Why did you do it?”

I got annoyed. “I had personal reasons.”

“Which are?”

“Personal,” I said.

Greene regarded me with his watery blue eyes, silent for a long minute. Then he said, patiently and politely, “I’m not sure I understand all of this. I’d appreciate it if you could help me out. Could you tell me again what happened? Starting with when the lights went out?”

I sighed.

We started over.

Four more times.

Greene was never so much as impolite to me, and his mild voice and watery eyes made him seem more like an apologetic clerk than a detective, but I had a gut instinct that there was a steely and dangerous man underneath the tweed camouflage, and that he had me pegged as an accomplice, or at least as someone who knew more than he was saying.

Which, I suppose, was true. But going on about black magic and ectoplasm and boogeymen that disappeared at will wasn’t going to make him like me any better. That was par for the course, when it came to cops. Some of them, guys like Rawlins, had run into something nasty at some point in their careers. They never talked much about it with anyone- other cops tend to worry about it when one of their partners starts talking about seeing monsters, and all kinds of well-intentioned counseling and psychological evaluations were sure to follow.

So if a cop found himself face-to-face with a vampire or a ghoul (and survived it), its only existence tended to be in the landscape of memory. Time has a way of wearing the sharpest edges away from that kind of thing, and it’s easy to avoid thinking about terrifying monsters, and even more terrifying implications, and get back to the daily routine. If enough time went by, a lot of cops could even convince themselves that what happened had been exaggerated in their heads, bad memories amplified by darkness and fear, and that since everyone around them knew monsters didn’t exist, they must therefore have seen something normal, something explainable.

But when the heat was on, those same cops changed. Somewhere deep down, they know that it’s for real, and when something supernatural went down again, they were willing, at least for the duration, to forget about anything but doing whatever they could to survive it and protect lives, even if in retrospect it seemed insane. Rawlins would poke fun at me for “pretending” to be a wizard when there was a fan convention in progress. But when everything had hit the proverbial fan, he’d been willing to work with me.

Then there was the other kind of cop-guys like Greene, who hadn’t ever seen anything remotely supernatural, who went home to their house and 2.3 kids and dog and mowed their lawn on Saturdays, who watch Nova and the Science Channel and subscribe to National Geographic , and keep every issue stored neatly and in order in the basement.