Proven Guilty

Chapter Seven

Ritual magic is not my favorite thing in the whole world. It doesn't matter what I'm trying to accomplish; I still feel sort of silly when it comes time to bathe and then dress myself up in a white robe with a hood, lighting candles and incense, chanting, and mucking around with a small arsenal of candles, wands, rods, liquids, and other props used in ritual magic.

Self-conscious as I might be, though, the props and the process offered an overriding advantage when it came to working with heavy magic-they freed up my attention from the dozens of little details that I would normally be forced to imagine and keep firmly in mind. Most of the time I never gave the proper visualization a second thought. I'd been doing it for so long that it was practically second nature. That was fine for short-term work, where I had to hold my thoughts in perfect balance only for a few seconds, but for a longer spell I would need an exponentially greater amount of focus and concentration. It took someone with a lot more mental discipline than me to cast a spell through a half-hour ritual without help, and while there were probably experienced wizards who could manage it, few bothered to try it when the alternative was usually simpler, safer, and more likely to work.

I rounded up the props I would need for the ritual, with the elements first. A silver cup, which I would fill with wine, for water. A geode the size of my fist, its internal crystals vibrant shades of purple and green, for earth. Fire would be represented by a faerie-made candle, formed from unused beeswax, its wick braided from the hairs of a unicorn's mane. Air would be anchored by a pair of hawk-wing feathers wrought from gold with impossibly fine detail and precision by a band of svartalves whose mortal contact sold examples of their craftsmanship out of a shop in Norway. And for the fifth element, spirit, I would use my mother's silver pentacle amulet.

Other props followed, to engage the senses. Incense for scent and fresh grapes for taste. Tactile forces would depend upon a double-sided three-inch square I'd made from velvet on one side and sandpaper on the other. A rather large, deeply colored opal set within a silver frame reflected back every color of the rainbow, and would hold down the sight portion of the spell. And when I got rolling I would strike my old tuning fork against the floor for sound.

Mind, body, and heart came last. For mind, I would use an old K-Bar military knife as my ritual athame, as I usually did. Fresh droplets of my blood upon a clean white cloth would symbolize my physical body. For heart, I placed several photos of those who were dear to me inside a sack of silver-white silk. My parents, Susan, Murphy, Thomas, Mouse and Mister (my thirty-pound grey tomcat, currently on walkabout), and after a brief hesitation, Michael and his family.

I prepared the ritual circle on my lab floor, carefully sweeping it, mopping it, sweeping it again, then cleansing it with captured rainwater poured from a small, silver ewer. I brought in all the props and laid them out, ready to go.

Then I prepared myself. I lit sandalwood incense and more faerie-candles in the bathroom, started up the shower, then went step by step through a routine of washing, while focusing my mind on the task at hand. The water sluicing over me would drain away any random magical energies, a crucial step in the spell-contaminating the spell's energy with other forces would cause it to fail.

I finished bathing, dried, and slipped into my white robe. Then I knelt on the floor at the head of the stairs down to the lab, closed my eyes, and began meditating. Just as no other energies could be allowed into the ritual, my concentration had to be of similar purity. Random thoughts, worries, fears, and emotions would sabotage the spell. I focused on my breathing, upon stilling my thoughts, and felt my limbs grow a little chill as my heartbeat slowed. Worries of the day, my aches and pains, my thoughts of the future-all had to go. It took a while to get myself in the proper frame of mind, and by the time I was finished it had been dark for two hours and my knees ached somewhere in the background.

I opened my eyes and everything came into a brilliantly sharp focus that discounted the existence of anything except myself, my magic, and the ritual awaiting me. It had been a long, wearying preparation, and I hadn't even started with the magic yet, but if the spell could help me nail the bad guys quicker, the hours of effort would be well worth it.

Silence and focus ruled.

I was ready.

And then the fucking phone rang about a foot from my ear.

It is possible that I made some kind of unmanly noise when I jumped. My posture-numbed legs didn't respond as quickly as I needed them to, and I lurched awkwardly to one side, half falling onto the nearest couch.

"Dammit!" I screamed in sudden frustration. "Dammit, dammit, dammit!"

Mouse looked up from his lazy drowse and tilted his head to one side, ears up and forward.

"What are you looking at?" I snarled.

Mouse's jaw dropped open into a grin, and his tail wagged.

I rubbed my hand at my face while the phone kept on ringing. It had been a while since I'd done any seriously focused magic like that, and granted, I really don't get very many calls, but all the same I should have remembered to unplug the phone. Four hours of preparation gone to waste.

The phone kept ringing, and my head pounded in time with it. I ached. Stupid phone. Stupid car crash. I tried to think positive, because I read somewhere that it's important to do that at times of stress and frustration. Whoever wrote that was probably selling something.

I picked up the phone and growled, "Screw thinking positive," into the handset.

"Urn," said a woman's voice. "What did you say?"

"Screw thinking positive!" I half shouted. "What the hell do you want?"

"Well. Maybe I have the wrong number. I was calling to speak to Harry Dresden?"

I frowned, my mind taking in details despite my temper's bid to take over the show. The voice was familiar to me; rich, smooth, adult-but the speaker's speech patterns had an odd hesitancy to them. Her words had an odd, thick edge on them, too. An accent?

"Speaking," I said. "Annoyed as hell, but speaking."

"Oh. Is this a bad time?"

I rubbed at my eyes and choked down a vicious response. "Who is this?"

"Oh," she said, as if the question surprised her. "Harry, it's Molly. Molly Carpenter."

"Ah," I said. I clapped one palm to my face. My friend Michael's oldest daughter. Way to role-model, Harry. You sure do come off like a calm, responsible adult. "Molly, didn't recognize you at first."

"I'm sorry," she said.

The "s" sound was a little bit thick. Had she been drinking? "Not your fault," I said. Which it hadn't been. For that matter, the interruption might have been a stroke of luck. If my head was still too scrambled from that afternoon's automobile hijinks to remember to unplug the phone, I didn't have any business trying to cast that spell. Probably would have blown my own head off. "What do you need, Molly?"

"Urn," she said, and there was nervous tension in her voice. "I need... I need you to come bail me out."

"Bail," I said. "You're being literal?"

"Yes."

"You're in jail?"

"Yes," she said.

"Oh my God," I said. "Molly, I don't know if I can do that. You're sixteen."

"Seventeen," she said, with sparks of indignation and another thick

"s."

"Whatever," I said. "You're a juvenile. You should call your parents."

"No!" she said, something near panic in her voice. "Harry, please. I can't call them."

"Why not?"

"Because I only get the one call, and I used it to call you."

"Actually, I don't think that's exactly how it works, Molly." I sighed.

"In fact, I'm surprised that..."I frowned, thinking. "You lied about your age."

"If I hadn't, Mom and Dad would be here already," she said. "Harry, please. Look, there's... there's a lot of trouble at home right now. I can't explain it here, but if you'll come get me, I swear, I'll tell you all about it."

I sighed again. "I don't know, Molly..."

"Please?" she said. "It's just this once, and I'll pay you back, and I'll never ask something like this of you again, I promise."

Molly had long since earned her PhD in wheedling. She managed to sound vulnerable and hopeful and sad and desperate and sweet all at the same time. I'm pretty sure she wouldn't need half that much effort to wrap her father around a finger. Her mother, Charity, was probably a different story, though.

I sighed. "Why me?" I asked.

I hadn't been talking to Molly, but she answered. "I couldn't think who else to call," she said. "I need your help."

"I'll call your dad. I'll come down with him."

"Please, no," she said quietly, and I didn't think she was feigning the quiet desperation in her voice. "Please."

Why fight the inevitable? I've always been a sucker for ye olde damsel in distress. Maybe not as big a sucker now as I had been in the past, but the insanity did not seem much less potent than it had always been.

"All right," I said. "Where?"

She gave me the location of one of the precincts not too far from my apartment.

"I'm coming," I told her. "And this is the deal: I'll listen to what you have to say. If I don't like it, I'm going to your parents."

"But you don't-"

"Molly," I said, and I felt my voice harden. "You're already asking me for a lot more than I feel comfortable with. I'll come down there to get you. You tell me what's up. After that, I make the call, and you abide by it."

"But-"

"This isn't a negotiation," I said. "Do you want my help or not?"

There was a long pause, and she made a frustrated little sound. "All right," she said. After a beat she hurried to add, "And thank you."

"Yeah," I said, and eyed the candles and incense, and thought about all the time I'd thrown away. "I'll be along within the hour."

I would have to call a cab. It wasn't the most heroic way to ride to the rescue, but walkers can't be choosers. I got up to dress and told Mouse, "I'm a sucker for a pretty face."

When I came out of the bedroom in clean clothes, Mouse was sitting hopefully by the door. He batted a paw at his leash, which hung over the doorknob.

I snorted and said, "You ain't pretty, furface." But I clipped the leash to his collar, and called for a cab.

Chapter Eight

The cabby drove me to the Eighteenth District of the CPD, on Larrabee. The neighborhood around it has seen a couple of better days and thousands of worse ones. The once-infamous Cabrini Green isn't far away, but urban renewal and the efforts of local neighborhood watches, community groups, church congregations from several faiths, and cooperation with the local police department had changed some of Chicago's nastier streets into something resembling actual civilization.

The nasty hadn't left the city, of course-but it had been driven away from what had once been a stronghold of decay and despair. What was left behind wasn't the prettiest section of town, but it bore the quiet, steady signs of a place that had a passing acquaintance with law and order.

Of course, the cynical would point out that Cabrini Green was only a short walk from the Gold Coast, one of the richest areas of the city, and that it was no coincidence that funds had been sent that way by the powers that be through various municipal programs. The cynical would be right, but it didn't change the fact that the people of the area had worked and fought to reclaim their homes from fear, crime, and chaos. On a good day, the neighborhood made you feel like there was hope for us, as a species; that we could drive back the darkness with enough will and faith and help.

That kind of thinking had taken on whole new dimensions for me in the past year or two.

The police station wasn't new, but it was free of graffiti, litter, and shady characters of any kind-at least until I showed up, in jeans and a red T-shirt, bruised and unshaven. I got a weird look from the cabby, who probably didn't get all that many sandalwood-scented fares to drop off there. Mouse presented his head to the cabby while I paid through the driver's window, and got a smile and a polite scratching of the ears in reply.

Mouse has better people skills than me.

I turned to walk up to the station, stubbornly putting my money back in my wallet with my stiff left hand as I walked, and Mouse walked beside me. The hair on the back of my neck suddenly crawled, and I looked up at the reflection in the glass doors as I approached them.

A car had pulled up on the far side of the street behind me, and was stopped directly under a No Parking sign. I saw a vague shadow inside the car, a white sedan I did not recognize and which certainly wasn't the dark grey car that had run me off the road earlier. But my instincts told me I was being tailed by someone. You don't park illegally like that, in front of a police station no less, just because you're bored.

Mouse let out a low rumble of a growl, which made me grow a shade more wary. Mouse rarely made noise at all. When he did, I had begun to think it was because there was some kind of dark presence around-evil magic, hungry vampires, and deadly necromancers had all earned snarls of warning. But he never made a peep when the mailman came by.

So adding it up, someone from the nasty end of my side of the supernatural street was following me around town. Good grief; at least I usually know who I'm pissing off, and why. By the time an investigation gets to the point where I'm being followed, there's usually been at least one crime scene and maybe even a corpse or two.

Mouse growled another warning.

"I see him," I told Mouse quietly. "Easy. Just keep walking."

He fell silent again, and we never broke stride up to the door.

Molly Carpenter appeared and opened the door for us.

The last time I'd seen Molly, she'd been an awkward adolescent, all skinny legs, bright-eyed interest, and hesitation of movement offset by an appealing personal confidence and frequent smiles and laughter. But that had been years ago.

Since then, Molly had gotten all growed up.

She strongly favored her mother, Charity. Both of them were tall for women, only an inch or two under six feet, both of them blond, fair, blue-eyed, and both of them built like the proverbial brick house, somehow managing to combine strength, grace, and beauty that showed as much in their bearing, expression, and movement as it did in their appearance. Charity was a rose wrought of stainless steel. Molly could have been her younger self.

Of course, I doubted Charity had ever worn an outfit like Molly's.

Molly stood facing me in a long, gauzy black skirt, shredded artistically in several places. She wore fishnet tights beneath it, showing more leg and hip than any mother would prefer. The tights, too, were artfully torn in patches to display pale, smooth skin of thigh and calf. She had army-surplus combat boots on her feet, laced up with neon pink and blue laces. She wore a tight tank top, its fabric white, thin, and strained by the curves of her breasts, and a short black bolero jacket bearing a huge, gaudy button printed with the logo "SPLATTERCON!!!" in dripping red letters. Black leather gloves covered her hands.

But wait, that's not all.

Her blond hair had been dyed, parti-colored, one half of her head bubblegum pink, the other sky blue, and it had been cut at a uniform length that ended just below her chin and left most of her face covered by a close veil of hair. She wore a lot of makeup; way too much eye liner and mascara, and black lipstick colored her mouth. Bright rings of gold gleamed in both nostrils, her lower lip, and her right eyebrow, and there was a bead of gold in that little dent just under her lower lip. There were miniature barbell-shaped bulges at the tips of her breasts, where the thin fabric emphasized rather than concealed them.

I didn't want to know what else had been pierced. I know I didn't, because I told myself that very sternly. I didn't want to know, even if it was, hell, a little intriguing.

But wait, that's still not all.

She had a tattoo on the left side of her neck in the shape of a slithering serpent, and I could see the barbs and curves of some kind of tribal design flickering out from the neckline of her tank top. Another design, whirling loops and spirals, covered the back of her right hand and vanished up under the sleeve of the jacket.

She watched me with one eyebrow arched, waiting for me to react. Her posture and expression both made the effort to say that she was way too cool to care what I thought, but I could practically taste the uncertainty she was working to hide, and her anxiety.

"Long time, no see," I said, finally.

"Hello, Harry," she replied. The words came out a little thick, and I saw more gold flash near the tip of her tongue.

Of course.

"It's odd," I said. "From here, it doesn't look like you're in jail at all."

"I know," she said. She managed to keep her voice mostly steady, but her face and throat colored pink in a guilty flush. She shifted her weight restlessly, and an odd clicking sound came from her mouth. Good grief. She'd picked up a tic of rattling her tongue piercing against her teeth when she was nervous. "Urn. I should apologize, I guess. Uh..."

She floundered. I let her. A long silence made her look more flustered, but I had no intention of politely helping her out of it.

Mouse sat down between me and Molly, watching her intently.

Molly smiled at the dog and reached down to pet him.

Mouse tensed up, and a low rumbling came from his chest. Molly moved her hand toward him again, and my dog's chest suddenly rumbled with a deep and warning growl.

The last time Mouse had growled at anything-for that matter, made much noise at all-it had been a crazed sorcerer who made fair headway toward eviscerating me, and summoned a twenty-foot-long demon cobra to kill my dog. Mouse killed it instead. Then, at my command, Mouse killed the sorcerer, too.

And now he was growling at Molly.

"Be polite," I told him firmly. "She's a friend."

Mouse gave me a look and then fell quiet again. He sat calmly as Molly let him sniff her hand and scratch at his ears, but his wary body language didn't change.

"When did you get a dog?" Molly asked.

Mouse was spooked, though not the way he was when serious bad guys were around. Interesting. I kept my tone neutral. "Couple years ago. His name is Mouse."

"What breed is he?"

"He's a West Highlands Dogasaurus," I said.

"He's huge."

I said nothing, and the girl floundered some more. "I'm sorry," she said, finally. "I lied to you to get you to come down here."

"Really?"

She grimaced. "I'm sorry. I just... I really need your help. I just thought that if I could talk to you in person about it, you might be... I mean..."

I sighed. Regardless of how intriguingly rounded her tight shirt was, she was still a kid. "Call a spade a spade, Molly," I said. "You figured if you could get me to come all the way down here, you'd have a chance to flutter your eyelashes and get me to do whatever it is you really want me to do."

She glanced aside. "It isn't like that."

"It's just like that."

"No," she began. "I didn't want this to be a bad thing..."

"You manipulated me. You took advantage of my friendship. How is that not a bad thing?" My headache started rising up again. "Give me one reason I shouldn't turn and walk away right now."

"Because my friend is in trouble," she said. "I can't help him, but you can."

"What friend?"

"His name is Nelson."

"In jail?"

"He didn't do it," she assured me.

They never did. "He's your age?" I asked.

"Almost."

I arched an eyebrow.

"Two years older," she amended.

"Then tell legal-adult Nelson he should call a bail bondsman."

"We tried that. They can't get to him before tomorrow."

"Then tell him to bite the bullet and spend a night in the lockup or else to call his parents." I turned to go.

Molly caught my wrist. "He can't," she said, desperation in her voice. "There's no one for him to call. He's an orphan, Harry."

I stopped walking.

Well, dammit.

I'd been an orphan, too. It hadn't been fun. I could tell you some stories, but I make it a personal policy not to review them often. They amount to a nightmare that started with my father's death, followed by years and years of feeling acutely, perpetually alone. Sure, there's a system in place to care for orphans, but it's far from perfect and it is, after all, a system. It isn't a person looking out for you. It's forms and carbon copies and people with names you quickly forget. The lucky kids more or less randomly get tapped by foster parents who genuinely care. But for all the puppies at the pound who don't get chosen, life turns into one big lesson on how to look out for yourself-because there's no one in this world who cares enough to do it for you.

It's a horrible feeling. I don't care to experience even the faded memory of it-but if I just hear the word "orphan" aloud, that empty fear and quiet pain come rushing back from the darker corners of my mind. For a long time I'd been stupid enough to assume that I could handle everything on my own. That's vanity, though. Nobody can handle everything by themselves. Sometimes, you need someone's help-even if that help is only giving you a little of their time and attention.

Or bailing you out of jail.

"What's your friend Nelson in for?"

"Reckless endangerment and aggravated assault." She took a breath and said, "It's kind of a long story. But he's a sweet guy, Harry. There isn't a violent bone in his body."

Which emphasized to me just how young Molly really was. There are violent bones in everyone's body, if you look deep enough. About two hundred and six of them. "What about your dad? He saves people all the time."

Molly hesitated for a second, and her cheeks turned pink. "Urn. My parents don't like Nelson very much. Especially my dad."

"Ah," I said. "Nelson's that kind of friend." Things started adding up. I asked the loaded question. "Why is it so important for him to get out tonight?"

Wait for it.

Molly let go of my wrist. "Because he might be in danger. The weird kind of danger. He needs your help."

And there it was.

Sometimes it's almost as though I'm psychic.