Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files #8) - Jim Butcher Page 0,6
me to handle whatever was wrong. That was almost worse. Man.
Sometimes I get tired of being the guy who is supposed to deal with un-deal-withable situations.
I looked up to find Ebenezar squinting at me. The expression made his face a mass of wrinkles. What? I asked.
You get a haircut or something, Hoss?
Uh, nothing new. Why?
You lookhellip; The old wizards voice trailed off thoughtfully. Different.
My heartbeat sped up a little. As far as I knew, Ebenezar was unaware of the entity who was leasing out the unused portions of my brain, and I wanted to keep it that way. But though he had a reputation for being something of a magical brawler, his specialty the summoning up of primal, destructive forces, he had a lot more on the ball than most of the Council gave him credit for. It was entirely possible that he had sensed something of the fallen angels presence within me.
Yeah, well. Ive been wearing the cloak of the people I spent most of my adult life resenting, I said. Between that and being a cripple, Ive been off my sleep for almost a year.
That can do it, Ebenezar said, nodding. Hows the hand? I bit back my first harsh response, that it was still maimed and scarred, and that the burns made it look like a badly melted piece of wax sculpture. Id gone up against a bad guy with a brain a couple of years back, and shed worked out that my defensive magic was designed to stop kinetic energy not heat. I found that out the hard way when a couple of her psychotic goons sprayed improvised napalm at me. My shield had stopped the flaming jelly, but the heat had gone right through and dry roasted the hand Id held out to focus my shield. I held up my gloved left hand and waggled my thumb and the first two fingers in jerky little motions. The other two fingers didnt move much unless their neighbors pulled them. Not much feeling in them yet, but I can hold a beer. Or the steering wheel. Doctors had me playing guitar, trying to move them and use them more.
Good, Ebenezar said. Exercise is good for the body, but music is good for the soul.
Not the way I play it, I said.
Ebenezar grinned wryly, and drew a pocket watch from the front pocket of the overalls. He squinted at it. Lunchtime, he said. You hungry?
There wasnt anything in his tone to indicate it, but I could read the subtext.
Ebenezar had been a mentor to me at a time Id badly needed it. Hed taught me just about everything I thought was important enough to be worth knowing. He had been unfailingly generous, patient, loyal, and kind to me.
But he had been lying to me the whole time, ignoring the principles he had been teaching me. On the one hand, he taught me about what it meant to be a wizard, about how a wizards magic comes from his deepest beliefs, about how doing evil with magic was more than simply a crime it was a mockery of what magic meant, a kind of sacrilege. On the other hand, hed been the White Councils Blackstaff the whole whilea wizard with a license to kill, to violate the Laws of Magic, to make a mockery of everything noble and good about the power he wielded in the name of political necessity. And hed done it. Many times.
I had once held the kind of trust and faith in Ebenezar that I had given no one else. Id built a foundation for my life on what hed taught me about the use of magic, about right and wrong. But hed let me down. Hed been living a lie, and it had been brutally painful to learn about it. Two years later, it still twisted around in my belly, a vague and nauseating unease.
My old teacher was offering me an olive branch, trying to set aside the things that had come between us. I knew that I should go along with him. I knew that he was as human, as fallible, as anyone else. I knew that I should set it aside, mend our fences, and get on with life. It was the smart thing to do. It was the compassionate, responsible thing to do. It was the right thing to do.
But I couldnt.
It still hurt too much for me to think straight about it.