Jim Butcher - Proven Guilty

My head started pounding and I pushed the Sight away. I leaned my hip against the wall for a second and rubbed at my temples until the throbbing subsided and I was sure that my normal vision had returned.

“Rosie,” I said, cutting into the middle of one of Murphy’s questions. “When was your last fix?”

Murphy glanced over her shoulder at me, frowning. Behind her, the girl gave me a guilty look, her eyes shifting to one side. “What do you mean?” Rosie asked.

“I figure it’s heroin,” I said. I kept my voice pitched to the barest level needed to be audible. “I saw the tracks on you last night.”

“I’m diab-” she began.

“Oh please,” I said, and let the annoyance show in my voice. “You think I’m that stupid?”

“Harry,” Murphy began. There was a warning note in her voice, but my head hurt too much to let it stop me.

“Miss Marcella, I’m trying to help you. Just answer the question.”

She was silent for a long moment. Then she said, “Two weeks.”

Murphy arched a brow, and her gaze went back to the girl.

“I quit,” she said. “Really. I mean, once I heard that I was pregnant… I can’t do that anymore.”

“Really?” I asked.

She looked up and her eyes were direct, though nothing like confident. “Yes. I’m done with it. I don’t even miss it. The baby’s more important than that.”

I pursed my lips and then nodded. “All right.”

“Miss Marcella,” Murphy said, “thank you for your time.”

“Wait,” she said, as Murphy turned away. “Please. No one will tell us anything about Ken. Do you know how he’s doing? What room he’s in?”

“Ken’s your boyfriend?” Murphy asked in a careful tone.

“Yes. I saw them load him in the ambulance last night. I know he’s here…” Rosie stared at Murphy for a second, and then her face grew even more pale. “Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no.”

I was glad I’d gotten a gotten a look at her before she found out about her boyfriend. My imagination provided me with a nice image of watching the emotional wounds open up as though an invisible sword had begun slicing into her, but at least I didn’t have to see it with my Sight, too.

“I’m very sorry,” Murphy said quietly. Her voice was steady, her eyes compassionate.

Molly picked that moment to return with a cup of coffee. She took one look at Rosie, put the coffee down, and then hurried to her. Rosie broke down in choking sobs. Molly immediately sat on the bed beside her, and hugged her while she wept.

“We’ll be in touch,” Murphy said quietly. “Come on, Harry.”

Mouse stared at Rosie with a mournful expression, and I had to tug on his leash a couple of times to get him moving. We departed and headed for the nearest stairwell. Murphy headed for ICU, which was in the neighboring building.

“I didn’t see the track marks on her last night,” she said after a minute. “You pushed her pretty hard.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it might mean something. I don’t know what, yet. But we didn’t have time to waste listening to her denial.”

“She wasn’t straight with you,” Murphy said. “No one kicks heroin that fast. Two weeks. She should still be feeling some of the withdrawal.”

“Yeah,” I said. We went outside to go to the other building. Bright morning sunlight made my head hurt even more, and the sidewalk began revolving. I stopped to wait for my eyes to adjust to the light.

“You all right?” Murphy asked.

“It’s hard. Seeing someone like that,” I said quietly. “And she’s probably the least mangled of the three.”

She frowned. “What did you see?”

I tried to tell her what Rosie had looked like. It sounded surreal and garbled, even to me. I didn’t think I had conveyed it very well.

“You look terrible,” she said when I finished.

“It’ll pass. Just got this damned headache.” I shook my head and focused on taking steady breaths until I could force the pain to recede. “Okay. I’m good.”

“Did you learn what you were hoping for?” Murphy asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “I’ll need to look at the others, too. See if the injuries on them give me some kind of pattern.”

“They’re in ICU.”

“Yeah. I need to find a way to them without getting too close to someone on life support. I can’t stay around to talk. I’ll need maybe a minute, ninety seconds to look at them both. Then I’ll get out. Let you talk.”

Murphy took a deep breath and said, “You sure you should do this?”

“No,” I told her. “But I can’t help you if I don’t get to look at them. I can’t do that any other way. If I can stay calm and relaxed, it shouldn’t hurt anything for me to be there for a minute or two.”

“But you can’t be sure.”

“When can I?”

She frowned at me, but nodded. “Let me go ahead of you,” she said. “Wait here.”

I found a chair, and took it down the hall and sat down with Mouse and Rawlins. We shared a companionable silence. I leaned my head back against the wall and closed my eyes.

My headache finally began to fade away just as Murphy returned. “All right,” she said quietly. “We need to go down a floor and then use the back stairs. A nurse is going to let us in. You won’t have to walk past any of the other rooms before you get to our witnesses.”

“Okay,” I said, and stood up. “Let’s get this over with.”

I wasted no time. We went up the stairs, and I was already preparing my Sight. A nurse opened the door to the stairway, and I simply stepped into the first door on my left-the catatonic girl’s, Miss Becton’s. I stepped into the doorway and raised my Sight.

She was a young girl, still in her late teens, nervously thin, her hair a shocking color of red that for some reason did not strike me as a dye job. She lay on her front, her head turned to the side, muddy brown eyes open and blank. Her back had been covered in bandages.

As my Sight focused on her, I saw more. The girl’s psyche had been savagely mauled, and as I watched her, phantom bruises darkened a few patches of skin that remained, and blood and watery fluids oozed from the rest of her torn flesh. Her mouth was set in a continual, silent wail, and beneath the real-world glaze, her eyes were wide with terror. If there’d been enough left of her behind those eyes, Miss Becton would have been screaming.

My stomach rolled and I barely spotted a trash can in time to throw up into it.

Murphy crouched down at my side, her hand on my back. “Harry? Are you okay?”

Anger and empathy and grief warred for first place in my thoughts. Across the room, I was dimly conscious of a clock radio warbling to life and dying in a puff of smoke. The room’s fluorescent lights began to flicker as the violent emotions played hell with the aura of magic around me.

“No,” I said in a vicious, half-strangled growl. “I’m not okay.”

Murphy stared at me for a second, and then looked at the girl. “Is she…”

“She isn’t coming back,” I said.

I spat a few times into the trash can and stood up. My headache started to return. The girl’s terrified eyes stayed bright and clear in my imagination. She’d been out for a fun time. A favorite movie. Maybe coffee or dinner with friends afterward. She sure as hell hadn’t woken up yesterday morning and wondered if today would be the day some kind of nightmarish thing would rip away her sanity.

“Harry,” Murphy said again, her voice very gentle. “You didn’t do this to her.”

“Dammit,” I said. I sounded bitter. She found my right hand with hers and I closed my fingers around hers with a kind of quiet desperation. “Dammit, Murph. I’m going to find this thing and kill it.”