'Wizards, Werewolves, and an insidious plot to take over the world, or at least the greater Chicago area? Just another day in the life of Harry Dresden, Wizard P.I.'
The Dresden Files and all associated properties are owned by Jim Butcher. This is a non-profit fanfic. Please support the official release.
This story takes place between Summer Knight and Death Masks.
Beta-ed by: ZeroZalazor
My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, Wizard of The White Council, and Private Investigator of Chicago.
And I don't get house calls.
Which made the knocking on my door weird, considering most people who needed to talk me did so on the phone, as opposed to showing up at my apartment. Seeing as I was in the phone book under 'Wizard', a decent number of those calls were either pranks, crazies, or people recommending I seek psychiatric help.
The knocking was also uneven, and while not quick, definitely coming from someone under distress. Potentially, of course, to break into my home and eat me like a crispy wizard sandwich, but demons and their ilk generally don't knock on your door when they come for your blood.
Trust me on that one.
And because that meant it was potentially a person in distress, or at the least looking for directions (if only), I hurried to open my front door.
In fact, I hurried so quickly that I completely forgot I was wearing my bathrobe.
It is a horrible, rude, and offensive stereotype that all wizards wear robes. Never mind that that White Council does, in fact, require robes at pretty much all formal meetings.
But anyway, back to the wizard running to his front door in a silly bathrobe.
As I neared my front door, there was a thump against it, and a sound suspiciously like something sliding down the outside.
Now I was worried.
Running up to the solidly reinforced door, with extra steel to keep out unwanted demons and fey, particularly the godmother variant of the last one, and wrenched open the door...
... To reveal a redheaded naked woman who looked to have passed out, bleeding, and slumped against where my door had been moments previous.
While normally supernatural entities don't bother playing the wounded gazelle card, there are some who'd use the sympathy to get a free pass into someone's threshold. Luckily I did recognize the woman as I did my best to carry her inside, flicking the steel door as well as I could with one foot as I walked past.
She was Andi, a werewolf friend of Billy, and part of the group I'd met during the loup-garou fiasco. They had very little formal training, even though as werewolves they had to have at least a minor talent.
That, however, did not mean they were helpless against a decent amount of things that went bump in the night.
Transforming into a wolf, after all, meant you were a wolf. They were considerably faster than humans, had better senses, and could hit considerably harder than anything human could naturally, baring magic or divine intervention. In other words, they certainly could never be classified as pushovers.
Which worried me, seeing as Andi was naked, indicating she had at some point before collapsing transformed into a werewolf...
... Meaning all this damage had likely been done to her as a werewolf. Which, as earlier mentioned, meant something superhuman had once again swept into the Windy City.
But, of more presently important matters, I was in the process of sitting a friend, if slightly extended, who was in the process of bleeding out on my already war torn couch.
Which was very bad, not just for the couch, but also for Andi, because like pretty much every mortal that hadn't made a deal with the Fair Folk, werewolves had no access to any healing abilities, and while she wasn't going to be dieing right this instant, she was in rather dire straits.
So, once making sure she was secure, I beat a hasty retreat to the first-aid kit that seemed to get a distressing amount use in recent years, and got bandages and antiseptics.
I also had far more experience applying the medical supplies than was normal, which was helpful here.
I was also doing my level best to not notice her current state of undress, and was partially succeeding. Mostly.
After making sure that everything was alright with Andi, and she wasn't going to lose a limb to infection while I was gone, I pulled up the trapdoor that I hadn't had time to hide under my rug, and descended into my lab.
Considering I had spent the greater part of the year before last in my lab, it had changed very little.
It was still in my basement, obviously, still had the summoning circle, bookshelves with an assortment of arcane tomes, untouched self-help books, and dime-store romance novels. All that, in addition to the shelves upon shelves of crap I had collected over the years, from both yard sales and more... questionable methods, mostly for what I needed it for now.
Potion making.
Despite what other wizards named Harry will tell you, potions aren't hard to understand, but they are hard to make.
While potions do have a physical component to them, the vast majority of a potion is the spiritual aspects of the brew, and those vary from person to person. While I generally know what I'm doing for the potions I regularly make, there is still a degree of error involved, and accidentally killing the person I was trying to help with the potion would be a bummer.
Which is why I walked over to the human skull on my bookshelves, near the highest concentration of smut, and spoke the skulls name.
"... Bob."
Orange lights opened in the skulls sockets.
Now technically speaking Bob isn't the name of the skull, but it is the name of the spirit of Air and Intellect kept in the skull.
Bob is a massive repository of magical knowledge, who I had obtained from my late master Justin DuMorne.
My obtain, of course, I meant took-it-from-the-ashes-of-the-home-we'd-lived-in-before-he-tried-to-mind-control-me-and-did-mind-control-my-girlfriend, but that's neither here nor there. The main thing here was that Bob was a fantastic resource...
Bob's skull broke into a lecherous grin.
"Why hello Harry! You seem to be... awake this afternoon!"
... As well as a massive pervert.
I tried to adjust my bathrobe as best I could to cover up the... problem seeing a beautiful woman in the nude had... Um... Caused, which was thankfully abating, in part due to the fact the woman had sustained substantial damage, and I was worried, and the fact it was still freezing in the basement.
Being a wizard has its prices, and Heating and A/C were two of them.
Selling your soul to the devil, thankfully, was not.
... Most of the time.
But anyway, I had a friend to save.
"Hope you're firing on all cylinders today Bob, 'cause we've got a doozy."
Bob snorted, a miracle considering he had no flesh or cartilage to snort with.
"Harry, I could be running like a single horse with three amputated limbs, and be dancing circles around you."
... Which was true enough. That was hardly the point though.
"I'd better get your A game today though, because I'm trying for a healing potion."
Bob immediately sobered. Healing magic was pretty difficult stuff, and a whole lot could go wrong with it, even if you were careful.
"That's outside of your usual bunch Harry. Who's it for?"
Of course it was. With how ludicrously complex the human body was, making a potion to heal just anyone was near about impossible. You had to make them on a person by person basis, and even then, as I had mentioned before, that had a landfill of potential problems. Which meant I had to give Bob the lowdown.
After my hurried retelling of events, Bob whistled, and it wasn't his normal wolf-whistle. Though that would have been a mood lightener.
For once he was serious, and I appreciated it.
"I was thinking something that sped up the bodies natural healing. Think we can handle that?"
Bob made a noncommittal hum.
"Probably. From the sound of it, no broken bones, so improper resetting shouldn't be a problem. Either way, an expedited healing potion is the safest option, but she's going to be starving afterwards."
I shrugged.
"That's something I can handle. So what will I need?"
Once Bob listed off his ingredients, I moved towards the shelving to collect whatever I needed, only for Bob's voice to stop me.
"You should also make something to wake her up, after you administer the first potion. She's going to need to eat pretty soon after, and getting information on whatever did it is going to be key."
Bob seemed oddly serious today, but I was certainly glad, even as he listed off ingredients for what amounted to magical smelling salts. Hell's Bell's, that was even in the recipe!
Once I had everything collected, I got to work.
Seeing as the healing potion was basically a super metabolism potion, it had to have a high energy liquid base, so the flask contained apple juice. The magic smelling salts had a simple base of salt water.
I started with the hearing aspect, which was the sound of a healthy heartbeat for the healing potion and a loud scream for the wake-up potion.
After 'collecting' the heartbeat and the scream, I added them to their respective potions.
The smell of antiseptics, the last I had left, and the smelling salts respectively.
Taste was of coffee, and a very sour Lemonhead candy.
Touch was covered by an old scab, which I had on my shelves, unfortunately, and the roughest sandpaper I could find.
And to round off the senses a smile and a flashing light for sight.
Next was spirit, covered by a hair of dog, seeing as Billy had never gotten around to supplying any wolf hair, and a single, forceful statement of 'wake up!'.
And finally body. This was going to be a little more unpleasant.
I pulled out my letter opener, and gave my right pinky enough of a hole to drip blood into the concoction. Compared to that, the shot of energy drink into the 'wake-up-and-smell-the-roses' potion was downright pleasant. Even if the container seemed to be glowing from the color.
With Bob's guidance, mixing the potions became an easy, if tedious process, and before long I had two sports bottles full of potion, well marked this time.
I could feel Bob's eyes follow me as I left the lab.
I made sure to heat up the oven, and stars and stones it was times like this I missed electricity, and grabbed the food I knew would be stocked in the ice box. After unwrapping them and putting them in the oven to cook, I got down to business.
During my bandaging I had run out, and once again, didn't that say something, so I had left some of the minor wounds on her upper arms with just antiseptic.
After making sure I had the right bottle, I opened Andi's mouth, and as carefully as I could tilted her head up so she didn't drown. It was probably good she wasn't awake, because while the potion making process makes the ingredients edible, many potions tasted horrible. And this was probably one of them.
It took a little over a minute to empty the bottle into her mouth, and some effects were already taking place. The healing potion was mainly a catalyst, and as such was used to speed up a reaction, the body's healing process in this case. While the potion did contain energy as well, a large chunk of the required power had to come from the human body, thus the need for food pretty much immediately afterwards.
That also made healing potions on the battlefield impractical, seeing as that took up much of the energy needed for spell casting, as well as the drop in concentration due to the ravenous hunger that was spawned.
She was healing at a visible rate, far faster than anything purely natural could achieve, but not Wolverine (or loup-garou) levels. It would also heal only to the point of having pink, new flesh, so it still wasn't perfect.
Luckily, most of her major wounds weren't in highly visible places, so long as she wore long sleeves and didn't bear her midriff for a couple weeks, she'd be fine.
... Although it was a very nice midriff...
No! Bad Dresden! She's a friend, and just recently had the crap beaten out of her! Bad thoughts!
According to the clock, it had been around forty minutes, and the healing was drawing to a close. I went back into the kitchen, pulled the food out of the oven before I had to explain to my kindly old landlady why there was a naked woman on my couch when the fire squad arrived.
Once I had impressed on Mister, my cat, who had not entered the living room since Andi had arrived, (and how unusual was my life when I could put 'passed out on my door' into 'arrived' in my head?) that he was not to eat the food, I returned to the couch.
It was time to face the music.
After picking up the remaining sports bottle, I knelt next to my werewolf friend, opening her mouth and tilted back her head, just like last time, and poured.
It looked suspiciously like Mountain Dew as it poured down her throat, a drink I'd never had, but Michael's daughter Molly had been sneaking one the last time time I had swung by the Carpenter residence.
The glow was memorable.
Once I was positive she wasn't about to start choking, I took several healthy steps back.
The potion was going to be a heavy shock to her system, and she was going to be disoriented at first. The last thing I needed was for her to see the massive figure next to her and come at me fangs first. Best to let her acclimate.
She bolted upright and swung her feet onto the floor in an instant, drawing herself up to her full height with a snarl, and I tensed for oncoming combat...
... Only for Andi to trip and fall with a very feminine yelp.
I blinked.
That... hadn't been what I'd expected.
It was likely that the super-energy potion had increased her awareness, like caffeine has the tendency to.
The sensation of her body being completely drained probably hadn't had its chance to manifest, and as such she'd gotten up on legs that felt perfectly fine, only for them to collapse under her.
As she struggled to get up off the floor, I spoke in my most non-threatening tone.
"Andi, it's me, Harry!"
Her eyes went up to mine and I saw recognition in the split second before I averted my eyes to avoid a Soulgaze.
She tried speaking.
"H-"
She coughed loudly. I did my best to be looking anywhere other than her.
Andi cleared her throat, and tried speaking again.
"... Harry?"
I tried my best to add some humor to the situation.
"The one and only. You almost had me worried there."
I expected for that to not go well, but she gave a very unladylike snort.
Huh. Maybe massive bodily trauma made my jokes funnier.
And knowing my life, by the end of the week I'd be able to test that theory.
By now, Andi looked like she wasn't out of it anymore, and was taking in the surroundings.
... That was right, wasn't it? The Alpha's had never been in my apartment. Whenever we played Arcanos, I always went to their place, and other than that I wasn't somebody who had people drop by often.
"Why don't we grab you something to eat, and then you can explain what happened."
Andi's stomach, as though listening, chose that moment to growl. She looked down, blushing slightly, before noticing her wounds weren't wounds anymore.
I cut her off before she could say anything.
"I'll get to that over the food."
She managed to get to her feet, slower this time, though still a little unsteady, before saying.
"You'd be...tt...er?"
Her nose sniffed the air.
"... Is that...?"
My face broke into a grin.
"Yep! The best oven-ready pizza's money can buy!"
... Or your fairy housekeepers can stock your fridge with, but semantics.
She moved past me into the kitchen, clearly ravenous, before she stopped, and turned to me.
"... Harry?"
I raised an eyebrow, a move I had perfected in my teenage years, before magic had rendered me incapable of watching decent Bond films.
"Yes?"
I stretched the word for all it was worth, hoping for a laugh.
She had a slight tilt of one side of her lips, but little else.
"... Would you mind grabbing me some clothes?"