I hurried out of the little complex and up the ladder. I went to the tunnel car and took the old leather seatbelt out of it. I turned it over and found the back inscribed with nearly invisible sigils and signs. Now that I was looking for it, I could feel the tingle of energy moving within it. “Hah,” I said. “Got it.”
Murphy frowned back at the entry to the Tunnel of Terror. “What do we do about Billy the Kid?”
“Not much we can do,” I said. “You want to try to explain what happened here to the Springfield cops?”
She shook her head.
“Me either,” I said. “The kid was LeBlanc’s thrall. I doubt he’s a danger to anyone without a vampire to push him into it.” Besides. The Reds would probably kill him on general principles anyway, once they found out about LeBlanc’s death.
We were silent for a moment. Then stepped in close to each other and hugged gently. Murphy shivered.
“You okay?” I asked quietly.
She leaned her head against my chest. “How do we help all the people she screwed with?”
“Burn the belt,” I said, and stroked her hair with one hand. “That should purify everyone it’s linked to.”
“Everyone,” she said slowly.
I blinked twice. “Yeah.”
“So once you do it . . . we’ll see what a bad idea this is. And remember that we both have very good reasons to not get together.”
“Yeah.”
“And . . . we won’t be feeling this anymore. This . . . happy. This complete.”
“No. We won’t.”
Her voice cracked. “Dammit.”
I hugged her tight. “Yeah.”
“I want to tell you to wait a while,” she said. “I want us to be all noble and virtuous for keeping it intact. I want to tell you that if we destroy the belt, we’ll be destroying the happiness of God knows how many people.”
“Junkies are happy when they’re high,” I said quietly, “but they don’t need to be happy. They need to be free.”
I put the belt back into the car, turned my right hand palm-up and murmured a word. A sphere of white-hot fire gathered over my fingers. I flicked a hand, and the sphere arched gently down into the car and began charring the belt to ashes. I felt sick.
I didn’t watch. I turned to Karrin and kissed her again, hot and urgent, and she returned it frantically. It was as though we thought that we might keep something escaping from our mouths if they were sealed together in a kiss.
I felt it when it went away.
We both stiffened slightly. We both remembered that we had decided that the two of us couldn’t work out. We both remembered that Murphy was already involved with someone else, and that it wasn’t in her nature to stray.
She stepped back from me, her arms folded across her stomach.
“Ready?” I asked her quietly.
She nodded and we started walking. Neither of us said anything until we reached the Blue Beetle.
“You know what, Harry?” she said quietly, from the other side of the car.
“I know,” I told her. “Like you said. Love hurts.”
We got into the Beetle and headed back to Chicago.
Jim Butcher, a New York Times bestselling author, is best known for his The Dresden Files series. Cold Days, the fourteen in the series, was published last year. A martial arts enthusiast with fifteen years of experience in various styles including Ryukyu Kempo, Tae Kwon Do, Gojo Shorei Ryu, and a sprinkling of Kung Fu, he is also a skilled rider and has worked as a summer camp horse wrangler and performed in front of large audiences in both drill riding and stunt riding exhibitions. Butcher lives in Missouri with his wife, son, and a vicious guard dog.
The Case: A crime against the world, against nature, against order—the death of Mycroft Holmes, in the specific, and Death in the general.
The Investigator: Sherlock Holmes, a “retired” British consulting detective, turned investigative apiarist.
THE CASE OF DEATH AND HONEY
Neil Gaiman
It was a mystery in those parts for years what had happened to the old white ghost man, the barbarian with his huge shoulder bag. There were some who supposed him to have been murdered, and, later, they dug up the floor of Old Gao’s little shack high on the hillside, looking for treasure, but they found nothing but ash and fire-blackened tin trays.
This was after Old Gao himself had vanished, you understand, and before his son came back from Lijiang to take over the beehives on the hill.
This is the problem, wrote Holmes in 1899: ennui. And lack of interest. Or rather, it all becomes too easy. When the joy of solving crimes is the challenge, the possibility that you cannot, why then the crimes have something to hold your attention. But when each crime is soluble, and so easily soluble at that, why then there is no point in solving them. Look: this man has been murdered. Well then, someone murdered him. He was murdered for one or more of a tiny handful of reasons: he inconvenienced someone, or he had something that someone wanted, or he had angered someone. Where is the challenge in that?
I would read in the dailies an account of a crime that had the police baffled, and I would find that I had solved it, in broad strokes if not in detail, before I had finished the article. Crime is too soluble. It dissolves. Why call the police and tell them the answers to their mysteries? I leave it, over and over again, as a challenge for them, as it is no challenge for me.
I am only alive when I perceive a challenge.
The bees of the misty hills, hills so high that they were sometimes called a mountain, were humming in the pale summer sun as they moved from spring flower to spring flower on the slope. Old Gao listened to them without pleasure. His cousin, in the village across the valley, had many dozens of hives, all of them already filling with honey, even this early in the year; also, the honey was as white as snow-jade. Old Gao did not believe that the white honey tasted any better than the yellow or light brown honey that his own bees produced, although his bees produced it in meager quantities, but his cousin could sell his white honey for twice what Old Gao could get for the best honey he had.
On his cousin’s side of the hill, the bees were earnest, hardworking, golden brown workers, who brought pollen and nectar back to the hives in enormous quantities. Old Gao’s bees were ill-tempered and black, shiny as bullets, who produced as much honey as they needed to get through the winter and only a little more: enough for Old Gao to sell from door to door, to his fellow villagers, one small lump of honeycomb at a time. He would charge more for the brood-comb, filled with bee larvae, sweet-tasting morsels of protein, when he had brood-comb to sell, which was rarely, for the bees were angry and sullen and everything they did, they did as little as possible, including make more bees, and Old Gao was always aware that each piece of brood-comb he sold meant bees he would not have to make honey for him to sell later in the year.
Old Gao was as sullen and as sharp as his bees. He had had a wife once, but she had died in childbirth. The son who had killed her lived for a week, then died himself. There would be nobody to say the funeral rites for Old Gao, no one to clean his grave for festivals or to put offerings upon it. He would die unremembered, as unremarkable and as unremarked as his bees.
The old white stranger came over the mountains in late spring of that year, as soon as the roads were passable, with a huge brown bag strapped to his shoulders. Old Gao heard about him before he met him.