Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter
Thirty-Four
February came and it wasn’t as cold as it might have been.
I had been spending a lot of time working on the spell for Thomas.
I had proved the concept with Lara on New Year’s Eve, but going halfway and backing off wasn’t the same as going through the whole process, any more than a quick sketch on a napkin was the same thing as a large oil painting.
Magic, like all power, often has unexpected consequences when used.
It’s easy to call it up, hard to deal with what happens as a result if you haven’t employed it with discipline and caution.
Severing the bond between the Hunger and Thomas was the danger point.
I had thought my way through it and had realized with a cold little shiver that I was, on a magical level, attempting something that, if done incorrectly, would be a lot like breaking molecular bonds.
The amount of eldritch energy that could potentially be released was staggering and could readily consume Thomas or the Hunger, or me, or all of us.
There was a very low-order probability that it could chain-react beyond the immediate participants in the spell as well, with results that could be entirely unpredictable.
I’d have to do it on the island, where I could have free rein to build the magical equivalent of a vault, clean room, and surgical theater.
I’d have to go to the island and outline to Alfred what I would need.
The Water Beetle was in harbor land storage at the moment, so it would have to be a trek through the Nevernever to get there.
Fun, in the way that I could readily get killed doing it, but I wanted to give Alfred plenty of time.
I’d probably need a proper thaw and the boat back in the water to get everything I’d need transported to the site.
Spring, then.
I’d given Fitz the evening off, and he’d promptly gone to the gym to horse around with a couple of the younger Knights of the Bean and several young men who were staying with their families from the neighborhood.
They’d worked out a way to throw down the workout pads and play a game somewhere between dodgeball, American football, and Rest-of-the-World football down the long axis of the gym.
There was a lot of tackling and kicking the ball with egregious amounts of force.
Bruises and minor injuries were common, and the players seemed to regard them as a feature, not a bug.
People get weird when they’re cooped up for a while.
I wrapped up my sketched design for a proper major circle for this spell, put it away in a protective sleeve and into a folder, and left it on my lab table. Bob the Skull had helped with it.
I climbed up the stepladder to the lowest floor of the castle and shambled down the hall to my room.
Bear, reading a book, glanced up as I walked by her room and I waved good night, before shutting myself in my bedroom, locking the door, and getting out the materials for the summoning ritual, along with a new board game where players cooperatively dealt with urban folklore monsters running about a small town.
Before, I would have said the game was too much like work, but I hadn’t been much on the deal-with-monsters train lately.
Maybe she’d feel the same way.
Spells go smoother and faster and more efficiently the more you perform them, and by now this one was second nature.
Maybe forty-five seconds, start to finish, closing a circle centered around a SIG Sauer P365 nine-millimeter pistol named Backup, a set of motorcycle keys, and several rough, raw diamonds I once would have considered rocks.
“New game,” she noted, a few seconds after I was finished. “Huh. Cooperative? They make cooperative games?”
I opened my eyes. The candles had burned down to blue pinpoints, and like always, it would take a few minutes before I could see her face. “They’re mostly playing together against an algorithm, but yeah.”
“Okay,” she said. She studied me for a moment. “Except you’re looking different, aren’t you?”
“Shaved,” I said. “Haircut. Maggie thought it looked messy.”
“Maggie’s right, it did,” she replied, amused. “Taking care of yourself. Grooming. That’s a good thing. Healthy.” I vaguely saw her tilt her head. “Something else is on your mind.”
The Winter mantle stirred, flickers of anger and need for resolution zinging around my insides.
“Mab thinks I need to get revenge on Rudolph.”
“For what?” she asked me.
I felt a flicker of something like shame at the way I felt. “You know for what.”
“From where I’m at right now,” she said, “it gets less and less relevant to me.”
“After what he did to you?!” I demanded.
“From my perspective,” she said gently, “he kind of created me. I know you get upset when I say this, but you need to hear it: I’m not quite her, am I?”
“Dammit,” I muttered. I stared at the box for the game.
“I don’t think I want to play that one,” she continued in the same soft voice. “Harry, I understand why you’re doing what you’re doing. But you can’t do this forever. We aren’t actually cooperative in all of this.”
I didn’t look up at her dim form.
“I don’t mind helping you,” she said. “I’m very, very fond of you, obviously. But I also have very limited agency in this, also obviously.”
She let that sit in the air for a long moment of silence.
“Why does Mab think you need revenge?” she asked.
“Said it would make managing the Winter mantle easier.”
“You having problems with it?”
“I…no. Not so much. I mean, the exercise, the routine, the discipline. And I’ve gotten better at…I dunno. Compartmentalizing? Or maybe figuring out which is the mantle and which is actually me.”
“Ah,” she said. “So if you’re aware that it’s the mantle that wants vengeance, why are you even asking me about it?”
“Oh,” I said.
“Do you?” she asked. “Is that what you want? To do unto Rudolph as he did unto Murphy?”
I flinched again.
I didn’t like it when the shade pointed out that she wasn’t…
Wasn’t…
“I…” I swallowed. “When it happened. I wanted to crush him. Slow. Painful.” The blue pinpoint lights blurred.
“And I’d never felt so certain about anything in my life.
It was like everything in me was all aligned, pointing in the same direction.
” I shook my head. “It was like fighting a child. Wasn’t a damned thing he could do. ”
She was sitting in the one chair in the room. She leaned forward, elbows resting on her knees. “Then what happened?”
“Two Knights of the Cross showed up to stop me,” I said. “I fought them. My friends. And I lost.” I held up the arm that still bore the burn scar from the Sword of Faith. “And the Sword that only smites the wicked did this to me.”
“My God,” she said. “You’re not even Catholic.”
I frowned. “Eh?”
She smiled at me. “I suppose we don’t have a monopoly on carrying shame, but we’re definitely number one.” She paused and mused, “We. You’d think I’d not be Catholic anymore given my circumstances. But here we are.”
“I’m not ashamed of the fight,” I said quietly.
“But you’re ashamed of the burn,” she said.
“I’m ashamed I failed y…” I swallowed and took a deep breath. “Her.”
The shade sat back slowly. I could see her face now. Her eyes. Her hair. Exactly like Murph. Her expression was pensive, intent.
“I failed her,” I said quietly. “I loved her and I failed her.”
“A great many people died that night,” the shade said quietly. “Mortals. Supernatural folk. It was a war. And no one was in control of what was happening.”
“I should have been,” I said viciously. “I should have been.”
Her eyes glistened with tears. “Oh,” she said quietly. “Oh, Harry.” She folded her hands and said, “I have all of her memories, you know. I remember that you told her to stay under cover. That she was in no shape to go to war. You did that, didn’t you?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“But she didn’t listen.”
“Course she didn’t,” I said. “You know how she was.”
“More than anyone, I suspect.” She sighed. “What is it, exactly, you think you should have done?”
“Bonked her on the head and dropped her off at McAnally’s,” I said.
“One,” the shade said, “you’re assuming you could have pulled that off. But let’s be generous and say you had. What do you think she would have done, after?”
“Been pissed,” I choked out.
“Understatement,” the shade said, nodding. “You’d have lost her that way, too.”
“But she’d be alive,” I snarled.
The shade stared at me for a long moment. Then she said, “She was too hurt to go out, wasn’t she?”
“She was,” I said. “Until Mab…”
Until Mab had exerted the force of her will. Had reduced the ability of those willing to fight to defend the city to feel fear. Pain. Made them more like Winter, more aggressive, primal, drawing out their combative instincts and sharpening them, the way the Winter mantle did for me.
If Mab hadn’t done that…
If I hadn’t gone and broken Thomas out of his imprisonment…
If I hadn’t destroyed the Red Court, freeing the Fomor to attack a power vacuum…
If I hadn’t stood to fight beside the Accorded nations, only to be cast out of the White Council…
If Rudolph had had an ounce of personal courage and backbone…
The shade watched my face intently. “A lot of things had to come together for all of that to happen,” she said. “Some of them were partly in your control. Some of them weren’t. It’s…extremely arrogant for you to take credit for the ones that weren’t your fault, Harry. You haven’t earned that.”
I scowled at the floor.
“I can tell you this much,” the shade said simply. “She loved you, though she was afraid to admit it to herself, much less you. She was going to be in that fight, one way or another. She regretted none of her choices. Even at the end. Except that she’d held herself back from you.”
I started crying. My shoulders shook.
“We can have conversations like this over and over,” the shade said. “But I don’t think you’re going to get much out of them.” She leaned forward. “You need other people for that. People who can put their hand on your shoulder. Tell you things that they see that you can’t see for yourself.”
“Everyone is under strain,” I began.
“Not everyone lost the person they loved,” said the shade in a reasonable tone.
“You should talk to them. About her. Let them help you remember her.” She sighed.
“Because you’re stuck in your memories, all by yourself.
And calling me up almost every night is not going to help you with that.
Memories fade. Like pain. Like wounds. Preserve the brightest ones.
Talk about them to other people. You’re going to find a lot more compassion and understanding than you think.
” She took a deep breath. “And talk about the worst, too. And let them go.”
“I don’t want to let go,” I said, voice almost pleading. I looked up at her. “Of y…of her.”
“That’s not for you to decide,” she said, very softly. “She’s gone. That’s the truth. There’s nothing left to hold on to.” She smiled wanly. “Apart from me, I mean.”
Shades were not the people who had once lived. They were an imprint, like a footprint in soft ground, a spiritual being made of memories of a life now gone.
“I’m tired,” I said, shaking. “Of…just, crying. Tears. Fuck, I’m so tired of hurting.”
“You need to take steps,” she said. “You need to heal. You know what that means.”
I shook my head.
“You’re getting there,” she said encouragingly. “I know you feel terrible still. But you’re getting there.” She sighed. “I mean what I say. About talking to someone. It will help.”
The candles flickered and went out.
And the shade was gone.
I sat on the floor and wept.
After a while, there was a quiet knock at the door, and Bear said, “Dresden?”
It took a moment, but I shambled to my feet, to the door, and opened it.
Bear hovered over me in a long white nightshirt, her expression set in a frown. “Hey. You all right?”
“No,” I said quietly. “Not since last summer.”
She nodded. “Murphy,” she said.
“Feels like my fault,” I said.
“Because you survived,” she said. “And she didn’t.”
“At the end…” I hesitated and then said, feeling afresh the horror and pain of that night, “Her lips were blue. And she was so pale. Like she was freezing.”
“Deep breath,” said Bear. “Go on.”
I took a deep breath, like when meditating. I felt some of the horror ease. I’d practiced breathing and calming myself so much over the past months.
“I miss her,” I said. “And when she went, I…I did things I’m not proud of. To friends. And I’m ashamed to talk to anyone about it.”
Bear blew out a heavy breath.
Then she said, “Man the fuck up, Dresden.”
I blinked. “What?”
“You got hurt,” she said. “In a bad situation, you did some things you wish you hadn’t.
Surprise, surprise, you’re human. You make mistakes.
You screw things up. That part isn’t even a question.
Humans do that. Life came along and knocked you onto your ass.
” She lifted a hand, made a fist, and drove it gently into my shoulder.
“It’s okay to get knocked down. It’s not okay to stay there.
That isn’t who you are, or who you are meant to be.
So gather up your testosterone, think of a wonderful thought, do whatever it is you need to do, and get back up off the ground. ”
“That’s so compassionate,” I said.
“Sometimes the most compassionate thing you can do for someone is give them a gentle, firm boot to the ass,” she said seriously. “Wake up. Events are in motion. There’s not a lot of time. There are massive things on the wind. And we need you. Make things as right as you can and move the fuck on.”
I think any night before that, I would have gotten angry. Really, really angry.
But the part of me that was tired of hurting thought that maybe I should consider what she’d said.
I looked at her for a long moment and then nodded slowly.
“Observation to make,” Bear said. “More personal than I usually do.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“If you weren’t a decent person, with a conscience and a soul,” she said, “one who genuinely cares about trying to be a good man, you’d never be torturing yourself like this.
If anyone else was treating someone the way you’ve been treating yourself, you’d hat up and take action.
Why the hell should it be any different when you are the person being treated badly? ”
I blinked a few times at that.
I hadn’t ever thought of it that way before.
“So do something about it,” Bear said. “Go to sleep. Leg day tomorrow.”
“I…” I said. “Uh. Yeah.” I looked up at her. “Thank you, Bear.”
She nodded gravely.
I went to bed, exhausted.
And before I knew it, I’d fallen asleep.