Fool Moon by Jim Butcher Page A

but they weren’t. And they scared the hell out of me.
    While sitting at an intersection, I slammed my hand on the steering wheel, abruptly angry. “Stupid, Harry,” I said. “How could you have been so stupid? Why in the hell did you go wandering in there like that? Do you realize how close those Neanderthal freaks came to tearing you apart?” I glared ferociously out my side window, at an old lady in a business suit who was staring at me as though I were a ranting madman. Which, I suppose, was what I looked like.
    I stopped myself from glaring at her, took a deep breath, and tried to calm down. A couple of blocks later, I was able to start thinking straight again.
    Parker and the Streetwolves were not responsible for the murders last month. That didn’t make them any less dangerous. They were lycanthropes, the kind Bob had told me about, and I could see now why they had been feared. People with the souls of beasts, possessed of a ferocity so great that it could transform them into something inhuman without altering a single cell of their bodies.
    They lived in a pack, and Parker was their leader. I had challenged his dominance in my clueless, bumbling way, and now he couldn’t afford to let me live, or he would be killed himself. So now I had to worry about someone else coming after me, trying to kill me. Not only that, all of this trouble had come gratis, without giving me any lead on the true culprit of the Lobo killings.
    Maybe it was a good time to leave town for a while.
    I brooded over that for a block or so, and then shook my head. I wouldn’t run. I had made this trouble for myself, and I would get out of it myself. I had to stay, to help Murphy find the killer, and to help save lives before the full moon rose again. And if Parker wanted to kill me, well—he’d find that doing in a full-fledged wizard is no easy task.
    I gripped the steering wheel grimly. If it came to it, I would kill him. I knew I could do that. Technically, I suppose, Parker and his lycanthropes weren’t human. The First Law of Magic, Thou Shalt Not Kill, wouldn’t necessarily apply to them. Legally, I might be able to make a case for the use of lethal magic to the White Council.
    I just wouldn’t be safe from myself. I wouldn’t be safe from the loathing I would feel, using a tool made of life’s essence, its energy, to bring an end to life. Magic was more than just an energy source, like electricity or petroleum. It was power, true, but it was a lot of other things as well. It was all that was deepest and most powerful in nature, in the human heart and soul. The ways in which I applied it were crude and clumsy in comparison to magic in its pure form. There’s more magic in a baby’s first giggle than in any firestorm a wizard can conjure up, and don’t let anyone tell you any different.
    Magic comes from what is inside you. It is a part of you. You can’t weave together a spell that you don’t believe in.
    I didn’t want to believe that killing was deep inside of me. I didn’t want to think about the part of me that took a dark joy in gathering all the power it could and using it as I saw fit, everything else be damned. There was power to be had in hatred, too, in anger and in lust, in selfishness and in pride. And I knew that there was some dark corner of me that would enjoy using magic for killing—and then long for more. That was black magic, and it was easy to use. Easy and fun. Like Legos.
    I parked the Beetle in the lot of my office building and rubbed at my eyes. I didn’t want to kill anybody, but Parker and his gang might not give me any choice. I might have to do a lot of killing, if I was going to live.
    I tried not to think too much about what sort of person it might be who survived. I would burn that bridge when I came to it.
    I would go up to my office and hold business hours for the rest of the day. I would wait for Murphy to call me, and give her any aid that I could. I would keep my eyes and ears open in