Side Jobs (20 page)

“Always with the corrupt government officials,” muttered the wizard from behind me. I glanced back at him and then looked for the thief. The nimble little minx was nowhere to be seen.

“You are trespassing!” boomed the magistrate. He had a big boomy voice. “Leave this place immediately on pain of punishment by the Crown’s law!”

“Sir!” replied the holy woman. “Our mission here is of paramount importance. The writ we bear from your own liege requires you to render aid and assistance in this matter.”

“But not to violate the graves of my subjects!” he boomed some more. “Begone! Before I unleash the nine fires of Atarak upon—”

“Enough talk!” I growled, and threw my heavy dagger at his chest.

Propelled by my massive thews, the dagger hit him two inches below his left nipple—a perfect heart shot. It struck with enough force to hurl him from his feet. His men howled with surprised fury.

I drew the huge sword from my back, let out a leonine roar, and charged the two dozen thugs.

“Enough talk!” I bellowed, and whipped the twenty-pound greatsword at the nearest target as if it were a wooden yardstick. He went down in a heap.

“Enough talk!” I howled, and kept swinging. I smashed through the next several thugs as if they were made of soft wax. Off to my left, the thief came out of nowhere and neatly sliced the Achilles tendons of another thug. The holy woman took a ready stance with her quarterstaff and chanted out a prayer to her deities at the top of her lungs.

The wizard shrieked, and a fireball whipped over my head, exploding twenty-one feet in front of me, then spread out in a perfect circle, like the shock wave of a nuke, burning and roasting thugs as it went and stopping a bare twelve inches shy of my nose.

“Oh, come on!” I said. “It doesn’t work like that!”

“What?” demanded the wizard.

“It doesn’t
work
like that!” I insisted. “Even if you call up fire with magic, it’s still
fire
. It acts like
fire
. It expands in a sphere. And under a ceiling, that means it goes rushing much farther down hallways and tunnels. It
doesn’t
just go twenty feet and then
stop
.”

“Fireballs used to work like that.” The wizard sighed. “But do you know what a chore it is to calculate exactly how far those things will spread? I mean, it slows everything down.”

“It’s simple math,” I said. “And it’s way better than the fire just spreading twenty feet regardless of what’s around it. What, do fireballs carry tape measures or something?”

Billy the Werewolf sighed and put down his character sheet and his dice. “Harry,” he protested gently, “repeat after me: It’s only a game.”

I folded my arms and frowned at him across his dining room table. It was littered with snacks, empty cans of pop, pieces of paper, and tiny model monsters and adventurers (including a massively thewed barbarian model for my character). Georgia, Billy’s willowy brunette wife, sat at the table with us, as did the redheaded bombshell Andi, while lanky Kirby lurked behind several folding screens covered with fantasy art at the head of the table.

“I’m just saying,” I said, “there’s no reason the magic can’t be portrayed at least a little more accurately, is there?”

“Again with
this
discussion.” Andi sighed. “I mean, I know he’s the actual wizard and all, but Christ.”

Kirby nodded glumly. “It’s like taking a physicist to a
Star Trek
movie.”

“Harry,” Georgia said firmly, “you’re doing it again.”

“Oh, no, I’m not!” I protested. “All I’m saying is that—”

Georgia arched an eyebrow and gave me a steady look down her aquiline nose. “You know the law, Dresden.”

“He who kills the cheer springs for beer,” chanted the rest of the table.

“Oh, bite me!” I muttered at them, but a grin was diluting my scowl as I dug out my wallet and tossed a twenty on the table.

“Okay,” Kirby said. “Roll your fireball damage, Will.”

Billy slung out a double handful of square dice and said, “Hah! One-point-two over median. Suck on that, henchmen!”

“They’re all dead,” Kirby confirmed. “We might as well break there until next week.”

“Crap,” I said. “I barely got to hit anybody.”

“I only got to hit
one
!” Andi said.

Georgia shook her head. “I didn’t even get to finish casting my spell.”

“Oh, yes,” Billy gloated. “Seven modules of identifying magic items and repairing things the stupid barbarian broke, but I’ve finally come into my own. Was it like that for you, Harry?”

“Let you know when I come into my own,” I said, rising. “But my hopes are high. Why, this very morrow, I, Harry Dresden, have a day off.”

“The devil you say!” Billy exclaimed, grinning at me as the group began cleaning up from the evening’s gaming session.

I shrugged into my black leather duster. “No apprentice, no work, no errands for the Council, no Warden stuff, no trips out of town for Paranet business. My very own free time.”

Georgia gave me a wide smile. “Tell me you aren’t going to spend it puttering around that musty hole in the ground you call a lab.”

“Um,” I said.

“Look,” Andi said. “He’s blushing!”

“I am not blushing,” I said. I swept up the empty bottles and pizza boxes, and headed into Billy and Georgia’s little kitchen to dump them into the trash.

Georgia followed me in, reaching around me to send several pieces of paper into the trash, too. “Hot date with Stacy?” she asked, her voice pitched to keep the conversation private.

“I think if I ever called her ‘Stacy,’ Anastasia might beat the snot out of me for being too lazy to speak her entire name,” I replied.

“You seem a little tense about it.”

I shrugged a shoulder. “This is going to be the first time we spend a whole day together without something trying to rip us to pieces along the way. I . . . I want it to go right, you know?” I pushed my fingers back through my hair. “I mean, both of us could use a day off.”

“Sure, sure,” Georgia said, watching me with calm, knowing eyes. “Do you think it’s going to go anywhere with her?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know. She and I have very different ideas about . . . well, about basically everything except what to do with things that go around hurting people.”

The tall, willowy Georgia glanced back toward the dining room, where her short, heavily muscled husband was putting away models. “Opposites attract. There’s a song about it and everything.”

“One thing at a time,” I said. “Neither one of us is trying to inspire the poets for the ages. We like each other. We make each other laugh. God, that’s nice, these days. ...” I sighed and glanced up at Georgia, a little sheepishly. “I just want to show her a nice time tomorrow.”

Georgia had a gentle smile on her narrow, intelligent face. “I think that’s a very healthy attitude.”

 

 

I WAS JUST getting into my car, a battered old Volkswagen Bug I’ve dubbed the
Blue Beetle
, when Andi came hurrying over to me.

There’d been a dozen Alphas when I’d first met them, college kids who had banded together and learned just enough magic to turn themselves into wolves. They’d spent their time as werewolves protecting and defending the town, which needed all the help it could get. The conclusion of their college educations had seen most of them move on in life, but Andi was one of the few who had stuck around.

Most of the Alphas adopted clothing that was easily discarded—the better to swiftly change into a large wolf without getting tangled up in jeans and underwear. On this particular summer evening, Andi was wearing a flirty little purple sundress and nothing else. Between her hair, her build, and her long, strong legs, Andi’s picture belonged on the nose of a World War II bomber, and her hurried pace was intriguingly kinetic.

She noticed me noticing and gave me a wicked little smile and an extra jiggle the last few steps. She was the sort to appreciate being appreciated. “Harry,” she said, “I know you hate to mix business with pleasure, but there’s something I was hoping to talk to you about tomorrow.”

“Sorry, sweetheart,” I said in my best Bogey dialect. “Not tomorrow. Day off. Important things to do.”

“I know,” Andi said. “But I was hoping—”

“If it waited until after the Arcanos game, it can wait until after my d-day off,” I said firmly.

Andi almost flinched at the tone, and nodded. “Okay.”

I felt myself arch an eyebrow. I hadn’t put
that
much harsh into it—and Andi wasn’t exactly the sort to be fazed by verbal salvos, regardless of their nature or volume. Socially speaking, the woman was armored like a battleship.

“Okay,” I replied. “I’ll call.” Kirby approached her as I got into the car, put an arm around her from behind, and tugged her backside against his front side, leaning down to sniff at her hair. She closed her eyes and pressed herself into him.

Yeah. I let myself feel a little smug as I pulled out of the lot and drove home. That one had just been a matter of time, despite everything Georgia had said. I totally called it.

 

 

I PULLED INTO the gravel parking lot beside the boardinghouse where I live and knew right away I had a problem. Perhaps it was my keenly developed intuition, honed by years of investigative work as the infamous Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, shamus of the supernatural, gumshoe of the ghostly, wise guy of the weird, warning me with preternatural awareness of the shadow of Death passing nearby.

Or maybe it was the giant black van painted with flaming skulls, goat’s head pentacles, and inverted crosses that was parked in front of my apartment door—six-six-six of one, half a dozen of another.

The van’s doors opened as I pulled in and people in black spilled out with neither the precision of a professional team of hitters nor the calm swagger of competent thugs. They looked like I’d caught them in the middle of eating sack lunches. One of them had what looked like taco sauce spilled down the front of his frothy white lace shirt. The other four . . . Well, they looked like something.

They were all wearing mostly black, and mostly Gothware, which meant a lot of velvet with a little leather, rubber, and PVC to spice things up. Three women, two men, all of them fairly young. All of them carried wands and staves and crystals dangling from chains, and all of them had deadly serious expressions on their faces.

I parked the car, never looking directly at them, and then got out of it, stuck my hands in my duster pockets, and stood there waiting.

“You’re Harry Dresden,” said the tallest one there, a young man with long black hair and a matching goatee.

I squinted at nothing, like Clint Eastwood would do, and said nothing, like Chow Yun-Fat would do.

“You’re the one who came to New Orleans last week.” He said it, “Nawlins,” even though the rest of his accent was Midwest standard. “You’re the one who desecrated my works.”

I blinked at him. “Whoa, wait a minute. There actually
was
a curse on that nice lady?”

He sneered at me. “She had earned my wrath.”

“How about that,” I said. “I figured it for some random bad feng shui.”

His sneer vanished. “What?”

“To tell you the truth, it was so minor that I only did the ritual cleansing to make her feel better and show the Paranetters how to do it for themselves in the future.” I shrugged. “Sorry about your wrath, there, Darth Wannabe.”

He recovered his composure in seconds. “Apologies will do you no good, Wizard. Now!”

He and his posse all raised their various accoutrements, sneering malevolently. “Defend yourself!”

“Okay,” I said, and pulled my .44 out of my pocket.

Darth Wannabe and his posse lost their sneers.

“Wh-what?” said one of the girls, who had a nose ring that I was pretty sure was a clip-on. “What are you doing?”

“I’m a-fixin’ to defend myself,” I drawled, Texas-style. I held the gun negligently, pointing down and to one side and not right at them. I didn’t want to hurt anybody. “Look, kids. You really need to work on your image.”

Darth opened his mouth. It just hung that way for a minute.

“I mean, the van’s a bit overdone. But hell, I can’t throw stones. My VW Bug has a big ‘53’ inside a circle spray-painted on the hood. You’re sort of slipping elsewhere, though.” I nodded at one of the girls, a brunette holding a wand with a crystal on the tip. “Honey, I liked the
Harry Potter
movies, too, but that doesn’t mean I ran out and got a Dark Mark tattooed onto my left forearm like you did.” I eyed the other male. “And you’re wearing a freakin’ Slytherin scarf. I mean, Christ. How’s anyone supposed to take
that
seriously?”

“You would dare—” Darth Wannabe began, obviously outraged.

“One more tip, kids. If you had any real talent, the air would practically have been on fire when you got ready to throw down. But you losers don’t have enough magic between you to turn cereal into breakfast.”

“You would dare—”

“I can tell, because I actually
am
a wizard. I went to school for this stuff.”

“You would—”

“I mean, I know you guys have probably thrown your talents at other people in your weight class, had your little duels, and maybe someone got a nosebleed and someone went home with a migraine and it gave your inner megalomaniac a boner. But this is different.” I nodded at one of the other girls, who had shaved her head clean. “Excuse me, miss. What time is it?”

She blinked at me. “Um. It’s after one . . . ?”

“Thanks.”

The Dim Lord tried for his dramatic dialogue again. “You would dare threaten us with mortal weapons?”

“It’s after midnight,” I told the idiot. “I’m off the clock.”

That killed his momentum again. “What?”

“It’s my day off, and I’ve got plans, so let’s just skip ahead.”