I couldn’t actually hear his eyes narrow, but I was pretty sure they did. “You got a lot of nerve, buddy, talking to an instructor like that.”
“If there weren’t all these kids around, I might have said another syllable or two,” I drawled. “Coach Vogon.”
“You’re about to lose your job, buddy. Get to work or I’ll report you for malingering.”
“Malingering,” I said. “Four whole syllables. You’re good.”
He rolled another step toward me and jabbed a finger into my chest. “Buddy, you’re about to buy a lot of trouble. Who do you think you are?”
“Harry Dresden,” I said. “Wizard.”
And I looked at him as I opened my Sight.
A wizard’s Sight is an extra sense, one that allows him to perceive the patterns of energy and magic that suffuse the universe—energy that includes every conceivable form of magic. It doesn’t actually open a third eye in your forehead or anything, but the brain translates the perceptions into the visual spectrum. In the circles I run in, the Sight shows you things as they truly are, cutting through every known form of veiling magic, illusion, and other mystic chicanery.
In this case, it showed me that the thing standing in front of me wasn’t human.
Beneath its illusion, the spindly humanoid creature stood a little more than five feet high, and it might have weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. It was naked, and anatomically it resembled a Ken doll. Its skin was dark grey, its eyes absolutely huge, bulbous, and midnight black. It had a rounded, high-crowned head and long, delicately pointed ears. I could still see the illusion of Coach Pete around the creature, a vague and hazy outline.
It lowered the lids of its bulbous eyes, the gesture somehow exceptionally lazy, and then nodded slowly. It inclined its head the smallest measurable amount possible and murmured, in a melodious and surprisingly deep voice, “Wizard.”
I blinked a few times and waved my Sight away, so that I was facing Coach Pete again. “We should talk,” I said.
The apparent man stared at me unblinkingly, his expression as blank as a discarded puppet’s. It was probably my imagination that made his eyes look suddenly darker. “Regarding?”
“Irwin Pounder,” I said. “I would prefer to avoid a conflict with Svartalfheim.”
He inhaled and exhaled slowly through his nose. “You recognized me.”
In fact, I’d been making an educated guess, but the svartalf didn’t need to know that. I knew precious little about the creatures. They were extremely gifted craftsmen, and were responsible for creating most of the really cool artifacts of Norse myth. They weren’t wicked, exactly, but they were ruthless, proud, stubborn, and greedy, which often added up to similar results. They were known to be sticklers for keeping their word, and God help you if you broke yours to them. Most important, they were a small supernatural nation unto themselves: one that protected its citizens with maniacal zeal.
“I had a good teacher,” I said. “I want your boys to lay off Irwin Pounder.”
“Point of order,” he said. “They are not mine. I am not their progenitor. I am a guardian only.”
“Be that as it may,” I said, “my concern is for Irwin, not the brothers.”
“He is a whetstone,” he said. “They sharpen their instincts upon him. He is good for them.”
“They aren’t good for him,” I said. “Fix it.”
“It is not my place to interfere with them,” Coach Pete said. “Only to offer indirect guidance and to protect them from anyone who would interfere with their growth.”
The last phrase was as emotionless as the first, but it somehow carried an ugly ring of a threat—a polite threat, but a threat nonetheless.
Sometimes I react badly to being threatened. I might have glared a little.
“Hypothetically,” I said, “let’s suppose that I saw those boys giving Irwin a hard time again and I made it my business to stop them. What would you do?”
“Slay you,” Coach Pete said. His tone was utterly absent of any doubt.
“Awfully sure of yourself, aren’t you?”
He spoke as if reciting a single-digit arithmetic problem. “You are young. I am not.”
I felt my jaw clench and forced myself to take a slow breath, to stay calm. “They’re hurting him.”
“Be that as it may,” he said calmly, “my concern is for the brothers, not for Irwin Pounder.”
I ground my teeth and wished I could pick my words out of them before continuing the conversation. “We’ve both stated our positions,” I said. “How do we resolve the conflict?”
“That also is not my concern,” he said. “I will not dissuade the brothers. I will slay you should you attempt to do so yourself. There is nothing else to discuss.”
He shivered a little, and suddenly the illusion of Coach Pete seemed to gain a measure of life, of definition, like an empty glove abruptly filled by the flesh of a hand.
“If you will excuse me,” he said, in Coach Pete’s annoying tone of voice, walking past me, “I have a detention over which to preside.”
“To preside over,” I said, and snorted at his back. “Over which to preside. No one actually talks like that.”
He turned his head and gave me a flat-eyed look. Then he rounded a corner and was gone.
I rubbed at the spot on my forehead between my eyebrows and tried to think.
I had a bad feeling that fighting this guy was going to be a losing proposition. In my experience, when someone gets their kids a supernatural supernanny, they don’t pick pushovers. Among wizards, I’m pretty buff, but the world is full of bigger fish than me. More to the point, even if I fought the svartalf and won, it might drag the White Council of Wizardry into a violent clash with Svartalfheim. I wouldn’t want to have something like that on my conscience.
I wanted to protect the Pounder kid, and I wasn’t going to back away from that. But how was I supposed to protect him from the Bully Brothers if they had a heavyweight on deck, ready to charge in swinging? That kind of brawl could spill over onto any nearby kids, and fast. I didn’t want this to turn into a slugfest. That wouldn’t help Irwin Pounder.
But what could I do? What options did I have? How could I act without dragging the svartalf into a confrontation?
I couldn’t.
“Ah,” I said to no one, lifting a finger in the air. “Aha!”
I grabbed my mop bucket and hurried toward the cafeteria.
THE SCHOOL EMPTIED out fast, making the same transition every school does every day, changing from a place full of life and energy, of movement and noise, into a series of echoing chambers and empty halls. Teachers and staff seemed as eager to be gone as the students. Good. It was still possible that things would get ugly, and if they did, the fewer people around, the better.
By the time I went by the janitor’s closet to pick up the few tools I’d brought with me and went to the cafeteria, my bucket’s squeaking wheels were the loudest sound I could hear. I turned the corner at almost exactly the same time as the Bully Brothers appeared from the opposite end of the hall. They drew up short, and I could feel the weight of their eyes as they assessed me. I ignored them and went on inside.
Bigfoot Irwin was already inside the cafeteria, seated at a table, writing on a piece of paper. I recognized the kid’s rigid, resigned posture, and it made my wrist ache just to see it: Coach Pete had him writing a sentence repetitively, probably something about being more careful with his lunch tray. The monster.
Coach Pete stood leaning against a wall, reading a sports magazine of some sort. Or at least that was what he appeared to be doing. I had to wonder how much genuine interest a svartalf might have in the NBA. His eyes flicked up as I entered; I saw them go flat.
I set my mop and bucket aside and started sweeping the floors with a large dust broom. My janitorial form was perfect. I saw Coach Pete’s jaw clench a couple of times, and then he walked over to me.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Sweeping the floor,” I replied, guileless as a newborn.