(this was written around 2007; I found it and decided to post it here)
Title: A Whiff of Roses
Medium: episode-length fiction
Rating: PG+
TV or Book Verse: TV with a touch (or more) of Book.
Spoilers: It's all open for use. But nothing blatant here.
Pairings: None
Warnings: None
Author's Note: Enjoy.
Disclaimer: Dresdens, Bob, Murphy, Kirmani, and any other characters you recognize from either the Dresden Files books or TV-show are not mine. If you desperately want any original characters, that's really okay.
There are some days that you just know ahead of time are going to be bad—days in which everything goes wrong, one thing after another—days when it would be better to just never get out of bed.
This was not one of those days. I was in a pretty good place, actually: cases had been coming in more-or-less steadily, but nothing to dangerous; I was up on the rent; I hadn't recently met any old archenemies out for my blood; Morgan hadn't shown his face on my block for a least a month; even Bob was being slightly less cranky than usual, since I had finally done my laundry.
In my life, you just know that can't last.
"Hey, Bob," I said, coming in the storefront after yet another successful finding spell (no ring alive can hide from me), "Do you know where that book went? The one Murphy loaned me?"
"The one you promised to read and still haven't picked up?" he clarified—unnecessarily, to my mind.
"Yeah, that one. Have you seen it?"
"Yes. I read it. It was very interesting. You know, if you paid more attention to—"
"Bob," I stopped him, before his tirade could get going, "the book. Where is it?"
Bob gave a little shake of his head and pointed to my desk, apparently to a stack of papers. I walked over and began shuffling through them. I have no idea how all this stuff ends up on my desk; I think most of it just grows. I wonder . . .
"Hey, Bob, is there a paper fairy?"
"What?"
"You know—a fairy that makes papers appear where they weren't before? Like—" I stopped talking. Bob was giving me that Look. You know the one. Like he can't believe that I actually said something so stupid.
"No, Harry," he told me in his driest, most superior talking-to-dolts voice, "there is no such thing as a paper fairy. Disorganization is caused by irresponsible—"
"It was a joke."
"—Foolish people like yourself who clearly are unable to understand the concept of—"
There was no stopping him when he got like that, so I just turned away and continued digging for the book. Yes—there it was: A Beginner's Guide to Aikido: Basic Defenses. It did look sort of interesting. Not that I thought any baddies were about to stop and let me kung-fu them to death if I lost my staff, but it was an interesting thought. I turned the first page and began to read.
"Harry," Bob's voice filtered through my thoughts.
"Come on Bob, I've just started reading this thing!"
"Harry," Bob's voice repeated, urgently enough that I turned to face him; "there's something coming. I can—"
And that's when the storefront door crashed open and my dad burst in.
No; let me rephrase that—my dad had been dead for about twenty years. So really: the storefront door crashed open and something that looked like my dad had twenty years ago before he had died and wasn't stopped by my threshold burst in.
"Harry," Bob said again.
"Yeah, yeah, Bob I know—it's not really my father. That's a—a simulacrum of some kind here to trick me.
"That's not what I was going to say," Bob replied reproachfully.
"It wasn't?"
"No. What I was going to say was—what I felt earlier? That something was approaching?"
"Yeah?"
"I can still feel it; it's getting closer. But that—" he nodded to my "dad," who was on his knees gasping for breath, and hadn't seemed to notice either Bob or myself—"whatever that is, is not what I felt."
"Oh."
Bob gave me another stare.
"Oh, right." I called my hockey stick—um, staff—and felt my defenses, using one hand to shut the door magically. Bob, meanwhile, approached the figure still on the floor. I was tempted to tell him to be careful, but he'd just Look at me again. There are certainly downsides to Bob's being a ghost, but one good thing is that not much can hurt him, since he's already dead.
"What can you see?" I called instead, adding a bit more power to my defenses.
Bob reached out a hand, as he has done so many times before, to examine my 'dad'—and touched his sleeve which rippled under his touch.
Bob snatched his hand back and had jumped away so quickly I hardly saw him move. My 'dad' looked up from the floor and up at Bob squinted his eyes a little and turning his head in confusion. "Do I know you?" he asked. "You look almost familiar."
"We met the day before your wedding," Bob said softly, still staring at my father.
"Oh—yeah, yeah, you were talking to Margaret in Justin's study, I had always wondered—what's your name?"
"Bob."
"No, no, it was longer than that—Rothbart or Robert or—"
"Hrothbert," I supplied.
"—or something old like that. What was it?"
"Hrothbert," I repeated, by my father didn't seem to hear me.
"Hrothbert, Mr. Dresden," Bob finally repeated, looking back at me gravely.
That's never a good look.
"Bob," I asked, "what's going on? What is that?"
Bob gave a little tilt of his head and fiddled with one of his rings and even fidgeted a little, which he practically never does. "It appears to be your father, Harry—or a part of him."
"Who are you talking to, Hrothbert?" asked my dad, slowly climbing to his feet and gazing around at the storefront with total incomprehension.
"My father? How can it be my father, he's—" I changed thoughts mid-sentence—"he's not a ghost, is he? Why can't he hear me? Or see me? What's going on?" I was begging and I knew it and I knew that Bob knew it, but can you blame me?
"No, no, not a ghost—he would have manifested much earlier if that were the case. But anyway, there's no reason for him to be a ghost—not even revenge, since Justin has been forever destroyed. No, he's something else."
"Who's not a ghost? Hrothbert, what are you talking about? Where am I? Where's Harry?"
Bob turned back to my father and walked closer again, looking into wild eyes. "Mr. Dresden, do you mind?" he asked.
"What?"
Bob reached out one hand and pushed it against my dad's shoulder, so my dad stepped back a bit. But Bob just took his other hand and held onto my dad and kept pushing. After a moment or so, he turned his fingers and they slid slowly into my dad's arm. Dad gave a gasp of surprise and stared at Bob, then moved his eyes to Bob's restraining hand where the fingers were slipping through the fabric of his shirt.
"Wow, that's really disgusting," I commented, dazed. My voice sounded uncommonly high and squeaky. Bob withdrew.
"What—what did you just do? How—"
"I attempted to ascertain what exactly you are, Mr. Dresden," Bob replied calmly.
"What do you mean? I'm human, what else would I be?"
"Dead." Bob's not always the most tactful of people. "Some sort of shade, a kind which I have never encountered before."
My dad's mouth dropped open and he made a few squeaking noises. I did approximately the same.
To top of the dramatic moment, the phone rang. We all jumped.
Oh, all right—I jumped. Bob looked slightly ruffled and my dad stared at Bob as if wondering why he was looking slightly ruffled. "Well," Bob asked, "aren't you going to get it?"
"Right." I snatched the phone of it's cradle. "Dresden."
Murphy's dulcet tones spoke on the other end of the line, "What are you doing?"
"Um. Well, I'm—"
"Anything important? No? Good. Meet me at St. Mary's Cathedral. We've got bodies and they're right down your alley."
"I'm sort of busy—"
"See you in fifteen minutes or I'll send Kirmani." Ah. Bring out the death threats.
"Right, right. Bye, Murph."
"Bye, Dresden."
Whew, Murphy was in a bad mood. She usually let me finish at least some of my cases. I set the phone down, overcome by the distinct feeling that something was wrong.
"Harry," Bob said quietly. "It's gone. Whatever was approaching—and so is your father."
I left Bob after extracting from him a promise to try and figure out what the hell was going on and headed out to St. Mary's in my Jeep. Kirmani met me outside and led me in without a sarcastic remark—proof something was really wrong.
We went right into the main sanctuary, which is an enormous room with plenty of light colors and windows: white-painted walls, light-colored wood, a priest all in white . . . and a swarm of uniformed officers right in the middle, along with Murphy and—to my surprise—Butters.
The cops parted like the Red Sea (if you can't use Biblical metaphors in a church, where can you use them?) to let me through . . . and I immediately wished they hadn't.
You don't want me to describe it, trust me. It wasn't pretty. Think food processor.
"Where's the smell gone?" was the only thing I could think of to say. Pathetic, I know, but no many how many dead bodies I've seen, there's always something worse.
No wonder Murphy had sounded so bad on the phone.
"You tell me," Murphy replied, gently taking my shoulder and turning me away from the scene.
"Oh, right," I managed. Then, "Um. How many—I mean, how many people—"
"As best we can guess, four," Murphy told me. "Butter's is working on it. So much had soaked into the carpeting, and everything was so jumbled . . . well, there's no way he can get it back to the morgue so he's working here."
"Oh." I forced myself to turn back to the remains of the bodies and walk a little closer, observing everything, taking it in, even sniffing carefully, and then more deeply to see if my first, surreal observation held true.
Everything smelled like roses.
I felt the air, the auras, and wasn't really surprised to find that I couldn't detect any dark magic. It's pretty hard to do anything very bad in a church, magically speaking—holy ground is the best threshold you can get. But that meant that whatever had done—this—was almost certainly human, or at least not your typical monster. Which didn't help explain what was going on.
I knew Bob would berate me later for not snatching a bit of the victims, but I couldn't bring myself to come close enough, so instead I went back to Murphy, who was being handed something by Kirmani.
"The victims," he said, "at least, we think these are probably the ones. Priest says they met here every Tuesday at noon." Murphy flipped through the pictures quickly and then handed them to me.
Three women, one man, all of them with grey hair and cheerful smiles. The looked like nice people, people whom I wouldn't have minded meeting. And now never would. "Can I, uh—can I take these with me?" I asked, holding the pictures up.
Murphy glanced at Kirmani. "They're only copies," he said. "See? I'm learning."
Ah, the sarcasm returns.
"Thanks. And, um—do you know how long the bodies will be here? I mean, you'll eventually move them to the morgue, right?"
"Yeah," said Murphy, "why do you want to know?"
"Uh, you know, just . . . curiosity." And I could bring Bob to find out if these pictures really were the people who had died . . . and anything else he might be able to tell me.
"Uh, huh. So, any idea what could have caused the flowery smell? And taken away all other scents?"
The immediate answer was, of course, no. I mean, it's not the sort of thing one tends to come across. So I began to think out loud. "Smell. What is smell. Human's sense of smell is pretty powerful, compared to our other senses, right? It can warn you, remind you, it's integral to taste . . ."
"So you're saying that something took away the smell so it couldn't taste them?"
"No, no—I am definitely not saying that. Look, I'll go, do a little research, see if I can find something else out. Do we have names for these four? Occupations? Homes?"
"Yeah." Murphy called over a uniform and got me the information. I hurried out of the Cathedral as soon as I had it.
Somehow, I didn't think I'd ever much like the smell of roses again.
My first stop after St. Mary's was the gas station, because even wizard's jeeps need gas. I got myself a coke while I was there and used it to sooth the headache that was already coming on. I was a mess, and I knew it, and the only thing that kept me going was not thinking about my father. Or the lasagna he used to make. Or the way he used to—"
"Stop it, Harry," I muttered to myself. "Get a grip and concentrate." I ran down the list of names and addresses, and went to the gas station's payphone to call the first number.
Nobody home.
Second number, third: nobody home.
Finally, I typed in the last number and got an answer from a retirement home.
"Hi," I said, "I was hoping I could talk to a Mrs. Joan Richardson?"
"Hold, please." Then, thirty seconds of Chopin later, "I'm sorry, Mrs. Richardson isn't in right now. Would you like to leave a message for her?"
"Nah—I have something for her. I'll just swing by and deliver it; it's not out of my way."
Little white lies. They come with the trade.
I followed the address Murphy had given me and pulled up at Green's Retirement Home twenty minutes later. It was a nice, normal building—you know, bricks, windows, a sign. Overall, it didn't look like such a bad place to relax. It even had it's own miniature golf course (at least, according to the sign). It might not have been the most expensive of places, but it was hardly poor, either.
I went in the front door and glanced down at the paper again before stuffing it in my pocket. Room 117. A sign directed me to the left, and I followed the hallway, smiling vaguely as I passed old people. Room 117 looked pretty much like the others from the outside. The door was locked so I knocked firmly and listened. No answer. A quick glance around the hallway showed me no one was watching, so I tripped the lock and slipped inside, flicking on the light.
The room was empty. I looked around, but first glance didn't tell me anything except that Mrs. Richardson had probably spent all seventy-some years of her life collecting stuffed animals. I poked a bunny with my finger.
"May I help you?"
Darn it. I turned to a rather pretty young lady standing at the door. "No, I mean, I was just looking for Mrs. Richardson—is she around?"
"No; she's always at the church at this time."
"Oh, I see. Tell me, Miss—" I paused, but she didn't provide her name—"Did you—do you know Mrs. Richardson well?"
"Are you a relative?"
"Me? No. I'm just, uh—" so it probably was Mrs. Richardson who had died, but before I learned for sure, it was probably not a good idea to go telling possible suspects. "No, just an interested party."
"That's nice. Now find a relative or a better excuse and come back then."
"All right, all right. But if you see her, tell her Harry stopped by, won't you? Thanks."
I got out of there as quickly as I could, the young lady's stare boring into my head the whole way.
Ah, the glamorous life of a private investigator.
I didn't stop by any of the other residences on the way back—Murphy and her gang would get around to that sooner or later, and I had already found out more-or-less what I needed to know: Mrs. Richardson was a pretty average woman, aside from her stuffed animal obsession, and not exactly murder material. I knew I could count on Murphy to call me up if she found anything on the victims, so all that was left was to go home and see if Bob had dug up any information on my dad's . . . shade . . . thing.
"Bob?" I called, pushing the front door open. "Bob, are you—oh, hello."
"I'm sorry," said the figure sitting in the chair. She turned, revealing herself to be a middle-aged woman with dyed red hair. "I just stopped by and there was a gentleman here and he said I could wait—are you Mr. Dresden?"
"That's me."
The lady burst into tears and sat back down. I offered her my handkerchief, got her a glass of water, and waited until she could speak again.
"I'm so sorry, Mr. Dresden, I don't usually cry like this—but my son . . . I didn't know who else to turn to."
"It's all right, Ms.—"
"Dearlow."
"Ms. Dearlow. You can tell me. What about your son?"
"Well—he's . . . I mean, he's dead. He's been dead these seventeen years and so of course I thought—but I saw him, just an hour ago. He was there, just like he always used to be—he hadn't aged a day! But when I tried to talk to him, it was like he couldn't see me—and so I put out a hand and it went right through him as if he wasn't there at all!"
I heard the telltale swish of Bob walking through something and saw him appear behind Ms. Dearlow, scrutinizing her.
"And so you came to me?" I asked, a little surprised—people don't usually come rushing to me so quickly.
"Well, you see," Ms. Dearlow continued, blowing her nose—I made a note to myself to wash the handkerchief—a have a touch of the gift myself. My son didn't, or at least not before he died, but I heard—you know how one hears these things—that you were . . . well, real. A real wizard, and that you helped people. Is that" she looked up through red eyes, "is that right?"
"Yeah, that's right," I acknowledged, pulling up a chair across from her. "Look, Ms. Dearlow, I—" I glanced above Ms. Dearlow's head at Bob who nodded and vanished again—"I believe you. The same thing happened to me this morning—only it was my father." I hate it when my voice breaks like that. "I'll look into this—this whatever is going on, but I was wondering if you could do me a favor."
Ms. Dearlow nodded. "If it'll help my Ben."
"I hope so. Look, could you talk to your friends—contacts, anyone you know who has any magical ability, especially if they have lost a loved one, see if anything like this has happened to them?"
Ms. Dearlow nodded, her tears completely stopped now, and as she stood with a new purpose glimmering in her eyes, I was sure I'd made the right decision to trust her. We exchanged the usual goodbyes and I escorted her the door.
"Well," said Bob from just over my shoulder, "that's a relief; it's not only you. I was beginning to think that you were the sole focus of everything magical that comes to Chicago."
"Very funny, Bob."
"So. What did the lovely Lieutenant Murphy want from you today?"
I described the scene at St. Mary's and my ensuing—if unsuccessful—investigations afterwards. Bob listened very closely, especially when I mentioned the rose smell, which he had me repeat several times.
"Sounds gruesome," he said when I had finished, "and very, very odd. Are you sure the smell was roses and not some other flower? You're not exactly a flower connoisseur."
"Yeah, but even I know the rose smell. Anyway, roses can be pretty powerful, right?"
"Hmm, yes. But usually as expressions of purity or love, certainly nothing that could have caused such devastation within a holy place."
"Unless the roses counteracted whatever dark was going on?"
"I suppose it's possible—but very, very doubtful. It's more likely that the smell was some sort of unexpected side effect."
"Like chemicals mixing—that cleaner stuff leaving blue spots on my shirt."
"Precisely. Something that could have been easily avoided if you had just read the box—"
"But not predictable from previous experience. Okay, what spells—or spell combinations—might leave an after-smell on the scene?"
Bob sighed and shook his head. "I don't know. I don't suppose you managed to get any samples from the crime scene?"
"No, nothing direct, only these pictures of the victims."
"Well, that's hardly helpful. If you want any real information you're going to have to do better than that."
"Yeah, yeah, I'll take you there tonight." I sighed and rubbed my jaw. "Okay. Do you have anything else on my father? You said he was some kind of shade, right?"
"An almost ghost—less solid than I am, but not by much."
"Yeah, but at least he could see and hear you—why not me?"
Bob shrugged. "I am much closer to the incorporeal world than he. I have only my skull and centuries-old magic tying my to this place—I exist just enough to be realized in this world, although not enough to effect it, where as he—I imagine you're lucky you could even see or hear him."
"So what does that make him?"
Bob spread his hands. "Out of my experience. I don't know, Harry. I am dead but have never actually left this world, not in the way most spirits do."
"But will my dad come back?"
"No, Harry," Bob said, almost sadly, "not truly, not as your father. He is gone."
The phone rang. Again. Two calls in one day; I was getting popular. "Hello."
"Hey, Dresden. Paul Andrews Nursing Home, Borgen Park. Either one sound familiar to you?"
"Not particularly. Why?"
"Our salad shooter murderer has visited both. Same M.O., seven more people dead. What the hell is going on?"
"You know Murphy, I really have no idea. But I'll come by, okay? See if I can find anything. Hey, by the way—you find anything more on the victims families? Any correlation?"
There was a sigh on the other end of the line, which got me realizing just how tired Murphy must be. "Not really. Normal people, for the most part, who probably just got in the way of our super psychotic spree killer. They're all old, though—the youngest one we've identified so far was sixty-seven. Does that help?"
"Maybe. I'll look into it."
"Tell me if you have any leads."
"Will do." I set the phone down.
"More of them?" Bob asked.
"Looks like it. That brings the total up to eleven people. Old people, Murphy said."
"And you're going to the newest crime scenes?"
"Yeah."
"I do hope you're going to manage to get something to work with this time. Take a vial; you may need it."
"Thanks, Bob."
I grabbed his skull from the counter and stuck it in my bag. "Oh, no," he said, "you're description was quite nice enough. I have no desire to—"
"Uh, huh. You'll have plenty more samples if you come with me. Now get in your skull, Bob, and let's go."
"Oh, all right."
I went first to St. Mary's, which had been largely abandoned by now, and let Bob out. The bodies had been taken out by now, mostly, but the carpeting had soaked in a large amount of blood and . . . well, bodily fluids of all kinds. There were small chunks.
Bob wrinkled his nose. "I don't smell roses," he told me.
"You don't?"
"No." He felt down into the carpet and concentrated a bit, turning into each of the four victims—who did indeed match Murphy's descriptions—before standing again.
"So?"
Bob shook his head. "I don't know. They were definitely human, normal—but strangely empty, as if drained of essence."
"Drained of essence?"
Bob gave a helpless little shrug and swirled back into his skull.
I headed to Paul Andrews Nursing Home and then Borgen Park. I couldn't let Bob out either time because there were cops around, but kept the bag slung over my shoulder anyway.
"What's that?" Murphy asked, eying the bag. "Bring a pack lunch?"
"Um. No. It's just—stuff. So—find anything new?"
Murphy shook her head. "And I have no idea how to stop this. A mysterious killing running around chopping up old people in public places and nobody notices? How am I supposed to stop someone like that? You know. I actually used to like the smell of roses. They brought back good memories."
"Yeah. Me too. Listen, I—"
A familiar flash of color caught my eye and I turned my father was standing on the sidewalk behind me, looking around in absolute confusion.
"What?" Murphy demanded. "What are you looking at?"
I shook my head and walked right up to my dad, directly in my line of sight, but he didn't notice me. A moment later, he took a step forward through my chest and continued on. I swung around and watched him. He walked right up to the bodies—or shredded remains of—and gazed down sorrowfully at them. Then he stooped down and . . . was gone.
"What's the matter?" Murphy asked. "You look like you've just seen a ghost."
"Yeah," I said faintly, "or a memory."
I had barely gotten home again when the phone rang. It was Ms. Dearlow. One of her friends had seen someone, she told me, her mother, dead these fifteen years.
"It's getting closer," I observed aloud, "whatever it was that you sensed right before my dad came. He died twenty years ago, Ben Dearlow died seventeen years ago . . . now this woman, fifteen."
"You mustn't let it get closer," Bob said in a low voice. "Have you any idea of how to stop it?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I have an idea."
"You must be careful. The being—whatever it is—may take the form of your father. If it really is made up of the memories of people on the other side, it will know you."
"Yeah, I know. But I can't let people go on being torn apart for their memories, can I?" I looked around, but Bob was already gone.
I called Mrs. Dearlow back and asked her to come over and bring her friend. They arrived, the friend turning out to be another woman about Mrs. Dearlow's age who introduced herself only as Angie. We all sat down around cups of tea and I did my best to explain.
"This thing—that's bringing people back? Well, it's not really. It's sort of like a—a big ball of stuff from the Nevernever that somehow shoved its way into our world."
"So that really was my mother?" Angie demanded.
"Um, no. It was sort of . . . like an echo of your mother. See, this memory-ball-monster-thing? It's been killing people, chewing them up for their memories so it can grow and stay alive in our world. Only, not all the parts are digestible, so it, um. It let's out waste which temporarily takes on forms from its memories. And because of the nature of memories, the . . . waste . . . tends to gravitate towards the people it once knew."
I thought it was a pretty elegant explanation, 'um's aside.
"So basically what you're saying is my Ben's image was basically excrement."
I winced. "Yeah, basically."
"Why are you telling us this?" Mrs. Dearlow demanded. "Couldn't you just—I don't know, banish it? Or retrieve the memories?"
"Yeah, only they're not really memories, exactly—more like echoes of memories of people. And I need you two because I need to get rid of all of this memory-monster . . . and that includes any waste it's left behind. So by bringing you two here—"
"You're able to gather it up. Hopefully before it kills again."
"Exactly." I put my tea down and drew out a piece of chalk. "And I'm going to need you two to help provide focus. Can you do that?"
Mrs. Dearlow and Angie glanced at each other, and chorused, "Yes."
We went down to the lab where Bob was waiting in the shadows, unseen. Golden sigils hung in the air around the circle I keep, and I traced them on the floor with the chalk, careful to not touch Bob's sigils before I had finished.
And then, it was only a matter of summoning the memory-thing and, with the help of the ladies, all three waste-echoes and banishing them.
Hah, like anything is ever that easy.
At first, it seemed like everything was going just fine: inside the summoning circle appeared my father and two people I didn't know, and just the shadow of a fourth. That's when I began to have a feeling of real trouble—it seemed like the Shade had devoured something else while we had been dilly-dallying over our tea. The ladies realized that at about the same time as me, and we all juiced-up the power as best we could and managed to solidify the fourth figure—a little girl, which just isn't right—when the whole circle lit up with a pale, sickly yellow-green light which pulsed and sent the ladies and me flying back against the far wall.
You'd be amazed at how often that happens.
I managed to keep enough of my will alert to trap the nasty within the circle and climbed to my feet, rubbing my neck and glancing around to see what had happened to Mrs. Dearlow and Angie.
They were both flat against the floor, apparently unconscious.
The light flared again, but this time I was ready and blocked it hard, hard enough that the flare turned inwards.
It was hard to see what happened: everything was pretty much a flash of light. But when I could see inside the circle again, it was empty.
I never found out whose little girl I had seen in the circle, nor was I sure I wanted to. But Mrs. Dearlow and Angie were all right (baring emotional scars) and they both left their phone numbers with instructions to call them if I ever needed an extra hand with anything. So it wasn't so bad, really. Except for all the innocent dead, ripped apart for their memories, and the memory of me banishing my own father beyond the Nevernever.
Oh, and the little bit where I still have to dead with Murphy. But maybe I'll managed to learn a little Aikido before then, if Bob ever stops criticizing my form. Like he would know.
Chapter End Notes:
Originally written for and posted in livejournal group seasonaldresden back in—2007, I think. Posted here because I found it again . . .