He left the cafeteria, shaking his head. What sounded suspiciously like a chuckle bubbled in his wake.
I WAITED UNTIL Irwin was done with his sentences, and then I walked him to the front of the building, where his maternal grandmother was waiting to pick him up.
“Was that okay?” he asked me. “I mean, did I do right?”
“Asking me if I thought you did right isn’t the question,” I said.
Irwin suddenly smiled at me. “Do I think I did right?” He nodded slowly. “I think … I think I do.”
“How’s it feel?” I asked him.
“It feels good. I feel … not happy. Satisfied. Whole.”
“That’s how it’s supposed to feel,” I said. “Whenever you’ve got a choice, do good, kiddo. It isn’t always fun or easy, but in the long run it makes your life better.”
He nodded, frowning thoughtfully. “I’ll remember.”
“Cool,” I said.
He offered me his hand very seriously, and I shook it. He had a strong grip for a kid. “Thank you, Harry. Could … could I ask you a favor?”
“Sure.”
“If you see my dad again … could you tell him … could you tell him I did good?”
“Of course,” I said. “I think what you did will make him very proud.”
That all but made the kid glow. “And … and tell him that … that I’d like to meet him. You know. Someday.”
“Will do,” I said quietly.
Bigfoot Irwin nodded at me. Then he turned and made his gangly way over to the waiting car and slid into it. I stood and watched until the car was out of sight. Then I rolled my bucket of ice back into the school so that I could go home.
This next story is set just after the events, I believe, of Proven Guilty, where Harry Dresden has become impressed with the need to instruct the younger wizards around him. I can just barely remember the actual writing of this tale, which probably means it happened around a move. I find moving homes to be among the more hideous experiences in life, and I tend to block out several days around the experience, just to be safe. If I was writing during that window, then I imagine that the story was likely late as well and absolutely needed to be finished. So once again, I met with Inspiration at the corner of Late and Hurry Up.
I wanted to write a story that began to show Dresden in his role as a teacher and mentor to the younger wizards, showing him taking on more responsibility in his community and becoming more of a leader as he grew as a wizard and as a person. He had added responsibilities now, including an apprentice of his own, and wasn’t ever really going to be able to go back to the carefree days of being a roaming knight errant. So here he’s trying to impress upon the younger wizards the danger of arrogance—something, let’s face it, that Dresden has flirted with upon multiple occasions, often to his chagrin.
But this is a story in which we see Dresden beginning to grow into new roles and new responsibilities, while simultaneously catching a glimpse of his past.
The first thing I thought, looking at the roomful of baby Wardens, was, They all look so darned young. The close second was, My God, am I getting old?
“Okay, children,” I said, closing the door behind me. I had rented an alleged conference center in a little Chicago hotel not too far from the airport, which amounted to a couple of rooms big enough for twenty or thirty people—if they were friendly—plus a few dozen chairs and several rickety old folding tables.
They didn’t even provide a cooler of water—just directions to their vending machines.
After my fellow Warden-Commander in the United States, Warden Ramirez, and I had gotten done learning the little Warden-kind up on their mayhem, for the sake of getting them killed in a war as quickly as possible, we thought it might be nice to give them a little instruction in other things, too. Ramirez was going to cover the course on relations with mortal authorities, which made sense; Ramirez got on just fine with the cops in LA, and hadn’t been shot by nearly as many law-enforcement personnel as I had.
The kids had all come to Chicago to learn about independent investigation of supernatural threats from me, which also made sense, because I’d done more of that, relative to my tender years, than any other wizard on the planet.
“Okay, okay,” I said to the room. The young Wardens became silent and attentive at once. No shock there—the disruptive ones who didn’t pay attention during lessons had mostly been killed and maimed in the war with the Red Court. Darwin always thought that it paid to be a quick learner. The war had simply made the penalty for not learning quite a bit steeper.
“You’re here,” I said, “to learn about investigating supernatural threats on your own. You’ll learn about finding and hunting warlocks from Captain Luccio, whenever the Reds give us enough time for it. Warlocks, our own kind gone bad, aren’t the most common opponent you’ll find yourself facing. Far more often, you’re going to run up against other threats.”
Ilyana, a young woman with extremely pale skin and ice-blue, nearly white eyes, raised her hand and spoke in a clipped Russian accent when I nodded to her. “What kinds of threats?” she asked. “In the practical sense. What foes have you faced?”
I held up my hands and flipped up a finger for each foe. “Demons, werewolves, ghosts, faeries, fallen angels, Black Court vampires, Red Court vampires, White Court vampires, cultists, necromancers”—I paused to waggle one foot, standing with three limbs in the air—“zombies, specters, phobophages, half-blood scions, jann …” I waved my hands and foot around a bit more. “I’d need to borrow a few people to do the whole list. Get the picture?” A few smiles had erupted at my antics, but they sobered up after a moment’s consideration.
I nodded and stuck my hands into my pockets. “Knowledge is quite literally power and will save your life. When you know what you’re facing, you can deal with it. Walk into a confrontation blind, and you’re begging to get your families added to the Wardens’ death-benefits list.” I let that sink in for a few seconds before continuing. “You can’t ever be sure what you’re going to come up against. But you can be sure about how to approach the investigation.”
I turned to the old blackboard on the wall behind me and scribbled on it with the stub of a piece of chalk. “I call it the Four As,” I said, and wrote four As down the left side of the board. “Granted, it doesn’t translate as neatly to other languages, but you can make up your own native-tongue mnemonic devices later.” I used the first A to spell ascertain.
“Ascertain,” I said, firmly. “Before you can deal with the threat, you’ve got to know that it exists, and you’ve got to know who the threat’s intended target is. A lot of times, that target is going to cry out for help. Whatever city you’re based in, it’s going to be your responsibility to work out how best to hear that scream. But sometimes there’s no outcry. So keep your eyes and ears open, kids. Ascertain the threat. Become aware of the problem.”
MY CAR DIDN’T make it all the way to Kansas City. It broke down about thirty miles short of town, and I had to call a wrecker. I had planned on being there before dark, but between walking eleven miles to find an increasingly rare pay phone, dumping most of my cash into a tow-truck driver’s pocket, and the collapse of an office computer network that delayed picking up a rental car for an extra hour and a half, I wound up pulling to the curb of a residential address a couple of minutes before nine in the evening.