Working for Bigfoot (3 page)

“I mean I’ve been you before,” I said. “The kid who liked reading books about aliens and goblins and knights and explorers at lunch, and in class, and during recess. I didn’t care much about sports. And I got picked on a lot.”

“They don’t pick on me,” Irwin said quickly. “It’s just…just what guys do. They give me a hard time. It’s in fun.”

“And it doesn’t make you angry,” I said. “Not even a little.”

His hands slowed down, and his face turned thoughtful. “Sometimes,” he said quietly. “When they spoil my broccoli.”

I blinked. “Broccoli?”

“I love broccoli,” Irwin said, looking up at me, his expression serious.

“Kid,” I said, smiling, “no one loves broccoli. No one even
likes
broccoli. All the grown-ups just agree to lie about it so that we can make kids eat it, in vengeance for what our parents did to us.”

“Well, I love broccoli,” Irwin said, his jaw set.

“Hunh,” I said. “Guess I’ve seen something new today.” We finished and I said, “Go get some more lunch. I’ll take care of this.”

“Thank you,” he said soberly. “Um, Norm.”

I grunted, nodded to him, tossed the dropped food, and returned the tray. Then I sat back down at the corner table with my lunch and watched Irwin and his tormentors from the corner of my eye. The two bullies never took their eyes off Irwin, even while talking and joking with their group.

I recognized that behavior, though I’d never seen it in a child before; only in hunting cats, vampires, and sundry monsters.

The two kids were predators.

Young and inexperienced, maybe. But predators.

For the first time, I thought that Bigfoot Irwin might be in real trouble.

I went back to my own tray and wolfed down the “food” on it. I wanted to keep a closer eye on Irwin.

Being a wizard is all about being prepared. Well, that and magic, obviously. While I could do a few things in a hurry, most magic takes long moments or hours to arrange, and that means you have to know what’s coming. I’d brought a few things with me, but I needed more information before I could act decisively on the kid’s behalf.

I kept track of Irwin after he left the cafeteria. It wasn’t hard. His face was down, his eyes on his book, and even though he was one of the younger kids in the school, he stood out, tall and gangly. I contrived to go past his classroom several times in the next hour. It was trig, which I knew, except I’d been doing it in high school.

Irwin was the youngest kid in the class. He was also evidently the smartest. He never looked up from his book. Several times the teacher tried to catch him out, asking him questions. Irwin put his finger on the place in his book, glanced up at the blackboard, and answered them with barely a pause. I found myself grinning.

Next I tracked down Irwin’s tormentors. They weren’t hard to find, either, since they both sat in the chairs closest to the exit, as though they couldn’t wait to go off and be delinquent the instant school was out. They sat in class with impatient, sullen expressions. They looked like they were in the grip of agonizing boredom, but they didn’t seem to be preparing to murder a teacher or anything.

I had a hunch that something about Irwin was drawing a predatory reaction from those two kids. And Coach Vogon had arrived on the scene pretty damned quickly—too much so for coincidence, maybe.

“Maybe Bigfoot Irwin isn’t the only scion at this school,” I muttered to myself.

And maybe I wasn’t the only one looking out for the interests of a child born with one foot in this world and one in another.

I was standing outside the gymnasium as the last class of the day let out, leaning against the wall on my elbows, my feet crossed at the heels, my head hanging down, my wheeled bucket and mop standing unused a good seven feet away—pretty much the picture of an industrious janitor. The kids went hurrying by in a rowdy herd, with Irwin’s tormentors being the last to leave the gym. I felt their eyes on me as they went past, but I didn’t react to them.

Coach Vogon came out last, flicking out the banks of fluorescent lights as he went, his footsteps brisk and heavy. He came to a dead stop as he came out of the door and found me waiting for him.

There was a long moment of silence while he sized me up. I let him. I wasn’t looking for a fight, and I had taken the deliberately relaxed and nonconfrontational stance I was in to convey that concept to him. I figured he was connected to the supernatural world, but I didn’t know
how
connected he might be. Hell, I didn’t even know if he was human.

Yet.

“Don’t you have work to do?” he demanded.

“Doing it,” I said. “I mean, obviously.”

I couldn’t actually hear his eyes narrow, but I was pretty sure they did. “You got a lot of nerve, buddy, talking to an instructor like that.”

“If there weren’t all these kids around, I might have said another syllable or two,” I drawled. “Coach Vogon.”

“You’re about to lose your job, buddy. Get to work or I’ll report you for malingering.”

“Malingering,” I said. “Four whole syllables. You’re good.”

He rolled another step toward me and jabbed a finger into my chest. “Buddy, you’re about to buy a lot of trouble. Who do you think you are?”

“Harry Dresden,” I said. “Wizard.”

And I looked at him as I opened my Sight.

A wizard’s Sight is an extra sense, one that allows him to perceive the patterns of energy and magic that suffuse the universe—energy that includes every conceivable form of magic. It doesn’t actually open a third eye in your forehead or anything, but the brain translates the perceptions into the visual spectrum. In the circles I run in, the Sight shows you things as they truly are, cutting through every known form of veiling magic, illusion, and other mystic chicanery.

In this case, it showed me that the thing standing in front of me wasn’t human.

Beneath its illusion, the spindly humanoid creature stood a little more than five feet high, and it might have weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet. It was naked, and anatomically it resembled a Ken doll. Its skin was a dark grey, its eyes absolutely huge, bulbous, and midnight black. It had a rounded, high-crowned head and long, delicately pointed ears. I could still see the illusion of Coach Pete around the creature, a vague and hazy outline.

It lowered the lids of its bulbous eyes, the gesture somehow exceptionally lazy, and then nodded slowly. It inclined its head the smallest measurable amount possible and murmured, in a melodious and surprisingly deep voice, “Wizard.”

I blinked a few times and waved my Sight away, so that I was facing Coach Pete again. “We should talk,” I said.

The apparent man stared at me unblinkingly, his expression as blank as a discarded puppet’s. It was probably my imagination that made his eyes look suddenly darker. “Regarding?”

“Irwin Pounder,” I said. “I would prefer to avoid a conflict with Svartalfheim.”

He inhaled and exhaled slowly through his nose. “You recognized me.”

In fact, I’d been making an educated guess, but the svartalf didn’t need to know that. I knew precious little about the creatures. They were extremely gifted craftsmen, and were responsible for creating most of the really cool artifacts of Norse myth. They weren’t wicked, exactly, but they were ruthless, proud, stubborn, and greedy, which often added up to similar results. They were known to be sticklers for keeping their word, and God help you if you broke yours to them. Most important, they were a small supernatural nation unto themselves: one that protected its citizens with maniacal zeal.

“I had a good teacher,” I said. “I want your boys to lay off Irwin Pounder.”

“Point of order,” he said. “They are not mine. I am not their progenitor. I am a guardian only.”

“Be that as it may,” I said, “my concern is for Irwin, not the brothers.”

“He is a whetstone,” he said. “They sharpen their instincts upon him. He is good for them.”

“They aren’t good for him,” I said. “Fix it.”

“It is not my place to interfere with them,” Coach Pete said. “Only to offer indirect guidance and to protect them from anyone who would interfere with their growth.”

The last phrase was as emotionless as the first, but it somehow carried an ugly ring of a threat—a polite threat, but a threat nonetheless.

Sometimes I react badly to being threatened. I might have glared a little.

“Hypothetically,” I said, “let’s suppose that I saw those boys giving Irwin a hard time again, and I made it my business to stop them. What would you do?”

“Slay you,” Coach Pete said. His tone was utterly absent of any doubt.

“Awfully sure of yourself, aren’t you.”

He spoke as if reciting a single-digit arithmetic problem. “You are young. I am not.”

I felt my jaw clench, and forced myself to take a slow breath, to stay calm. “They’re hurting him.”

“Be that as it may,” he said calmly, “my concern is for the brothers, not for Irwin Pounder.”

I ground my teeth and wished I could pick my words out of them before continuing the conversation. “We’ve both stated our positions,” I said. “How do we resolve the conflict?”

“That also is not my concern,” he said. “I will not dissuade the brothers. I will slay you should you attempt to do so yourself. There is nothing else to discuss.”

He shivered a little, and suddenly the illusion of Coach Pete seemed to gain a measure of life, of definition, like an empty glove abruptly filled by the flesh of a hand.

“If you will excuse me,” he said, in Coach Pete’s annoying tone of voice, walking past me, “I have a detention over which to preside.”

“To preside over,” I said, and snorted at his back. “Over which to preside. No one actually talks like that.”

He turned his head and gave me a flat-eyed look. Then he rounded a corner and was gone.

I rubbed at the spot on my forehead between my eyebrows and tried to think.

I had a bad feeling that fighting this guy was going to be a losing proposition. In my experience, when someone gets their kids a supernatural supernanny, they don’t pick pushovers. Among wizards, I’m pretty buff—but the world is full of bigger fish than me. More to the point, even if I fought the svartalf and won, it might drag the White Council of Wizards into a violent clash with Svartalfheim. I wouldn’t want to have something like that on my conscience.

I wanted to protect the Pounder kid, and I wasn’t going to back away from that. But how was I supposed to protect him from the Bully Brothers if they had a heavyweight on deck, ready to charge in swinging? That kind of brawl could spill over onto any nearby kids, and fast. I didn’t want this to turn into a slugfest. That wouldn’t help Irwin Pounder.

But what could I do? What options did I have? How could I act without dragging the svartalf into a confrontation?

I couldn’t.

“Ah,” I said to no one, lifting a finger in the air. “Aha!”

I grabbed my mop bucket and hurried toward the cafeteria.