Jim Butcher: Proven Guilty

They were monsters of the worst sort, and Michael was a Knight of the Cross. He was one of three people on the face of the earth who had been chosen to wield a holy sword, an honest-to-Goodness holy sword, each of them with what was supposed to be a nail from the Cross, capital C, worked into the blade. Michael fought dark and evil things. He beat them. He saved children and innocents in danger, and he would stand up to the darkest creatures imaginable without blinking, so strong was his faith that the Almighty would give him strength enough to defeat the darkness before him.

He had no love for his opposites, the Denarians, power-hungry psychopaths as determined to cause and spread pain and suffering as Michael was to contain them.

I never told him about the coin. I didn’t want him to know that I was sharing brain space with a demon. I didn’t want him to think less of me. Michael had integrity. Most of my adult life, the White Council at large had been sure that I was some kind of monster just waiting for the right time to morph into its true form and start laying waste to everything around me. But Michael had been firmly on my side since the first time we’d met. His unwavering support had made me feel a whole hell of a lot better about my life.

I didn’t want him to look at me the way he’d looked at the Denarians we’d fought. So until I got rid of Lasciel’s stupid mental sock puppet, I wasn’t going to ask him for help.

I would handle this on my own.

I was fairly sure that my day couldn’t get much worse.

No sooner had I thought it than there was a horrible crunching sound, and my head snapped back hard against the headrest on the back of the driver’s seat. The Beetle shuddered and jounced wildly, and I fought to keep it under control.

You’d think I would know better by now.

I managed to get one wild look around, and it showed me someone in a real battleship of an old Chrysler, dark grey, windows tinted, and then the car slammed into the Beetle again and nearly sent me into a deadly spin. My head snapped to one side and hit the window, and I could almost smell the smoldering of my tires as they all slid forward and sideways simultaneously. I felt the car hit the curb, and then bounce up. I wrenched at the steering wheel and the brakes, my body responding to things my stunned brain hadn’t caught up to yet. I think I kept it from becoming a total disaster, because instead of spinning off into oncoming traffic or hitting the wall at a sharp angle, I managed to slam the Beetle’s passenger-side broadside into the building beside the street. Brick grated on steel, until I came to a halt fifty feet later.

Stars swarmed over my vision and I tried to swat them away so that I could get a look at the Chrysler’s plates-but it was gone in a heartbeat. Or at least I think it was. Truth be told, my head was spinning so much that the car could have been doing interpretive dance in a lilac tutu and I might not have noticed.

Sitting there seemed like a really good idea, so I sat. After a while I got the vague notion that I should make sure everyone was all right. I looked at me. No blood, which was positive. I looked blearily around the car. No screaming. No corpses in my rearview mirror. Nothing was on fire. There was broken safety glass everywhere from the passenger-side window, but the rear window had been replaced with a sheet of translucent plastic a while back.

The Beetle, stalwart crusader against the forces of evil and alternative fuels, was still running, though its engine had acquired an odd, moaning wheeze as opposed to the usual surly wheeze. I tried my door. It didn’t open. I rolled down my window and hauled myself slowly out of the car. If I could get up the energy to slide across the hood before I got back in, I could audition for The Dukes of Hazzard .

“Here in Hazzard County,” I drawled to myself, “we don’t much cotton to hit-and-run automotive assaults.”

It took an unknown number of minutes for the first cop to arrive, a patrolman I recognized named Grayson. Grayson was an older cop, a big man with a big red nose and a comfortable gut, who looked like he could bounce angry drunks or drink them under the table, take your pick. He got out of his car and started asking me questions in a concerned tone of voice. I answered him as best I could, but something between my brain and my mouth had shorted out, and I found him eyeing me and then looking around the inside of the Beetle for open containers before he sat me down on the ground and started routing traffic around. I got to sit down on the curb, which suited me fine. I watched the sidewalk spin around until someone touched my shoulder.

Karrin Murphy, head of Chicago PD’s Special Investigations department, looked like someone’s cute kid sister. She was maybe a rose petal over five feet tall, had blond hair, blue eyes, a pug nose, and nearly invisible freckles. She was made all of springy muscle; a gymnast’s build that did not preclude feminine curves. She was in a white cotton shirt and blue jeans that day, a Cubs ball cap on her head, reflective sunglasses over her eyes.

“Harry?” she asked. “You okay?”

“Uncle Jesse is gonna be awful disappointed that one of Boss Hogg’s flunkies banged up the General Lee,” I told her, waving at my car.

She stared at me for a moment and then said, “Did you know you have a bruise on the side of your head?”

“Nah,” I said. I poked a finger at it. “Do I?”

Murphy sighed and gently pushed my finger down. “Harry, seriously. If you’re so loopy you can’t talk to me, I need to get you to a hospital.”

“Sorry, Murph,” I told her. “Been a long day already. I got my bells rung pretty good. I’ll be fine in a minute.”

She exhaled, and then nodded and sat down on the curb with me. “Mind if I have one of the EMTs look at you? Just to be careful?”

“They’d want to take me to a hospital,” I said. “Too dangerous. I could short out someone’s life support. And the Reds are watching the hospitals, putting hits on our wounded. I could draw fire onto the patients.”

“I know that,” she said quietly. “I won’t let them take you.”

“Oh. Okay, then,” I said. An EMT checked me out. He shined a light into my eyes, for which I kicked him lightly in the shins. He muttered at me for a minute, poked me here and there, examined and measured and counted and so on. Then he shook his head and stood up. “Maybe a mild concussion. He should see a doctor to be safe, Lieutenant.”

Murphy nodded, thanked the EMT, and looked pointedly at the ambulance. He sidled away, his expression disapproving.

Murphy sat down with me again. “All right, spill. What happened?”

“Someone in a dark grey Chrysler tried to park in my backseat.” I waved a hand, annoyed, as she opened her mouth. “And no. I didn’t get the plates. I was too busy considering a career as a crash test dummy.”

“You’ve got the dummy part down,” she said. “You into something lately?”

“Not yet,” I complained. “I mean, Hell’s bells, Murphy. I got told half a freaking hour ago that there’s bad juju going down somewhere in Chicago. I haven’t even had time to start checking into it, and someone is already trying to make me into a commercial for seat belts and air bags.”

“You sure it was deliberate?”

“Yeah. But whoever it was, he wasn’t a pro.”

“Why do you say that?”

“If he had been, he’d have spun me easy. No idea he was there until he’d hit me. Could have bumped me into a spin before I could have straightened out. Flipped my car a few times. Killed me pretty good.” I rubbed at the back of my neck. A nice, all-body ache was already spreading out into my muscles. “Isn’t exactly the best place for it, either.”