Jim Butcher - Proven Guilty

Thomas didn’t want to go into the church because he wasn’t optimistic that the Almighty and his institutions would smile on him. Like me, he favored maintaining a low profile with regards to matters temporal. And if he had gone back to older patterns, doing what came naturally to his predator’s nature, it might incline him to stay off the theological radar. Worse, entering such a place as the church might force him to face his choices, to question them, to be confronted with the fact that the road he’d chosen kept getting darker and further from the light.

I knew how he felt.

I hadn’t been in a church since I’d smacked my hand down on Lasciel’s ancient silver coin. Hell, I had a freaking fallen angel in my head-or at least a facsimile of one. If that wasn’t a squirt of lemon juice in God’s eye, I didn’t know what was.

But I had a job to do.

“Be careful,” I told him quietly. “Call Murphy. Tell her what’s up.”

“You’d better get some rest soon, Harry,” he replied. “You don’t look good.”

“I never look good,” I said. I offered him my fist. He rapped my knuckles gently with his own.

I nodded and walked over to knock on the delivery doors while he drove off in Madrigal’s van. I’d taken my duster back, once Daniel had a blanket on him. Screw the heat. I wanted the protection. Its familiar weight on my shoulders and motion against my legs were reassuring.

Forthill answered my knock, fully dressed, the white of his clerical collar easily seen in the night. His bright blue eyes looked around the parking lot once, and he hurried toward the van without a word being exchanged. I followed him. Forthill moved briskly, and we unloaded the van, Alicia shepherding the mobile kids indoors while he and Charity carried Daniel in between them. I followed with the two little wet dishrags, trying to keep my tired muscles from shaking too obviously.

Forthill led us to the storage room that sometimes doubled as refugee housing. There were half a dozen folded cots against one wall, and another one already opened, set out, and occupied by a lump under a blanket. Forthill and Charity got the wounded Daniel onto a cot first, and then opened the rest of them. We deposited tired children on them.

“What happened?” Forthill asked, his voice quiet and calm.

I didn’t want to hear Charity talk about it. “Got a cramp,” I told them. “Need to walk it off. Come find me when Daniel gets coherent.”

“Very well,” Charity said.

Forthill looked back and forth between us, frowning.

Mouse rose with a grunt of effort to limp after me. “No, boy. Stay and keep an eye on the kids.”

Mouse settled down again, almost gratefully.

I beat it, and started walking. It didn’t matter where. There were too many things flying around in my head. I just walked. Motion wasn’t a cure, but I was tired enough that it kept the thoughts, the emotions, from drowning me. I walked down hallways and through empty rooms.

I wound up in the chapel proper. I’ve been in smaller stadiums. Gleaming hardwood floors shine over the whole of the chapel. Wooden pews stand in ranks, row upon row upon row, and the altar and nave are gorgeously decorated. It seats more than a thousand people, including the balcony at the rear of the chapel, and every Sunday they still have to run eight masses in four different languages to fit everyone in.

More than size and artistry, though, there is something else about the place that makes it more than simply a building. There’s a sense of quiet power there, deep and warm and reassuring. There’s peace. I stood for a moment in the vast and empty room and closed my eyes. Right then, I needed all the peace I could get. I drifted through the room, idly admiring it, and wound up in the balcony, all the way at the top, in a dark corner.

I leaned my head back against a wall.

Lasciel’s voice came to me, very quietly, and sounded odd. Sad. It is beautiful here .

I didn’t bother to agree. I didn’t tell her to get lost. I leaned my head back against the rear wall and closed my eyes.

I woke up when Forthill’s steps drew near. I kept my eyes closed, half hoping that if I didn’t seem to waken he would go away.

Instead, he settled a couple of feet down the pew from me, and remained patiently quiet.

The act wasn’t working. I opened my eyes and looked at him.

“What happened?” he asked quietly.

I pressed my lips together and looked away.

“It’s all right,” Forthill said quietly. “If you wish to tell me, I’ll speak of it to no one.”

“Maybe I don’t want to talk to you,” I said.

“Of course,” he said, nodding. “But my offer stands, should you wish to talk. Sometimes the only way to carry a heavy burden is to share it with another. It is your choice to make.”

Choices.

Sometimes I thought it might be nice not to make any choices. If I never had one, I could never screw it up.

“There are things I don’t care to share with a priest,” I told him, but I was mostly thinking out loud.

He nodded. He took off his collar and set it aside. He settled back into the pew, reached into his jacket, and drew out a slender silver flask. He opened it, took a sip, and offered it to me. “Then share it with your bartender.”

That drew a faint, snorting laugh from me. I shook my head, took the flask, and sipped. An excellent, smooth Scotch. I sipped again, and I told him what happened at the convention, and how it had spilled over onto the Carpenter household. He listened. We passed the flask back and forth. I finished by saying, “I sent those things right to her door. I never meant it to happen.”

“Of course not,” he said.

“It doesn’t make me feel any better about it.”

“Nor should it,” he said. “But you must know that you are a man of power.”

“How so?”

“Power,” he said, waving a hand in an all-encompassing gesture. “All power is the same. Magic. Physical strength. Economic strength. Political strength. It all serves a single purpose-it gives its possessor a broader spectrum of choices. It creates alternative courses of action.”

“I guess,” I said. “So?”

“So,” he said. “You have more choices. Which means that you have much improved odds of making mistakes. You’re only human. Once in a while, you’re going to screw the pooch.”

“I don’t mind that,” I said. “When I’m the only one who pays for it.”

“But that isn’t in your control,” he said. “You cannot see all outcomes. You couldn’t have known that those creatures would go to the Carpenter house.”

I ground my teeth. “So? Daniel’s still hurt. Molly could be dead.”

“But their condition was not yours to ordain,” Forthill said. “All power has its limits.”

“Then what’s the point ?” I snarled, suddenly furious. My voice bounced around the chapel in rasping echoes. “What good is it to have power enough to kill my friend’s family, but not power enough to protect them? What the hell do you expect from me? I’ve got to make these stupid choices. What the hell am I supposed to do with them?”

“Sometimes,” he replied, his tone serious, “you just have to have faith.”

I laughed, and it came out loud and bitter. Mocking echoes of it drifted through the vast chamber. “Faith,” I said. “Faith in what?”

“That things will unfold as they are meant to,” Forthill said. “That even in the face of an immediate ugliness, the greater picture will resolve into something all the more beautiful.”

“Show me,” I spat. “Show me something beautiful about this. Show me the silver fucking lining.”

He pursed his lips and mused for a moment. Then he said, “There’s a quote from the founder of my order: There is something holy, something divine, hidden in the most ordinary situations, and it is up to each one of you to discover it.”