Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files #8) - Jim Butcher Page 0,82

can, thats what I always say.

Bob!

What? he said.

That isnt how things are.

Not now, Bob said. But you go get in that shower with her and youve got your own personal cable TV erotic movie come true.

I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. Hells bells. The whole idea is wrong, Bob. Justhellip; wrong.

Harry, even a nerd should know that its no coincidence when a girl shows up at a mans hotel room. You know all she really wants is to

Bob, I snapped, cutting him off. Even if she wanted to, which she doesnt, nothing is happening with the girl. Im trying to work, here. You arent helping.

Id hate to disrupt your most recent attempt to court death and agony, he said brightly. You should stick me somewhere else, where I wont distract you. On the counter in the bathroom, for example.

I slapped open one of the empty dresser drawers and tossed the skull in there, instead. Bob sputtered a few muffled curses in ancient Greek, something about sheep and a skin rash.

I looked up from the drawer into the rooms mirror, and found myself facing not my reflection, but Lasciels image instead, angelic and lovely and poised. The perverted little creep has a point, my host, she said.

I jabbed a finger at the mirror and said, Bob is my little creep, and the only one who gets to call him names is me. Now go away.

Ah, Lasciel said, and the image faded to translucence, my own reflection appearing to replace it. Fascinating, though, she added, just before vanishing, that boyfriend Nelson bears quite the striking physical resemblance to you.

Then she was gone. Dammit. Stupid demons. Always with the last word.

Worse, she had a point. I eyed the bathroom door and reviewed the past day or so, and my interactions with the girl before that. I had always been someone her father respected and her mother disapproved of. I showed up once in a blue moon in a big black coat, usually looking roughed-up and dangerous, and Id been doing so since she was young enough to be very impressionable. Hell, when you got right down to it, Charitys disapproval alone might have been enough to make me seem interesting to a rebellious teenage girl.

I came to the reluctant conclusion that it was possible Molly might have certain ideas in her head. It might well explain the most recent awkward silences and halting pauses. Shed always liked me, and it wasnt outrageous to think that it might have developed into something moreand that Id be a right bastard to do anything that might encourage those ideas, even inadvertently. Maybe Bob and Lasciel were wrong, and in fact nothing like that was going on, but the passions of youth, its attractions and desires, were a minefield one took lightly at ones own peril.

Magnificent rack notwithstanding, Molly was still, in every important way, a childmy friends child, to boot. She was hurting. It bothered me, and I wanted to help her, but I had to be aware of the fact that my sympathy could be misinterpreted. The kid had issues and she needed someone to help her work things out. She didnt need someone who would only make her more confused.

Steam curled out from under the bathroom door. An actual hot shower. Not merely the illusion of one.

I shook my head and got back to the detection web.

As spells went, this one was pretty big, but it wasnt complicated. Id created a long-term version of the same basic working in the neighborhood around my apartment, in order to detect approaching mystical entities. The one I wanted for the hotel was the same thing, but I didnt have to bother with setting it up as a long-term construct. A sunrise, or two at most, would erode the spell, but with any luck I wouldnt need it for any longer.

I took the Play-Doh in hand, grabbed three candles in their own wooden holders, poured the sand in a circle around me, and began gathering in my power, painstakingly creating mental images of the web of energy I needed to weave between the points of the hotel Id marked out with Play-Doh. It didnt take me a terribly long time to set it up. Anyone with some basic skills and desire enough could have done something like this or at least, they could have done it on a smaller scale. Weaving a web throughout the whole building took a lot of heavy lifting, magically speaking, but