I’d gotten the address from a contact on the Paranet—the organization made up mostly of men and women who didn’t have enough magical power to be accepted into the ranks of the White Council or to protect themselves from major predators, but who had more than enough mojo to make them juicy targets. For the past year, I and others like me had been working hard to teach them how to defend themselves—and one of the first things they were to do was notify someone upstream in the Paranet’s organization that they were in trouble.
One such call had been bucked up to me, and here I was, answering. Before I had closed the door of the car, a spare, tense-looking man in his forties came out of the house and walked quickly toward me.
“Harry Dresden?” he called.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You’re late.”
“Car trouble,” I said. “Are you Yardly?” He stopped across the hood of the car from me, frowning severely. He was average height, and wore most of a business suit, including the tie. His black hair was cut into a short brush. He looked like the kind of guy who solved his problems through ferocious focus and mulish determination, and who tolerated no nonsense along the way.
“I’m Yardly,” he said. “Can you show me some ID?”
I almost smiled. “You want to see my American Association of Wizards card?”
Yardly didn’t smile. “Your driver’s license will do.”
“If I were a shapeshifter,” I said, passing him the license, “this wouldn’t help.”
Yardly produced a little UV flashlight and shone it onto the license. “I’m more concerned about a simple con man.” He passed me the license back. “I’m not really into my sister’s group. Whatever they are. But she’s had it rough lately and I’m not going to see her hurt anymore. Do you understand?”
“Most big brothers stop making threats about their little sisters after high school.”
“I must be remedial,” Yardly said. “If you abuse Megan in any way, you’ll answer to me.”
I felt my mouth lift up on one side. “You’re a cop.”
“Detective Lieutenant,” he said. “I asked Chicago PD for their file on you. They think you’re a fraud.”
“And you don’t?”
He grunted. “Megan doesn’t. I learned a long time ago that a smart man doesn’t discount her opinion out of hand.”
He stared at me with hard and opaque eyes, and I realized, in a flash of insight, that the man was tense because he was operating on unfamiliar ground. You couldn’t read it in his face, but it was there if you knew what to look for. A certain set of the shoulders, a twitch along the jawline, as if some part of him was ready to whirl around and sink his teeth into a threat that he could feel creeping up behind him.
Yardly was afraid. Not for himself, maybe, but the man was terrified.
“Megan says shrinks can’t help with this one,” he said quietly. “She says maybe you can.”
“Let’s find out,” I said.
“SECOND A,” I said to the Wardenlets, writing on the chalkboard as I did. “Analysis.”
“How do you get an ogre to lie down on the couch, Harry?” called a young man with the rounded vowels of a Northern accent in his speech. The room quivered with the laughter of young people.
“That’s enough out of you, there, McKenzie, you hoser,” I shot back, in a parody of the same accent. “Give me a break here, eh?”
I got a bigger laugh than the heckler. Which is how you make sure the heckler doesn’t steal the show from you. “Pipe down,” I said, and waited for them to settle. “Thank you. Your second step is always analysis. Even when you know what you’re dealing with, you’ve got to know why it’s happening. If you’ve got an angry ghost, it’s generally angry for a reason. If a new pack of ghouls has moved in down the block, they’ve generally picked their spot for a reason.”
Ilyana raised her hand again and I pointed at her. “What does it matter?” she asked. “Ghost or ghoul is causing problem, still we are dealing with them, yes?” She pointed her finger like a gun and dropped her thumb like the weapon’s hammer on the word dealing.
“If you’re stupid, yeah,” I said.
She didn’t look pleased at my response.
“I used to have a similar attitude,” I said. I held up my left hand. It was a mass of old scars, and not the pretty kind. It had been burned, and badly, several years before. Wizards heal up better than regular folks, over the long term. I could move it again, and I had feeling back in parts of all the fingers. But it still wasn’t a pretty picture. “An hour or two of work would have told me enough about the situation I was walking into to let me avoid this,” I told them. It was the truth. Pretty much. “Learn everything you possibly can.”
Ilyana frowned at me.
McKenzie raised his hand, frowning soberly, and I nodded at him.
“Learn more. Okay. How?”
I spread my hands. “Never let yourself think you know all the ways to learn,” I said. “Expand your own knowledge base. Read. Talk to other wizards. Hell, you might even go to school.”
That got me another laugh. I went on before it gathered much momentum.
“Warden Canuck there was onto something earlier, too. People are people. Learn about what makes them tick. Monsters are the same way. Find ways to emulate their thinking”—I wasn’t even going to try a phrase like Get into their heads, thank you—“and you’ll have insight into their actions and their probable intentions.
“Information-gathering spells can be darned handy,” I continued, “but if you’ll forgive the expression, they aren’t magic. The information you get from them can be easily misread, and it will almost never let you see past one of your own blind spots. You can seek answers from other planes, but if you go bargaining with supernatural beings for knowledge, things can get dangerous fast. Sometimes what you get from them is invaluable. Most of the time, it could be had another way. Approach that particular well with extreme caution.”
To emphasize those last two words, I stared slowly around the room in pure challenge, daring anyone to disagree with me. The young people dropped their eyes from mine. Eye contact with a wizard is tricky—it can trigger a soulgaze, and that isn’t the kind of thing you want happening to you casually.
“Honestly,” I said into the silence, letting my voice become gentler, more conversational, “the best thing you can do is communicate. Talk to the people involved. Your victims, if they can speak to you. Their family. Witnesses. Friends. Most of the time, everything you need is something they already know. Most of the time, that’s the fastest, safest, easiest way to get it.”
McKenzie raised his hand again, and I nodded. “Most of the time?” he asked.
“That’s the thing about people,” I said quietly, so they would pay attention. “Whether it’s to you or to everyone or just to themselves, people lie.”
MEGAN YARDLY WAS a single mother of three. She was in her early thirties and looked it, had gorgeous red hair and bright green eyes. She and her children lived in a suburb that was more sub than urb, southeast of KC, named Peculiar. Peculiar, Missouri. You can’t make these things up. Megan opened the door, nodded to her brother, looked up at me, and said, “You’re him. You’re the wizard.” Her eyes narrowed. “Your … your car broke down. And you think the name of our town is a bad joke.” She nodded, like a musician who has picked up on a beat and a chord progression. “And you think this probably isn’t a supernatural problem.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “You’re one hell of a sensitive.”
She nodded. “You were expecting someone who was good at cold reading.”
“A lot of professional psychics are,” I said. I smiled. “So are you.”
She arched an eyebrow at me.
“There’s at least a fair chance that, if someone is late to what is perceived as an important appointment, that car trouble is to blame, particularly if they show up in a rental car. Most people who hadn’t grown up around a town named Peculiar would think the name was odd.” I grinned at her. “And gosh. A lot of professional investigators are just a tad cynical.”
Her expression broke and she laughed. “Apparently.” She turned from me and kissed her brother on the cheek.
“Ben.”
“Meg.”
“Child services was here again today,” she said, her tone neutral.
“Dammit,” Yardly said. “How’s Kat?”
She waggled a hand in the air, but her face suddenly aged ten years. “The same.”