“Meg, the doctors—”
“Not again, Ben,” she said, closing her eyes briefly. She shook her head once, and Yardly shut his jaws with an audible click. Megan looked down at the ground for a moment and then up at me. “So. Harry Dresden. High Mucketymuck of the White Council.”
“Actually,” I said, “I’m a fairly low mucketymuck. Or maybe a mucketymuck militant. High mucketymucks—”
“Wouldn’t come to Peculiar?”
“You’re really into interruption, aren’t you?” I said, smiling. “I was going to say, they wouldn’t have a problem with their car.”
“Oh, God,” she said. “I think I like you.”
“Give it time,” I said.
She nodded slowly. Then she said, with gentle emphasis, “Please come into my home.” She stepped back, and I came into the little house, crossing over the threshold, the curtain of gentle, powerful energy that surrounds every home. Her invitation meant that the curtain parted for me, letting me bring my power with me. I exhaled slowly, tightening my metaphysical muscles and feeling my power put a silent, invisible strain on the air around me. Megan inhaled suddenly, sharply, and took a step back from me.
“Ah,” I said. “You are a sensitive.”
She shook her head once, and then held up her hand to forestall her brother. “Ben, it’s fine. He’s …” She looked at me again, her expression pensive, fragile. “He’s the real deal.”
We sat down in the little living room. It was littered with children’s toys. The place didn’t look like an animal pit—just busy and well-loved. I sat in a comfy chair. Megan perched at the edge of her couch. Yardly hovered, evidently unable to bring himself to sit.
“So,” I said quietly. “You think something is tormenting your daughters.”
She nodded.
“How old are they?”
“Kat is twelve. Tamara is four.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Tell me about what happens.”
Sometimes I seem to have the damnedest sense of timing. No sooner had I asked the question than a high-pitched scream cut the air, joined an instant later by another one.
“Oh, God,” Megan said, and flew up to her feet and out of the room.
I followed her, but more slowly, as the screaming continued. She hurried down a short hallway to a room with a trio of large cartoon girl figures I didn’t recognize. They had freaking huge eyes, though. Megan emerged a moment later, carrying a dark-haired moppet in pink-and-white-striped footie pajamas. The little girl was clinging to her mother with all four limbs and kept screaming, her eyes squeezed tight shut.
The sound was heart wrenching. She was terrified. I had to stop short as Megan immediately took two quick steps toward me and plunged through the next doorway. This one had a poster of a band of young men on it I didn’t recognize. One looked rebellious and sullen, one wacky and lighthearted, one sober and stable, and one handsomely vogue. Another Monkees reincarnation, basically.
I went to the door and saw Megan, with her clinging moppet, sit down on the bed and start gently shaking the shoulder of a girl with hair like her mother’s—presumably Kat. She was screaming, too, but she broke out of it a moment later, the instant her eyes fluttered open.
The moppet, presumably Tamara, stopped screaming, too, and at exactly the same time. Then they both burst into less-hysterical tears and clung to their mother.
Megan’s face was anguished, but her voice and her hands were gentle as she touched them, spoke to them, reassured them. If she was an empath as sensitive as her file and her reaction to my test suggested, then she had to be in terrible psychic pain. She pushed enough of it aside to be there for her kids, though.
“Dammit,” I heard Yardly breathe from the hall behind me. It was a tired oath.
“Interesting,” I said. “Excuse me.”
I turned and paced down the hallway to the younger child’s room, and nearly tripped over a dark-haired child, a boy who might have been eight. He was wearing underwear and a T-shirt with a cartoon Jedi Knight on it, which raised my opinion of his mother immediately. The kid’s eyes weren’t even open, and he raised his arms blindly. I picked him up and carried him with me into the little bedroom.
It wasn’t large—nothing about Megan’s house was. One of the beds was pink and festooned with the same three big-eyed girls. The other was surrounded in the plastic shell of a Star Wars landspeeder. I plopped the young Jedi back into it, and he promptly curled into a ball and went to sleep.
I covered him up with a blanket and turned to examine the rest of the room. Not much to it. A lot of toys, most of them more or less put away; a dresser the two younger kids evidently shared; a little table and chairs; and a closet.
A nice, shadowy closet.
I grunted and got on the floor to peer beneath the little pink bed. Then I squinted at the closet. If I were four and lying on the girl’s bed, the closet would be looming right past the ends of my toes.
I closed my eyes for a moment and reached out with my wizard’s senses, feeling the flow and ebb of energy through the house. Within the defensive wall of the threshold, other energy pulsed and moved—emotions from the house’s inhabitants, random energies sifting in from outdoors—the usual.
But not in the closet. There wasn’t anything at all in that closet.
“Aha,” I said.
“THIRD A,” I said, writing on the board. “Assemble.”
“Avengers,” said McKenzie.
“Assemble!” crowed the young Wardens in unison. They’re good kids.
“That is, in fact, one potential part of this phase of the investigation,” I said, taking the conversation back in hand as I nodded my approval. “Sometimes, once you’ve figured out what’s going on, you go and round up reinforcements. But what assembling really means, for our purposes, is putting everything together. You’ve got your information. Now you need to decide what to do with it. You plan what steps you need to take. You work out the possible consequences of your actions.”
“Here’s where you use your brain. If the foe has a weakness, you figure out how to exploit it. If you’ve got an advantage of terrain, you figure out how to use it. If you need specialized gear or equipment to help, here’s where you get it.” I started passing a stack of papers around the room. “There’s recipes on these handouts for a couple of the most common things you’ll use: an antidote for Red Court venom, which you’re familiar with, and an ointment for your eyes that’ll let you see through most faerie glamour, which you may not know about. Get used to making these.”
I took a deep breath. “This is also the stage where sometimes you do some math.”
The room was very quiet for a moment.
“Yeah,” I said. “Here’s where you decide whose life to risk, or whose isn’t worth risking. Here’s where you decide who you can save and who is already gone past saving. I’ve been doing this sort of thing for a while. Some of my seniors in the Council would call me foolish or arrogant, and they could be right—but I’ve never met anyone who was breathing who I thought was too far gone to help.”
“YOU’VE GOT A boogeyman,” I told Megan an hour later.
Megan frowned at me. “A-a … ?”
“A boogeyman,” I said. “Sometimes known as a boggle or a boggart. It’s a weak form of phobophage—a fear-eater, mostly insubstantial. This one is pretty common. Feeds on a child’s fear.”
Yardly’s eyebrows tried to climb into his hair.
“That isn’t possible,” Megan said. “I’d … I’d sense something like that. I’d feel it. I’ve felt things like that before. Several ghosts. Once, a poltergeist.”
“Not this one,” I said. “You’re too old.”
She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Excuse me?”
“Ahem. I mean, you’re an adult.”
“I don’t understand,” she said.
“Only kids can sense them,” I said. “Part of their nature conceals them from older awarenesses.”