I stared at her until she obeyed.
My right arm was splinted and in a sling. With my left hand, I reached out and flipped open her suit jacket, over her left hip, where she’d been clutching the child all evening.
There was an envelope in a plastic bag protruding from the jacket’s interior pocket. I took it.
She made a small sound of protest and aborted it partway.
I opened the bag and the envelope and scanned over the paper inside.
“These are account numbers,” I said quietly. “Security passwords. Stolen from Mag’s home, I suppose?”
She stared at me with very wide eyes.
“Dear child,” I said, “I am a criminal. One very good way to cover up one crime is to commit another, more obvious one.” I glanced down at the sleeping child again. “Using a child to cover your part of the scheme. Quite cold-blooded, Justine.”
“I freed all of Mag’s prisoners to cover up the theft of his records at my lady’s bidding,” she said quietly. “The child was … not part of the plan.”
“Children frequently aren’t,” I said.
“I took her out on my own,” she said. “She’s free of that place. She will stay that way.”
“To be raised among the vampires?” I asked. “Such a lovely child will surely go far.”
Justine grimaced and looked away. “She was too small to swim out on her own. I couldn’t leave her.”
I stared at the young woman for a long moment. Then I said, “You might consider speaking to Father Forthill at St. Mary of the Angels. The Church appears to have some sort of program to place those endangered by the supernatural into hiding. I do not recommend you mention my name as a reference, but perhaps he could be convinced to help the child.”
She blinked at me, several times. Then she said quietly, “You, sir, are not very much like I thought you were.”
“Nor are you, Agent Justine.” I took a deep breath and regarded the child again. “At least we accomplished something today.” I smiled at Justine. “Your ride should be here by now. You may go.”
She opened her mouth and reached for the envelope.
I slipped it into my pocket. “Do give Lara my regards. And tell her that the next time she sends you out to steal honey, she should find someone else to kill the bees.” I gave her a faint smile. “That will be all.”
Justine looked at me. Then her lips quivered up into a tiny, amused smile. She bowed her head to me, collected the child, and walked out, her steps light.
I debated putting a bullet in her head but decided against it. She had information about my defenses that could leave them vulnerable—and, more to the point, she knew that they were effective. If she should speak of today’s events to Dresden …
Well. The wizard would immediately recognize that the claymores, the running water, and the magic-defense-piercing bullet had not been put into place to counter Mag or his odd folk at all.
They were there to kill Harry Dresden.
And they worked. Mag had proven that. An eventual confrontation with Dresden was inevitable—but murdering Justine would guarantee it happened immediately, and I wasn’t ready for that, not until I had rebuilt the defenses in the new location.
Besides, the young woman had rules of her own. I could respect that.
I would test myself against Dresden in earnest one day—or he against me. Until then, I had to gather as many resources to myself as possible. And when the day of reckoning came, I had to make sure it happened in a place where, despite his powers, he would no longer have the upper hand.
Like everything else.
Location, location, location.
This is the last of the trio of Bigfoot stories, and is set between Turn Coat and Changes. In this one, I got to play with the collision of a couple of different scions of supernatural beings, and to get a look at how that collision would play out against the background of the world of the Dresden Files.
This is also where Harry manages to insert himself into what he perceives as a parenting problem on behalf of River Shoulders, and in a quite arrogant, self-righteously wizardly fashion to boot. Naturally, his taking this position would come back to haunt him later, when he would have to face similar problems, and find out that the whole parenting gig is a lot harder than it looks from the outside.
It was also a chance for me to revisit, if mostly in memory, the campus of the University of Oklahoma and the town of Norman, where a number of excellent and nerdy friends I made in school live to this day.
The campus police officer folded his hands and stared at me from across the table. “Coffee?”
“What flavor is it?” I asked.
He was in his forties, a big, solid man with bags under his calm, wary eyes, and his name tag read DEAN. “It’s coffee-flavored coffee.”
“No mocha?”
“Fuck mocha.”
“Thank God,” I said. “Black.”
Officer Dean gave me hot black coffee in a paper cup, and I sipped it gratefully. I was almost done shivering. It just came in intermittent bursts now. The old wool blanket Dean had given me was more gesture than cure.
“Am I under arrest?” I asked him.
Officer Dean moved his shoulders in what could have been a shrug. “That’s what we’re going to talk about.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“Maybe,” he said in a slow, rural drawl, “you could explain to me why I found you in the middle of an orgy.”
“Well,” I said, “if you’re going to be in an orgy, the middle is the best spot, isn’t it?”
He made a thoughtful sound. “Maybe you could explain why there was a car on the fourth floor of the dorm.”
“Classic college prank,” I said.
He grunted. “Usually when that happens, it hasn’t made big holes in the exterior wall.”
“Someone was avoiding the cliché?” I asked.
He looked at me for a moment, and said, “What about all the blood?”
“There were no injuries, were there?”
“No,” he said.
“Then who cares? Some film student probably watched Carrie too many times.”
Officer Dean tapped his pencil’s eraser on the tabletop. It was the most agitated thing I’d seen him do. “Six separate calls in the past three hours with a Bigfoot sighting on campus. Bigfoot. What do you know about that?”
“Well, kids these days, with their Internets and their video games and their iPods. Who knows what they thought they saw.”
Officer Dean put down his pencil. He looked at me and said calmly, “My job is to protect a bunch of kids with access to every means of self-destruction known to man from not only the criminal element but also from themselves. I got chemistry students who can make their own meth, Ecstasy, and LSD. I got ROTC kids with access to automatic weapons and explosives. I got enough alcohol going through here on a weekly basis to float a battleship. I got a thriving trade in recreational drugs. I got lives to protect.”
“Sounds tiring.”
“About to get tired of you,” he said. “Start giving it to me straight.”
“Or you’ll arrest me?” I asked.
“No,” Dean said. “I bounce your face off my knuckles for a while. Then I ask again.”
“Isn’t that unprofessional conduct?”
“Fuck conduct,” Dean said. “I got kids to look after.”
I sipped the coffee some more. Now that the shivers had begun to subside, I finally felt the knotted muscles in my belly begin to relax. I slowly settled back into my chair. Dean hadn’t blustered or tried to intimidate me in any way. He wasn’t trying to scare me into talking. He was just telling me how it was going to be. And he drank his coffee old-school.
I kinda liked the guy.
“You aren’t going to believe me,” I said.
“I don’t much,” he said. “Try me.”
“Okay,” I said. “My name is Harry Dresden. I’m a professional wizard.”