my maimed hand was still mostly numb to conventional stimuli, it had never had any trouble sensing the subtle patterns of organized magical energy. I spread out my fingers as much as I could, trying to touch the largest possible area as I closed my eyes and focused on my wizard's senses.
"It's a ward," I said quietly.
"Like on your apartment?" she asked.
"It's not as strong," I said, waving my hand slowly over it. "And it's a little cruder. I've got bricks and razor wire. This is more like aluminum siding and chicken wire. But it has a decent kick. Fire, I think." I squinted up and down the hall. "Huh. I don't think there's enough there to kill outright, but it would hurt like hell."
"And a fire would set off the building's alarms," Murphy added. "Make people start running out. Summon the authorities."
"Uh-huh," I said. "Discouraging your average prowler, supernatural or not. It's not meant to kill." I stepped back and nodded to Murphy. "Go ahead and knock."
She gave me an arch look. "That's a joke, right?"
"If this ward isn't done right, it could react with my aura and go off."
"Can't you just take it apart?"
"Whoever did this was worried enough to invest a lot of time and effort to make this home safer," I said. "Kinda rude to tear it up."
Murphy tilted her head for a second, and then she got it. "And you'll scare them if you just walk through it like it wasn't there."
"Yeah," I said quietly. "They're frightened, Murph. I've got to be gentle, or they won't give me anything that can help them."
Murphy nodded and knocked on the door.
She rapped three times, and the doorknob was already turning on the third rap.
A small, prettily plump woman opened the door. She was even shorter than Murphy, mid-forties maybe, with blond hair and rosy, cherubic cheeks that looked used to smiling. She wore a lavender dress and carried a small dog, maybe a Yorkshire terrier, in her arms. She smiled at Murphy and said, "Of course, Sergeant Murphy, I know who you are."
Maybe half a second after the woman started speaking, Murphy said, "Hello, my name is Sergeant Murphy, and I'm a detective with the CPD."
Murphy blinked for a second and fell silent.
"Oh," the woman said. "I'm sorry; I forget sometimes." She made an airy little gesture with one hand. "Such a scatterbrain."
I started to introduce myself, but before I got my mouth open, the little woman said, "Of course, we all know who you are, Mister Dresden." She put her fingers to her mouth. They were shaking a little. "Oh. I forgot again. Excuse me. I'm Abby."
"Pleased to meet you, Abby," I said quietly, and extended my hand, relaxed, palm down, to the little Yorkie. The dog sniffed at my hand, quivering with eagerness as he did, and his tail started wagging. "Heya, little dog."
"Toto," Abby said, and before I could respond said, "Exactly, a classic. If it isn't broken, why fix it?" She nodded to me and said, "Excuse me; I'll let our host speak to you. I was just closest to the door." She shut the door on us.
"Certainly," I said to the door.
Murphy turned to me. "Weird."
I shrugged. "At least the dog liked me."
"She knew what we were going to say before we said it, Harry."
"I noticed that."
"Is she telepathic or something?"
I shook my head. "Not in the way you're thinking. She doesn't exactly hide what she's doing, and if she was poking around in people's heads, the Council would have done something a long time ago.
"Then how did she know what we were about to say?"
"My guess is that she's prescient," I said. "She can see the future. Probably only a second or two, and she probably doesn't have a lot of voluntary control over it."
Murphy made a thoughtful noise. "Could be handy."
"In some ways," I said. "But the future isn't written in stone."
Murphy frowned. "Like, what if I'd decided to tell her my name was Karrin Murphy instead of Sergeant, at the last second?"
"Yeah. She'd have been wrong. People like her can sense a… sort of a cloud of possible futures. We were in a fairly predictable situation here even without bringing any magical talents into it, basic social interaction, so it looked like she saw exactly what was coming. But she didn't. She got to judge what was most probable, and it wasn't hard to guess correctly in this particular instance."
"That's why she seemed so distracted," Murphy said thought fully.