Side Jobs

Murphy frowned and eyed Maroon for a second.

I went over to the downed man and touched my fingers lightly to his brow. There was no telltale energy signature of a practitioner. “Nope.”

“Who, then?”

I shook my head. “This is delicate, difficult magic. There might not be three people on the entire White Council who could pull it off. So . . . it’s most likely a focus artifact of some kind.”

“A what?”

“An item that has a routine built into it,” I said. “You pour energy in one end, and you get results on the other.”

Murphy scrunched up her nose. “Like those wolf belts the FBI had?”

“Yeah, just like that.” I blinked and snapped my fingers. “Just like that!”

I hurried out of the little complex and up the ladder. I went to the tunnel car and took the old leather seat belt out of it. I turned it over and found the back inscribed with nearly invisible sigils and signs. Now that I was looking for it, I could feel the tingle of energy moving within it. “Hah,” I said. “Got it.”

Murphy frowned back at the entry to the Tunnel of Terror. “What do we do about Billy the Kid?”

“Not much we can do,” I said. “You want to try to explain what happened here to the Springfield cops?”

She shook her head.

“Me, either,” I said. “The kid was LeBlanc’s thrall. I doubt he’s a danger to anyone without a vampire to push him into it.” Besides, the Reds would probably kill him on general principles, anyway, once they found out about LeBlanc’s death.

We were silent for a moment, then stepped in close to each other and hugged gently. Murphy shivered.

“You okay?” I asked quietly.

She leaned her head against my chest. “How do we help all the people she screwed with?”

“Burn the belt,” I said, and stroked her hair with one hand. “That should purify everyone it’s linked to.”

“Everyone,” she said slowly.

I blinked twice. “Yeah.”

“So once you do it . . . we’ll see what a bad idea this is. And remember that we both have very good reasons to not get together.”

“Yeah.”

“And . . . we won’t be feeling this anymore. This . . . happy. This complete.”

“No. We won’t.”

Her voice cracked. “Dammit.”

I hugged her tight. “Yeah.”

“I want to tell you to wait awhile,” she said. “I want us to be all noble and virtuous for keeping it intact. I want to tell you that if we destroy the belt, we’ll be destroying the happiness of God knows how many people.”

“Junkies are happy when they’re high,” I said quietly, “but they don’t need to be happy. They need to be free.”

I put the belt back into the car, turned my right hand palm up, and murmured a word. A sphere of white- hot fire gathered over my fingers. I flicked a hand, and the sphere arched gently down into the car and began charring the belt to ashes. I felt sick.

I didn’t watch. I turned to Karrin and kissed her again, hot and urgent, and she returned the kiss frantically. It was as though we thought we might keep something from escaping our mouths if they were sealed together in a kiss.

I felt it when it went away.

We both stiffened slightly. We both remembered that we had decided the two of us couldn’t work out. We both remembered that Murphy was already involved with someone else and that it wasn’t in her nature to stray.

She stepped back from me, her arms folded across her stomach.

“Ready?” I asked her quietly.

She nodded, and we started walking. Neither of us said anything until we reached the Blue Beetle.

“You know what, Harry?” she said quietly from the other side of the car.

“I know,” I told her. “Like you said, love hurts.”

We got into the Beetle and headed back to Chicago.

AFTERMATH

—original novella

Takes place an hour or two after the end of Changes

To quote a great man: ’Nuff said.

I can’t believe he’s dead.

Harry Dresden, Professional Wizard. It sounds like a bad joke. Like most people, at first I figured it was just his schtick, his approach to marketing himself as a unique commodity in private investigation, a job market that isn’t ever exactly teeming with business.

Well, that’s not entirely true. I knew better. I’d seen something that the rules of the normal world just couldn’t explain, and he was right in the middle of it. But I did what everyone does when they run into the supernatural: I told myself that it was dark, and that I didn’t really know what I had seen. No one else had witnessed anything to support me. They would call me crazy if I tried to tell anyone about it. By the time a week had passed, I had half convinced myself that I hallucinated the whole thing. A year later, I was almost certain it had been some kind of trick, an illusion pulled off by a smarmy but savvy con.

But he was for real.

Believe me, I know. Several years and several hundred nightmares later, I know.

He was the real thing.

God. I was already thinking about him in the past tense.

“Sergeant Murphy,” said one of the lab guys. Dresden was almost one of our own, in Special Investigations. We’d pulled every string we had to get a forensics team on the site. “Excuse me, Sergeant Murphy.”

I turned to face the forensic tech. He was cute, in a not-quite-grown, puppyish kind of way. The ID clipped to his lapel said his name was Jarvis. He looked nervous.

“I’m Murphy,” I said.

“Um, right.” He swallowed and looked around. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but . . . my boss said I shouldn’t be talking to you. He said you were on suspension.”

I looked at him calmly. He wasn’t more than average height, but that put his head about eight and a half inches over mine. He still had that whippet thinness that some twentysomethings hang on to for a while after their teenage years. I smiled at him and tried to put him at ease. “I get it,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”

He licked his lips nervously.

“Jarvis,” I said, “please.” I gestured at the bloodstain on the exterior of the cabin of a dumpy little secondhand boat, the lettering on which proclaimed it the Water Beetle. “He is my friend.”

I didn’t say was—not out loud. You don’t ever do that until you’ve found the