Jim Butcher - Proven Guilty

It would have been easier to dropkick a puppy than to turn the kid away. “Sure,” I said. “Just keep it quiet. Okay?”

I stepped back into the room, and Molly followed me, pausing to scratch Mouse behind the ears. She looked past me, to the open floor space and the things I had sat out.

“What are you doing?” she asked me.

“Magic,” I said. “What’s it look like I’m doing?”

She smiled a little. “Oh. Right.”

I waved a hand at my materials. “I’m going to try to prevent another attack from hurting anyone.”

“Can you do that?” she asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “I hope so.”

“I can’t believe… I mean, I knew there were things out there, but my friends… Rosie.” Her lower lip quivered and her eyes filled with tears that didn’t quite fall.

I didn’t have much I could say to comfort her. “I’m going to stop it from happening again,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry I didn’t move fast enough the first time.”

She looked down again, and nodded without speaking. She swallowed several times.

“Listen,” I told her quietly. “This is serious stuff. You need to talk about it. Not with me,” I added, as she looked up at me. “With your mom.”

Molly shook her head. “She isn’t-”

“Molly,” I sighed. “Life can be short. And cruel. You saw that last night. You got a look at the kind of thing your dad deals with all the time.”

She didn’t respond.

I said quietly, “Even Knights can die, Molly. Shiro did. It could happen to Michael, too.”

She lifted her head abruptly, staring at me as if in shock.

“How does that make you feel?” I asked.

She chewed on her lip. “Scared.”

“It scares your mom, too. It scares her a lot. She deals with it by holding on hard to the people around her. Maybe too hard, sometimes. That’s why you feel like she’s trying to keep you a little kid. She probably is. But it isn’t because she’s a control freak. It’s because she loves you all so much-you, your dad, your family-and she’s frightened that something bad could happen. She’s desperate to do everything she can to keep you all safe.”

Molly didn’t look up or respond.

“Life is short,” I said. “Too short to waste it on stupid arguments. I’m not saying your mom is perfect, because God knows she isn’t. But my God, Molly, you’ve got the kind of family people like me would kill for. You think they’ll always be there later-but they might not be. Life doesn’t give you any guarantees.”

I let that sink in for a minute, and then said, “I promised your dad that I’d ask you to talk to her. I told him I’d do my best to get the two of you to work things out.”

She looked up at me, crying now, silently. More dark makeup trailed down her cheeks.

“Will you sit down with her, Molly? Talk?”

She took a shaking breath and said, “I don’t know if it will do any good. We’ve said so much…”

“I can’t force you to do it. No one can do that but you.”

She sniffled for a moment. “It won’t do any good.”

“I don’t expect miracles. Just try to talk to her. Please.”

She took a breath, and then nodded, once.

“Thank you,” I said.

She tried to smile once, and hovered outside the bathroom door for a moment more.

“Molly?” I asked. “Are you okay?”

She nodded, but she didn’t move, either.

I frowned. “Something you want to say?”

She looked up at me for just a second. “No,” she said then, and shook her head. “No, it’s nothing, really. Thank you. I won’t be long.” She stepped into the bathroom, shut the door, and locked it. The shower started a moment later.

“Wow,” Bob said from behind me, somehow inserting a leer into the word. “I didn’t realize you liked them quite that… fresh, Harry.”

I glared at him. “What?”

“Did you see the body on her? Magnificent rack! Blond Nordic babe-age, but all pierced and dressed in black, which means she’s probably into at least one kind of kink. And all tender and emotional and vulnerable to boot. Taking her clothes off right here in your room.”

“Kink? You don’t-look, there’s no way to…” I sputtered. “No, Bob. Just no. For crying out loud. She’s seventeen.”

“Better move quick, then,” Bob said. “Before anything starts to droop. Taste of perfection while you can, that’s what I always say.”

“Bob!”

“What?” he said.

“That isn’t how things are.”

“Not now,‘” Bob said. “But you go get in that shower with her and you’ve got your own personal cable TV erotic movie come true.”

I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. “Hell’s bells. The whole idea is wrong, Bob. Just… wrong.”

“Harry, even a nerd should know that it’s no coincidence when a girl shows up at a man’s hotel room. You know all she really wants is to-”

“Bob,” I snapped, cutting him off. “Even if she wanted to, which she doesn’t, nothing is happening with the girl. I’m trying to work, here. You aren’t helping.”

“I’d hate to disrupt your most recent attempt to court death and agony,” he said brightly. “You should stick me somewhere else, where I won’t distract you. On the counter in the bathroom, for example.”

I slapped open one of the empty dresser drawers and tossed the skull in there, instead. Bob sputtered a few muffled curses in ancient Greek, something about sheep and a skin rash.

I looked up from the drawer into the room’s mirror, and found myself facing not my reflection, but Lasciel’s image instead, angelic and lovely and poised. “The perverted little creep has a point, my host,” she said.

I jabbed a finger at the mirror and said, “Bob is my little creep, and the only one who gets to call him names is me. Now go away.”

“Ah,” Lasciel said, and the image faded to translucence, my own reflection appearing to replace it. “Fascinating, though,” she added, just before vanishing, “that boyfriend Nelson bears quite the striking physical resemblance to you.”

Then she was gone. Dammit. Stupid demons. Always with the last word.

Worse, she had a point. I eyed the bathroom door and reviewed the past day or so, and my interactions with the girl before that. I had always been someone her father respected and her mother disapproved of. I showed up once in a blue moon in a big black coat, usually looking roughed-up and dangerous, and I’d been doing so since she was young enough to be very impressionable. Hell, when you got right down to it, Charity’s disapproval alone might have been enough to make me seem interesting to a rebellious teenage girl.

I came to the reluctant conclusion that it was possible Molly might have certain ideas in her head. It might well explain the most recent awkward silences and halting pauses. She’d always liked me, and it wasn’t outrageous to think that it might have developed into something more-and that I’d be a right bastard to do anything that might encourage those ideas, even inadvertently. Maybe Bob and Lasciel were wrong, and in fact nothing like that was going on, but the passions of youth, its attractions and desires, were a minefield one took lightly at one’s own peril.

Magnificent rack notwithstanding, Molly was still, in every important way, a child-my friend’s child, to boot. She was hurting. It bothered me, and I wanted to help her, but I had to be aware of the fact that my sympathy could be misinterpreted. The kid had issues and she needed someone to help her work things out. She didn’t need someone who would only make her more confused.

Steam curled out from under the bathroom door. An actual hot shower. Not merely the illusion of one.