pulling a rabbit out of his hat.
If Harry were here, he could have taken some hairs out of Georgia’s hairbrush, done something stupid-looking with them, and followed her across the town or the state or, for all I knew, to the other side of the universe. He could have told me more about what had happened at Georgia’s than I could have known, maybe even identified the perp, in general or specifically. And, if things got hot when we went after the bad guy, he would have been there, throwing fire and lightning around as if they were his own personal toys, created especially and exclusively for him to play with.
Watching Dresden operate was usually one of two things: mildly amusing or positively terrifying. On a scene, his whole personal manner always made me think of autistic kids. He never met anyone’s eyes for more than a flickering second. He moved with the sort of exaggerated caution of someone who was several sizes larger than normal, keeping his hands and arms in close to his body. He spoke a little bit softly, as if apologizing for the resonant baritone of his voice.
But when something caught his attention, he changed. His dark, intelligent eyes would glitter, and his gaze became something so intense that it could start a fire. During the situations that changed from investigation to desperate struggle, his whole being shifted in the same way. His stance widened, becoming more aggressive and confident, and his voice rose up to become a ringing trumpet that could have been clearly heard from opposite ends of a football stadium.
Quirky nerd, gone. Terrifying icon, present.
Not many “vanillas,” as he called nominally normal humans, had seen Dresden standing his ground in the fullness of his power. If we had, more of us would have taken him seriously—but I had decided that for his sake, if nothing else, it was a good thing that his full capabilities went unrecognized. Dresden’s power would have scared the hell out of most people, just like it had scared me.
It wasn’t the kind of fear that makes you scream and run. That’s fairly mild, as fear goes. That’s Scooby Doo fear. No. Seeing Dresden in action filled you with the fear that you had just become a casualty of evolution—that you were watching something far larger and infinitely more dangerous than yourself, and that your only chance of survival was to kill it, immediately, before you were crushed beneath a power greater than you would ever know.
I had come to terms with it. Not everyone would.
In fact . . . it might be for that very reason that someone had put the hit on him. A bullet that strikes from long range and goes cleanly through a human body, and then through the hull of a boat, twice, leaving a series of neat holes, is almost certainly a very high-powered rifle round. A professional rifleman shooting from a good way out was one of the things Dresden had acknowledged had a real chance of taking him out cleanly. He might be a wizard, a wielder of tremendous power and knowledge (as if they’re any different), but he wasn’t immortal.
Quick, tough, tricky as hell, sure. But not untouchable.
Not in any number of senses. I should know, having touched him—even if I hadn’t touched him anywhere near soon or often enough. . . .
And now I never would.
Dammit.
I pushed thoughts of the man out of my head before I started crying again. It’s hard enough to pull off an air of authority when you’re five feet tall, without also having red, watery eyes and a running nose.
Dresden was gone. His cheesy jokes and his corny sense of humor were gone. His ability to know the unknowable, to fight the unfightable, and to find the unfindable was gone.
The rest of us were just going to have to carry on as best we could without him.
I KNOCKED ON doors and talked to a lot of people, most of them college-age kids attending school in town. I got a whole lot of nothing about Georgia, though I did get tips on some drug sales that had gone down in the parking lot. I’d pass them on to the right people on the force, where they would become more scenery for the endless march of the war on drugs and wouldn’t amount to anything. The tips did prove the point I’d made to Will, though: Neighbors see things. Maybe I just hadn’t talked to the