Turn Coat (The Dresden Files 11)

I rose, forced to lean on my staff to stay upright, and hobbled forward as quickly as I could. I started calculating prime numbers as I walked, focusing on the process as intently as I would any spell.

"One," I muttered through clenched teeth. "Two. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven. Thirteen..."

And I staggered through the night, literally too terrified to think about what might be coming after me.

Chapter Five

By the time I'd reached twenty-two hundred and thirty-nine, I'd arrived at Billy and Georgia's place.

Life had changed for the young werewolves since Billy had graduated and started pulling in serious money as an engineer, but they hadn't moved out of the apartment they'd had in college. Georgia was still in school, learning something psychological, and they were saving for a house. Good thing for me. I wouldn't have been able to walk to the suburbs.

Georgia answered the door. She was a tall woman, lean and willowy, and in a T-shirt and loose, long shorts, she looked smarter than she did pretty.

"My God," she said, when she saw me. "Harry."

"Hey, Georgia," I said. "Twenty-two hundred and... uh. Forty-three. I need a dark, quiet room."

She blinked at me. "What?"

"Twenty-two hundred and fifty-one," I responded, seriously. "And send up the wolf-signal. You want the gang here. Twenty-two hundred and, uh... sixty... seven."

She stepped back from the door, holding the door open for me. "Harry, what are you talking about?"

I came inside. "Twenty-two hundred and sixty... not divisible by three, sixty-nine. I need a dark room. Quiet. Protection."

"Is something after you?" Georgia said.

Even with the help of Eratosthenes, when Georgia asked the question and my brain answered it, I couldn't keep the image of that thing from invading my thoughts, and it drove me to my knees and would have sent me all the way to the floor-except that Billy caught me before I could get there. He was a short guy, maybe five six, but he had the upper body of a professional wrestler and moved with the speed and precision of a predator.

"Dark room," I gasped. "Call in the gang. Hurry."

"Do it," Georgia said, her voice low and urgent. She shut the door and locked it, then slammed down a heavy wooden beam the size of a picnic table's bench that they had installed themselves. "Get him into our room. I'll make the calls."

"Got it," Billy said. He picked me up the way you'd carry a child, barely grunting as he did. He carried me down the hall and into a dark bedroom. He laid me down on a bed, then crossed to the window-and pulled and locked a heavy steel security curtain over it, evidently another customization that he and Georgia had installed.

"What do you need, Harry?" Billy asked.

"Dark. Quiet. Explain it later."

He put a hand on my shoulder and said, "Right." Then he padded out of the room and shut the door.

It left me in the dark with my thoughts-which is where I needed to be.

"Come on, Harry," I muttered to myself. "Get used to the idea."

And I thought about the thing I'd Seen.

It hurt. But when I came back to myself, I did it again. And again. And again.

Yes, I'd Seen something horrible. Yes, it was a hideous terror. But I'd Seen other things, too.

I called up those memories, too, all of them just as sharp and fresh as the horror pressing upon me. I'd Seen good people screaming in madness under the influence of black magic. I'd Seen the true selves of men and women, good and bad, Seen people kill-and die. I'd Seen the Queens of Faerie as they prepared for battle, drawing all their awful power around them.

And I'd be damned if I was going to roll over for one more horrible thing doing nothing but jumping from one rooftop to another.

"Come on, punk," I snarled at the memory. "Next to those others, you're a bad yearbook picture."

And I hit myself with it, again and again, filling my mind with every horrible and beautiful thing I had ever Seen-and as I did, I focused on what I had bloody well done about it. I remembered the things I'd battled and destroyed. I remembered the strongholds of nightmares and terrors that I had invaded, the dark gates I'd kicked down. I remembered the faces of prisoners I'd freed, and the funerals of those I'd been too late to save. I remembered the sounds of voices and laughter, the joy of loved ones reunited, the tears of the lost and bereaved.

There are bad things in the world. There's no getting away from that. But that doesn't mean nothing can be done about them. You can't abandon life just because it's scary, and just because sometimes you get hurt.

The memory of the thing hurt like hell-but pain wasn't anything special or new. I'd lived with it before, and would do it again. It wasn't the first thing I'd Seen, and it wouldn't be the last.

I was not going to roll over and die.

Sledgehammers of perfect memory pounded me down into blackness.

When I pulled myself back together, I was sitting on the bed, my legs folded Indian-style. My palms rested on my knees. My breathing was slow and rhythmically heavy. My back was straight. My head pounded painfully, but not cripplingly so.

I looked up and around the room. It was dark, but I'd been in there long enough for my eyes to adjust to the light coming under the door. I could see myself in the dresser mirror. My back was straight and relaxed. I'd taken my coat off, and was wearing a black T-shirt that read "PRE-FECTIONIST" in small white letters, backward in the mirror. A thin, dark runnel of blood had streamed from each nostril and was now drying on my upper lip. I could taste blood in my mouth, probably from where I'd bitten my tongue earlier.

I thought of my pursuer again, and the image made me shudder-but that was all. I kept breathing slowly and steadily.

That was the upside of being human. On the whole, we're an adaptable sort of being. Certainly, I'd never be able to get rid of my memory of this awful thing, or any of the other awful things I'd Seen-so if the memory couldn't change, it would have to be me. I could get used to seeing that kind of horror, enough to see it and yet remain a reasoning being. Better men than I had done so.

Morgan had.

I shivered again, and not because of any memory. It was because I knew what it could mean, when you forced yourself to live with hideous things like that. It changed you. Maybe not all at once. Maybe it didn't turn you into a monster. But I'd been scarred and I knew it.

How many times would something like this need to happen before I started bending myself into something horrible just to survive? I was young for a wizard. Where would I be after decades or centuries of refusing to look away?