Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files 8)

"I'm fine," I told him.

He exhaled through his nose, doggie expression somehow skeptical, and I scratched his ears, to prove it. "Thanks for the ride, Murph."

"Sure," she said. She brought out a plastic sack she'd carried in and tossed it on the floor. It held my robe, stole, and cloak, all of them spattered with blood. She walked over to the kitchen sink and started filling it with cold water. "So let's talk."

I nodded and told her about the Korean kid. While I did that, she put my stole in the sink, then started washing it briskly in the cold water.

"That kid is what wizards mean when they talk about warlocks," I said. "Someone who has betrayed the purpose of magic. Gone bad, right from the start."

She waited a moment and then said, in a quiet, dangerous voice, "They killed him here? In Chicago?"

"Yes," I said. I felt even more tired. "This is one of our safer meeting places, apparently."

"You saw it?"

"Yes."

"You didn't stop it?"

"I couldn't have," I said. "There were heavyweights there, Murphy. And..." I took a deep breath. "I'm not sure they were completely in the wrong."

"Like hell they weren't," she snarled. "I don't give a good God damn what the White Council does over in England or South America or wherever they want to hang around flapping their beards. But they came here."

"Had nothing to do with you," I said. "Nothing to do with the law, that is. It was internal stuff. They would have done the same to that kid, no matter where they were."

Her movements became jerky for a moment, and water splashed over the rim of the sink. Then she visibly forced herself to relax, put the stole aside, and went to work on the robe. "Why do you think that?" she asked.

"The kid had gone in for black magic in a big way," I said. "Mind-control stuff. Robbing people of their free will."

She regarded me with cool eyes. "I'm not sure I understand."

"It's the Fourth Law of Magic," I said. "You aren't allowed to control the mind of another human. But... hell, it's one of the first things a lot of these stupid kids try-the old Jedi mind trick. Sometimes they start with maybe getting homework overlooked by a teacher or convincing their parents to buy them a car. They come into their magic when they're maybe fifteen or so, and by the time they're seventeen or eighteen they've got a full -grown talent."

"And that's bad?"

"A lot of times," I said. "Think about how men that age are. Can't go ten seconds without thinking about sex. Sooner or later, if someone doesn't teach them otherwise, they'll put the psychic armlock on the head cheerleader to get a date. And more than a date. And then more girls, or I guess other guys if I'm going to be PC about it. Someone else gets upset about losing a girlfriend or a daughter getting pregnant and the kid tries to fix his mistakes with more magic."

"But why does that mandate execution?" Murphy asked.

"It..." I frowned. "Getting into someone's mind like that is difficult and dangerous. And sooner or later, while you're changing them, you start changing yourself, too. You remember Micky Malone?"

Murphy didn't exactly shudder, but her hands stopped moving for a minute. Micky Malone was a retired police officer. A few months after he'd gotten out of the game, an angry and vicious spiritual entity had unleashed a psychic assault on him, and bound him in spells of torment to boot. The attack had transformed a grandfatherly old retired cop into a screaming maniac, totally out of control. I'd done what I could for the poor guy, but it had been really bad.

"I remember," Murphy said quietly.

"When a person gets into someone's head, it inflicts all kinds of damage-sort of like what happened to Micky Malone. But it damages the one doing it, too. It gets easier to bend others as you get more bent. Vicious cycle. And it's dangerous for the victim. Not just because of what might happen as a direct result of suddenly being forced to believe that the warlock is the god-king of the universe. It strains their psyche, and the more uncharacteristically they're made to feel and act, the more it hurts them. Most of the time, it devolves into a total breakdown."

Murphy shivered. "Like those office workers Mavra did it to? And the Renfields?"

A flash of phantom pain went through my maimed hand at the memory. "Exactly like that," I said.

"What can that kind of magic do?" she asked, her voice more subdued.

"Too much. This kid had forced a bunch of people to commit suicide. A bunch more to commit murder. He'd turned a whole gang of people, most of them his family, into his personal slaves."

"My God," Murphy said quietly. "That's hideous."

I nodded. "That's black magic. You get enough of it in you and it changes you. Stains you."

"Isn't there anything else the Council can do?"

"Not when the kid is that far gone. They've tried it all," I said. "Sometimes the warlock seemed to get better, but they all turned back in the end.

And more people died. So unless someone on the Council takes personal responsibility for the warlock, they just kill them."

She thought about that for a moment. Then she asked, "Could you have done that? Taken responsibility for him?"

I shifted uncomfortably. "Theoretically, I guess. If I really believed he could be salvaged."

She pressed her lips together and stared at the sink.

"Murph," I said, as gently as I knew how. "The law couldn't handle someone like that. You couldn't arrest them, contain them, without some serious magic to neutralize their powers. If you tried to bring an angry warlock into holding down at SI, it would get ugly. Worse than the loup-garou."

"There's got to be another way," Murphy said.

"Once a dog goes rabid, you can't bring him back," I said. "All you can do is keep him from hurting others. The best solution is prevention. Find the kids displaying serious talent and teach them better from the get-go. But the world population has grown so much in the past century that the White Council can't possibly identify and reach them all. Especially with this war on. There just aren't enough of us."

She tilted her head, staring at me. "Us? That's the first time I've heard you reference the White Council with yourself included in it."

I wasn't sure what to say to that, so I drank the rest of my Coke. Murphy went on washing for a minute, set the robe aside, and reached for the grey cloak. She dropped it into the sink, frowned, and then held it up. "Look at this," she said. "The blood came out when it hit the water All by itself."