Jim Butcher - Proven Guilty

I grunted. “Why do Nelson, too?”

“He was… he was using too much. He and Rosie sort of reinforced each other. And I wasn’t sure what might happen, so I tried the spell out before I used it on her, too.”

“You tested it on Nelson?” I asked. “Then did the same one on Rosie?”

She nodded. “I had to scare them away from the drugs. I sent them both a nightmare.”

“Stars and stones,” I muttered. “A nightmare.”

Molly’s voice became defensive. “I had to do something. I couldn’t just sit there.”

“Do you have any idea how much you hurt them both?” I asked.

“Hurt them?” she said, apparently bewildered. “They were fine.”

“They weren’t fine,” I said quietly. “But the same spell should have done more or less the same thing to both of them. It acted differently on

Nelson than Rosie.“ And then I put two and two together again and said, ”Ah. Now I get it.“

She didn’t look up at me.

“Nelson was the father,” I said quietly.

She shrugged. A tear streaked down her cheek. “They probably didn’t even know what they were doing when it happened. The pair of them were just…” She shook her head and fell silent.

“That explains why your spell damaged Nelson so much more severely.”

“I don’t understand. I never hurt him.”

“I don’t think you did it on purpose.” I waved a hand, palm up. “Magic comes from a lot of places. But especially from your emotions. They influence almost anything you can do. You were angry at Nelson when you cast the spell. Contaminated the whole thing with your anger.”

“I did not hurt them,” she said stubbornly. “I saved their lives.”

“I don’t think you realize the ramifications,” I said.

She spun to me and shrieked, “ I did not hurt them !”

The air suddenly crackled with tension; vague, unfocused energy centered on the screaming girl. There was enough energy to manage something unfortunate, and it was clear that the kid wasn’t in anything like control of her power. I shook my head and swung my left hand in a half circle, palm faced out, and simply drew in the magical energy her emotions had generated and grounded it into the earth before somebody got hurt.

A tingle of sensation washed up my arm, surprisingly intense. Her talent was not a modest one. I started to snap a reprimand for her carelessness, but aborted it before the first word. In the first place, she was ignorant of what she’d done. Not innocent, but not wholly at fault, all the same. In the second place, she’d just been through a nightmarish ordeal at the hands of wicked faeries. She probably couldn’t have controlled her emotions, even if she wanted to.

She stared at me in surprise as the energy she had raised vanished. The rage and pain in her stance and expression faded to uncertainty.

“I didn’t hurt them,” she said in a rather small voice. “I saved them.”

“Molly, you need to know the facts. I know you’re tired and scared. But that doesn’t change a damned thing about what you did to them. You fucked around with their minds. You used magic to enslave them to your will, and the fact that you meant well by it doesn’t matter at all. Somewhere inside of them both, they know what you’ve done to them, subconsciously.

They’ll try to fight it. Regain control of their own choices. And that struggle is going to tear their psyches to shreds.“

More tears fell from her eyes. “B-but…”

I went on in a steady voice. “Rosie was better off. She might recover from it in a few years. But Nelson is probably insane already. He might not ever make it back. And doing it to them has screwed around with your own head. Not as bad as Rosie and Nelson, but you damaged yourself, too. It’ll make it harder for you to control impulses and your magic. Which makes you a lot more likely to lose control and hurt someone else. It’s a vicious cycle. I’ve seen it in action.”

She shook her head several times. “No. No, no, no.”

“Here’s another truth,” I said. “The White Council has seven Laws of Magic. Screwing around in other people’s heads breaks one of them. When the Council finds out what you’ve done, they’ll put you on trial and execute you. Trial, sentence, and execution won’t take an hour.”

She fell silent, staring at me, crying harder. “Trial?” she whispered.

“A couple of days ago I watched them execute a kid who had broken the same law.”

Her shocked expression could not seem to recover. Her eyes roamed randomly, blurred with tears. “But… I didn’t know.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I said.

“I never meant to hurt anyone.”

“Ditto.”

She broke out into a half-hysterical sob and clutched at her stomach. “But… but that’s not fair.”

“What is?” I said quietly. “One more hard truth for you. I’m a Warden of the Council now, Molly. It’s my job to take you to them.”

She only stared. She looked wracked with pain, helpless, alone. God help me, she looked like the little girl I’d first met at Michael’s house years before. I had to remind myself that there was another, darker portion of the girl behind those blue eyes. The snarling rage, the denial, they both belonged to the parts of her mind that had been twisted as she twisted others.

I wished that I hadn’t seen flashes of that other self in her, because I did not want to follow the chain of consequence that sprang from it. Molly had broken the Laws of Magic. She’d inflicted incalculable harm on others. Her damaged psyche could collapse on her, leaving her insane.

All of which meant that she was dangerous.

Ticking-bomb dangerous.

It did not matter to the Laws that she had meant well. She had become exactly the kind of person that the Laws of Magic-and their sentence- were created to deal with.

But when the law fails to protect those it governs, it’s up to someone else to pick up the slack-in this case, me. There was a chance that I could save her life. It wasn’t an enormous chance, but it was probably the best shot she was going to get. Assuming, of course, that she was not already too far around the bend.

I only knew one sure way to find out.

I stopped in the darkened hall and turned to her. “Molly. Do you know what a soulgaze is?”

“It… I read in a book that it’s when you look into someone’s eyes. You see something about who they are.”

“Close enough,” I agreed. “You ever done it?”

She shook her head. “The book said it could be dangerous.”

“Can be,” I confirmed. “Though probably not for the reasons you’d think. When you see someone like that, Molly, there’s no hiding the truth about who you are. You see it all, good and bad. No specifics, usually, but you get a damned good idea about what kind of person they are. And it’s for keeps. Once you’ve seen it, it stays in your head, fresh, period. And when you look at them, they get the same look at you.”

She nodded. “Why do you ask?”

“I’d like to gaze on you, if you’re willing to permit it.”

“Why?”

I smiled a little, though my reflection in a passing window looked mostly sad. “Because I want to help you.”

She turned away, as if to start walking again, but only swayed in place, her torn skirts whispering. “I don’t understand.”

“I’m not going to hurt you, kid. But I need you to trust me for a little while.”

She nodded, biting her lip. “Okay. What do I do?”

I stopped and turned to face her. She mirrored me. “This might feel a little weird. But it won’t last as long as it seems.”

“Okay,” she said, that lost-child tone still in her voice.

I met her eyes.

For a second, I thought nothing had happened. And then I realized that the soulgaze was already up and running, and that it showed me Molly, standing and facing me as nothing more than she seemed to be. But I could see down the hall behind her, and the church’s windows held half a dozen different reflections.