“I’m aware,” I said.
“This girl,” Ilyana said. “Her talents were born in trauma and fear. This is one of the warning signs of a potential warlock.”
“Yeah,” I said. My talents had started in a similar fashion. “I heard that once.”
“So … She is under surveillance?” Ilyana asked.
“I drop in on her once in a while,” I said.
“That poor kid,” McKenzie said. “What do we do?”
I spread my hands. “It’s an imperfect world, Wardens. We do what we always do.” I smiled at them lopsidedly. “Whatever we can.”
They both looked down, frowning, concerned—concerned for a little girl who had no idea of what might be waiting for her.
Excellent.
The lesson hadn’t been wasted. “Okay, guys,” I said. “Burger King?” That perked them both up, though Ilyana, benighted soul that she was, didn’t react with joy at the utterance of the holy name of the Mount Olympus of fast food. We left together.
You do whatever you can.
This next story, set around the same time as Dead Beat in the main Dresden Files story line, was written as part of correcting the injustice of not having considered Bigfoot sufficiently in my previous world building. For that reason alone, it was a totally necessary story.
But I also wanted to try a tale that was a little less smash-action-figures-together-y, which is a fair assessment of several of my short stories. So I plotted out this one, where the motives are perhaps a little less sinister and a little bit more dangerously human than a simple case of attacker versus defender, and to force Dresden to deal with a situation other than directly confronting some brand of bully.
Also, I wanted to show Irwin growing up as well—and particularly the effect Dresden had had on his life. The idea of the consequences of your actions coming back to you in the future is ingrained into the fabric of the Dresden Files—and both your terrible choices and your more inspired ones engender consequences that will eventually come home to roost.
There are times when, as a professional wizard, my vocation calls me to the great outdoors, and that night I was in the north woods of Wisconsin with a mixed pack of researchers, enthusiasts, and, well, nerds.
“I don’t know, man,” said a skinny kid named Nash. “What’s his name again?”
With a stick I poked the small campfire I’d set up earlier and pretended that they weren’t standing less than ten feet away from me. The forest made forest sounds like it was supposed to. Full dark had fallen about half an hour before.
“Harry Dresden,” said Gary, a plump kid with a cell phone, a GPS unit, and some kind of video-game device on his belt. “Supposed to be a psychic or something.” He was twiddling deft fingers over the surface of what they call a smartphone, these days. Hell, the damned things are probably smarter than me. “Supposed to have helped Chicago PD a bunch of times. I’d pull up the Internet references, but I can’t get reception out here.”
“A psychic?” Nash said. “How is anyone ever supposed to take our research seriously if we keep showing up with fruitcakes like that?”
Gary shrugged. “Dr. Sinor knows him or something.”
Dr. Sinor had nearly been devoured by an ogre in a suburban park one fine summer evening, and I’d gotten her out in one piece. Like most people who have a brush with the supernatural, she’d rationalized the truth away as rapidly as possible—which had led her to participate in such fine activities as tonight’s Bigfoot expedition in her spare time.
“Gentlemen,” Sinor said impatiently. She was a blocky, no-nonsense type, grey-haired and straight-backed. “If you could help me with these speakers, we might actually manage to blast a call or two before dawn.”
Gary and Nash both hustled over to the edge of the firelight to start messing about with the equipment the troop of researchers had packed in. There were half a dozen of them altogether, all of them busy with trail cameras and call-blasting speakers and scent markers and audio recorders.
I pulled a sandwich out of my pocket and started eating it. I took my time about it. I was in no hurry.
For those of you who don’t know it, a forest at night is dark. Sometimes pitch-black. There was no moon to speak of in the sky, and the light of the stars doesn’t make it more than a few inches into a mixed canopy of deciduous trees and evergreens. The light from my little campfire and the hand held flashlights of the researchers soon gave the woods all the light there was.
Their equipment wasn’t working very well—my bad, probably. Modern technology doesn’t get on well with the magically gifted. For about an hour, nothing much happened beyond the slapping of mosquitoes and a lot of electronic noises squawking from the loudspeakers.
Then the researchers got everything online and went through their routine. They played primate calls over the speakers and then dutifully recorded the forest afterward. Everything broke down again. The researchers soldiered on, repairing things, and eventually Gary tried wood knocking, which meant banging on trees with fallen limbs and waiting to hear if there was a response.
I liked Dr. Sinor, but I had asked to come strictly as a ride-along and I didn’t pitch in with her team’s efforts.
The whole “let’s find Bigfoot” thing seems a little ill planned to me, personally. Granted, my perspective is different from that of nonwizards, but marching out into the woods, looking for a very large and very powerful creature by blasting out what you’re pretty sure are territorial challenges to fight (or else mating calls) seems … somewhat unwise.
I mean, if there’s no Bigfoot, no problem. But what if you’re standing there, screaming, “Bring it on!” and find a Bigfoot?
Worse yet, what if he finds you?
Even worse, what if you were screaming, “Do me, baby!” and he finds you then?
Is it me? Am I crazy? Or does the whole thing just seem like a recipe for trouble?
So, anyway, while I kept my little fire going, the Questionably Wise Research Variety Act continued until after midnight. That’s when I looked up to see a massive form standing at the edge of the trees, in the very outskirts of the light of my dying fire.
I’m in the ninety-ninth percentile for height, but this guy was tall. My head might have come up to his collarbone, barely, assuming I had correctly estimated where his collarbone was under the long, shaggy, dark brown hair covering him. It wasn’t long enough to hide the massive weight of muscle he carried on that enormous frame or the simple, disturbing, very slightly inhuman proportions of his body. His face was broad and blunt, with a heavy brow ridge that turned his eyes into mere gleams of reflected light.
Most of all, there was a sense of awesome power granted to his presence by his size alone, chilling even to someone who had seen big things in action before. There’s a reaction to something that much bigger than you, an automatic assumption of menace that is built into the human brain: Big equals dangerous.
It took about fifteen seconds before the first researcher—Gary, I think—noticed and let out a short gasp. In my peripheral vision, I saw the entire group turn toward the massive form by the fire and freeze into place. The silence was brittle crystal.
I broke it by bolting up from my seat and letting out a high-pitched shriek.
Half a dozen other screams joined it, and I whirled as if to flee, only to see Dr. Sinor and crew hotfooting it down the path we’d followed into the woods, back toward the cars.
I held it in for as long as I could, and only after I was sure that they wouldn’t hear it did I let loose the laughter bubbling in my chest. I sank back onto my log by the fire, laughing, and beckoning the large form forward.