Harry Magic - Part One
On the third of July, I spent most of the afternoon writing. I got out six good pages that I'm quite happy with. I think I finally got Harry Dresden's voice right. I plan to write during my lunch breaks this week and take at least one night for myself to write. So I plan to continue this.
Here's the first part, looked over by the Dr. kittycat22 , the other doctor in my life who can't write prescriptions. (Yet?)
Harry Magic
A Crossover of The Dresden Files and Harry Potter
Rating: 17+
Spoilers: Through White Knight for The Dresden Files fandom and through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for Harry Potter fandom.
Author's Note: Please be aware this is more Dresden Files-oriented than it is oriented toward Harry Potter. If you haven't read up to Proven Guilty, you'll likely be spoiled pretty big by this story.
Chapter One
The kid just fell out of the sky.
Literally.
There wasn't anything special about the sky that day. It was a lazy May afternoon, a breezy mid-spring day where it was cool in the shade and warm in the sunshine. Molly, my apprentice, was with her family on some sort of trip. Thomas, my half-brother, was working at his salon. Murphy had work, too. And nothing had tried to kill me for nearly a week. Since I didn't want to be cooped up inside with only Bob for company, I figured it was as good a day as any to go to the lake.
So I grabbed some towels, piled my dog, Mouse, into the back seat, and set out for the lake.
Mouse is an absolute must-have when I go to the lake during warm weather. I'm not much to look at -- I'm really tall and skinny, all angles and awkward lines -- so I really stick out among all the college students and other young people there. Mouse soothes all that, though. He's enormous, probably cross-bred with a grizzly bear, all shaggy fur and monster paws, but he's a natural with the ladies. I tried to run along the shore, but we had to stop every couple hundred yards for him to flirt while college girls cooed over him.
Not that I have too many complaints.
It was late afternoon when we got back to my apartment, not long before dinner time. I pulled into a parking spot and, right after I shut the car off, I felt a surge of magic in front of me. I looked out and the shimmering light of a gateway formed about five feet above my car. A kid fell out of the gateway and landed right on my hood. The gateway immediately closed behind him.
The kid was skinny, dressed in really baggy clothes that were older and worn. He had really messy black hair and a pair of beat-up glasses sat cock-eyed on his face, barely hanging on by only one ear piece. He lay there still for a moment before he groaned and started to slowly move.
I turned to look at Mouse. "Damn, somebody threw away a perfectly good white boy." Mouse just huffed at me. Guess he's not a Cusack fan.
I opened the car door and got out, and Mouse followed me. I stayed a few feet back from the kid and kept my senses open for magic -- or anything else -- in the area. The kid looked harmless, and he might well be, but I'd had too many improbable attempts on my life over the past few years to not be a little paranoid. Dropping a kid on my car might be an unusual distraction, but I wasn't about to let it be a successful one.
Mouse loped over to the kid and pushed at the kid's arm with his nose. The kid scratched behind Mouse's ear for a moment, then slid himself around on the car's hood and wrapped both arms around Mouse's neck and hugged him tightly. The kid mumbled something incoherent over and over; all I got out of it was the word "serious."
Mouse looked over at me with a bewildered, helpless look. "Now what do I do with this lunatic?" he seemed to ask.
I grinned and said, "Kid, you could at least buy him dinner before you put the moves on my dog."
The kid jerked his eyes up to me, startled, then scrambled back away from Mouse and fixed his glasses onto his face properly. The kid had the purest green eyes I'd ever seen before. "Oh, erm-- I, uh--" he stammered for a moment, before he finally got out, "Hi."
"Hello," I responded. "Why are you on my car, molesting my dog?"
"I'm not molesting your dog," the kid said. He had a generic British accent, nothing obvious enough that I could pinpoint anything beyond that. "Thought he was someone else."
His eyes darted around, trying to get his bearings. He wobbled a bit as he turned, obviously still woozy from his fall and whatever magic brought him here. "Okay. Sure. But why are you here?"
The kid shook his head quickly, as if to try to clear it, and he blinked rapidly. "Looking for my godfather," he said. His words were already slightly more slurred. "Sirius."
"Sirius?"
"Sirius--" The kid hesitated, pursed his lips as he looked at me. "Sirius Black," he said. He kept his eyes on me and looked for a reaction. I didn't recognize the name at all, though.
"Hangs out with Joking Orange?"
The kid blinked rapidly again, then squinted at me. "What?"
"Sirius Black? Joking Orange?" I repeated. The kid's mouth opened in a look of faint disgust. I shook my head. "Geez. Tough crowd."
"Sirius, like the star, the dog star," the kid explained.
Which I already knew. Really, I did. I nodded. "Sure. Still don't know him."
The kid looked down and nodded. "Right, of course, Yank Muggles," he said, which made no sense at all.
He started to climb off the car, but caught a foot on the quarter panel and pitched forward toward me. I stepped forward to catch him and he toppled into me. He reached up and grabbed my shoulder with his hand, and the end of his thumb came into contact with my neck. The skin-to-skin contact created a shock which caused both of us to jerk back in surprise.
It's a reaction that happens whenever two magic-users touch. The magic in each recognizes the other and creates a shock. The size of the shock is dependent upon the strength of the magic-user. A full-fledged wizard, like me, can create a pretty strong shock, while someone with minimal talent who only tinkers with the Art would barely be felt. The kid was wizard-level strength, not as strong as I am but pretty close to Molly's level. I was impressed.
The kid didn't react well to the shock, though. His right hand darted down and came back up with a wand, and let me tell you -- the kid was fast. Ever since the war with the Vampire Courts began, I was used to going up against supernaturally-powered badguys who were faster than any mortal, and my reflexes had developed enough to keep me alive, but the kid still almost got the draw on me.
I caught his wrist just before the wand came in line with my face and held it off to the side. It was pretty easy -- he might be fast, but he was still a kid over a foot shorter than me and exhausted to boot. He glared up at me angrily and snarled, "What the hell was that?"
I blinked. The kid knew enough to carry a magical focus used for combat, but didn't know what happened when two wizards touched? Was he bluffing or was he honestly ignorant?
"Magic, kid," I said. I watched him close for his reaction. "I'm a wizard of the White Council. Harry Dresden."
The kid kept his eyes focused on me, but his head and body started to weave slightly as his balance went. "I don't know what you're talking about," he growled. He blinked rapidly and shook his head. I could feel his arm tense as he tried to use that to steady himself. "Who are you? Where am I?"
The kid was scared and weak, but he hid it well. I was impressed, and pretty sure he wasn't bluffing. "I just told you, kid. I'm Harry Dresden. I'm with the White Council. I can help you."
"I'm fine," the kid snapped. He was stubborn, tough, and rude; I kind of liked him. "Where am I?"
"You're--" I said, but he cut me off. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and he collapsed. I had to drop to my knees to catch him before he hit the ground. He was easy to hold up, he barely weighed anything.
I looked over at Mouse, who sat unconcernedly over behind the kid. His tongue lolled out of his mouth as he grinned a big doggy grin at me.
"Yeah," I said, "laugh it up, fuzz ball."
:#:
It took a while, but I muscled the kid into my apartment and onto the couch. A few years ago, after a bunch of zombies controlled by an insane megalomaniac smashed in the original, I installed a massive steel-reinforced door which weighed a ton. Unfortunately, the hinges weren't done properly, so the door sticks and doesn't swing well. Opening or closing it is a lesson in humility the best of circumstances. Trying to handle a passed-out British teenager adds a degree of difficulty that wasn't really needed.
I got the kid situated on the couch and Mouse flopped down on the floor right in front of him. I sat in a chair across from the kid and indulged in a luxury I don't often get:
I thought about the situation and what I should do next.
My first instinct was to get someone else involved, pass the kid off, make it their problem. I'm not known for my people skills. I'm good at detective work, locating objects, blowing things up, and pissing people off. I wasn't the person who should handle a prickly teenager.
Except, maybe in this case, I was.
Too many things about the kid seemed familiar to me. He wasn't looking for his parents, but rather his Godfather. He obviously knew about magic, but he didn't know any of the basics, such as the White Council or the touch of another magic-user. What he did know was specific: he had a combat focus he was familiar enough with to do a perfect draw in extremely uncomfortable circumstances, no mean feat for a kid as young as he appeared. I knew it was no mean feat because I knew the practice necessary to achieve that kind of skill at that age.
When I was about this kid's age, I was adopted by a man named Justin Du Morne. Justin was a warlock, a wizard who practiced dark magics, but at the time I didn't know that. All I knew was that he took me in and gave me the first home I'd known since my father died years before. He taught me magic and trained me to become his personal enforcer, loyal to only him. He tried to bind me to his will. We fought.
I only learned of the White Council and the rest of the outside world when they came to arrest me after I killed Justin.
This kid's situation might not be the same, but signs were definitely there. It was enough that I knew I needed to tread lightly.
I needed someone else there, though, at least as backup. Someone from the Council would be tricky, especially if the kid was trained by a warlock, but there were two people I felt I could trust in that situation. Ebenezer McCoy was my old mentor and a member of the Senior Council, and I knew he would back me up and help the kid. But Ebenezer was the Blackstaff and the Council was at war, so it would need to be something major before I would feel comfortable calling him in. Carlos Ramirez was a fellow Warden, the Regional Commander of the west coast, and a friend. We'd recently gone to war together against the White Court of vampires, and he was one of the few wizards I fully trusted. But Carlos had just recovered from serious injuries and was fighting through a major backlog of work in Los Angeles, and -- like Ebenezer -- I didn't want to pull him away unless the situation was dire. So the Council was out for now.
Sgt. Karrin Murphy was a Chicago cop and one of my best friends. We'd gone to battle together many times, and I'd long since lost track of the number of times she saved my ass. Still, she was a firm believer in the law, and she hated it when I tried to keep the human authorities out of a situation. She would want to put the kid into the system, and I thought that was a huge mistake. I definitely wanted to bring her in, but I wanted to get a firmer grasp on the kid first.
Molly, my apprentice, was definitely out. She was learning, but she was still a former warlock herself and very impressionable. I wasn't about to let her near the kid until I got a handle on him.
Michael, a Knight of the Cross and another of my best friends, was Molly's father. It would be too difficult to bring Michael in and keep Molly out.
I needed someone reliable, completely trustworthy, and capable of handling himself if the kid turned out nasty. Really, there was only one choice.
Quietly, I picked up the phone and called my brother, Thomas.
-:-
Here's the first part, looked over by the Dr. kittycat22 , the other doctor in my life who can't write prescriptions. (Yet?)
Harry Magic
A Crossover of The Dresden Files and Harry Potter
Rating: 17+
Spoilers: Through White Knight for The Dresden Files fandom and through Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for Harry Potter fandom.
Author's Note: Please be aware this is more Dresden Files-oriented than it is oriented toward Harry Potter. If you haven't read up to Proven Guilty, you'll likely be spoiled pretty big by this story.
Chapter One
The kid just fell out of the sky.
Literally.
There wasn't anything special about the sky that day. It was a lazy May afternoon, a breezy mid-spring day where it was cool in the shade and warm in the sunshine. Molly, my apprentice, was with her family on some sort of trip. Thomas, my half-brother, was working at his salon. Murphy had work, too. And nothing had tried to kill me for nearly a week. Since I didn't want to be cooped up inside with only Bob for company, I figured it was as good a day as any to go to the lake.
So I grabbed some towels, piled my dog, Mouse, into the back seat, and set out for the lake.
Mouse is an absolute must-have when I go to the lake during warm weather. I'm not much to look at -- I'm really tall and skinny, all angles and awkward lines -- so I really stick out among all the college students and other young people there. Mouse soothes all that, though. He's enormous, probably cross-bred with a grizzly bear, all shaggy fur and monster paws, but he's a natural with the ladies. I tried to run along the shore, but we had to stop every couple hundred yards for him to flirt while college girls cooed over him.
Not that I have too many complaints.
It was late afternoon when we got back to my apartment, not long before dinner time. I pulled into a parking spot and, right after I shut the car off, I felt a surge of magic in front of me. I looked out and the shimmering light of a gateway formed about five feet above my car. A kid fell out of the gateway and landed right on my hood. The gateway immediately closed behind him.
The kid was skinny, dressed in really baggy clothes that were older and worn. He had really messy black hair and a pair of beat-up glasses sat cock-eyed on his face, barely hanging on by only one ear piece. He lay there still for a moment before he groaned and started to slowly move.
I turned to look at Mouse. "Damn, somebody threw away a perfectly good white boy." Mouse just huffed at me. Guess he's not a Cusack fan.
I opened the car door and got out, and Mouse followed me. I stayed a few feet back from the kid and kept my senses open for magic -- or anything else -- in the area. The kid looked harmless, and he might well be, but I'd had too many improbable attempts on my life over the past few years to not be a little paranoid. Dropping a kid on my car might be an unusual distraction, but I wasn't about to let it be a successful one.
Mouse loped over to the kid and pushed at the kid's arm with his nose. The kid scratched behind Mouse's ear for a moment, then slid himself around on the car's hood and wrapped both arms around Mouse's neck and hugged him tightly. The kid mumbled something incoherent over and over; all I got out of it was the word "serious."
Mouse looked over at me with a bewildered, helpless look. "Now what do I do with this lunatic?" he seemed to ask.
I grinned and said, "Kid, you could at least buy him dinner before you put the moves on my dog."
The kid jerked his eyes up to me, startled, then scrambled back away from Mouse and fixed his glasses onto his face properly. The kid had the purest green eyes I'd ever seen before. "Oh, erm-- I, uh--" he stammered for a moment, before he finally got out, "Hi."
"Hello," I responded. "Why are you on my car, molesting my dog?"
"I'm not molesting your dog," the kid said. He had a generic British accent, nothing obvious enough that I could pinpoint anything beyond that. "Thought he was someone else."
His eyes darted around, trying to get his bearings. He wobbled a bit as he turned, obviously still woozy from his fall and whatever magic brought him here. "Okay. Sure. But why are you here?"
The kid shook his head quickly, as if to try to clear it, and he blinked rapidly. "Looking for my godfather," he said. His words were already slightly more slurred. "Sirius."
"Sirius?"
"Sirius--" The kid hesitated, pursed his lips as he looked at me. "Sirius Black," he said. He kept his eyes on me and looked for a reaction. I didn't recognize the name at all, though.
"Hangs out with Joking Orange?"
The kid blinked rapidly again, then squinted at me. "What?"
"Sirius Black? Joking Orange?" I repeated. The kid's mouth opened in a look of faint disgust. I shook my head. "Geez. Tough crowd."
"Sirius, like the star, the dog star," the kid explained.
Which I already knew. Really, I did. I nodded. "Sure. Still don't know him."
The kid looked down and nodded. "Right, of course, Yank Muggles," he said, which made no sense at all.
He started to climb off the car, but caught a foot on the quarter panel and pitched forward toward me. I stepped forward to catch him and he toppled into me. He reached up and grabbed my shoulder with his hand, and the end of his thumb came into contact with my neck. The skin-to-skin contact created a shock which caused both of us to jerk back in surprise.
It's a reaction that happens whenever two magic-users touch. The magic in each recognizes the other and creates a shock. The size of the shock is dependent upon the strength of the magic-user. A full-fledged wizard, like me, can create a pretty strong shock, while someone with minimal talent who only tinkers with the Art would barely be felt. The kid was wizard-level strength, not as strong as I am but pretty close to Molly's level. I was impressed.
The kid didn't react well to the shock, though. His right hand darted down and came back up with a wand, and let me tell you -- the kid was fast. Ever since the war with the Vampire Courts began, I was used to going up against supernaturally-powered badguys who were faster than any mortal, and my reflexes had developed enough to keep me alive, but the kid still almost got the draw on me.
I caught his wrist just before the wand came in line with my face and held it off to the side. It was pretty easy -- he might be fast, but he was still a kid over a foot shorter than me and exhausted to boot. He glared up at me angrily and snarled, "What the hell was that?"
I blinked. The kid knew enough to carry a magical focus used for combat, but didn't know what happened when two wizards touched? Was he bluffing or was he honestly ignorant?
"Magic, kid," I said. I watched him close for his reaction. "I'm a wizard of the White Council. Harry Dresden."
The kid kept his eyes focused on me, but his head and body started to weave slightly as his balance went. "I don't know what you're talking about," he growled. He blinked rapidly and shook his head. I could feel his arm tense as he tried to use that to steady himself. "Who are you? Where am I?"
The kid was scared and weak, but he hid it well. I was impressed, and pretty sure he wasn't bluffing. "I just told you, kid. I'm Harry Dresden. I'm with the White Council. I can help you."
"I'm fine," the kid snapped. He was stubborn, tough, and rude; I kind of liked him. "Where am I?"
"You're--" I said, but he cut me off. His eyes rolled into the back of his head and he collapsed. I had to drop to my knees to catch him before he hit the ground. He was easy to hold up, he barely weighed anything.
I looked over at Mouse, who sat unconcernedly over behind the kid. His tongue lolled out of his mouth as he grinned a big doggy grin at me.
"Yeah," I said, "laugh it up, fuzz ball."
:#:
It took a while, but I muscled the kid into my apartment and onto the couch. A few years ago, after a bunch of zombies controlled by an insane megalomaniac smashed in the original, I installed a massive steel-reinforced door which weighed a ton. Unfortunately, the hinges weren't done properly, so the door sticks and doesn't swing well. Opening or closing it is a lesson in humility the best of circumstances. Trying to handle a passed-out British teenager adds a degree of difficulty that wasn't really needed.
I got the kid situated on the couch and Mouse flopped down on the floor right in front of him. I sat in a chair across from the kid and indulged in a luxury I don't often get:
I thought about the situation and what I should do next.
My first instinct was to get someone else involved, pass the kid off, make it their problem. I'm not known for my people skills. I'm good at detective work, locating objects, blowing things up, and pissing people off. I wasn't the person who should handle a prickly teenager.
Except, maybe in this case, I was.
Too many things about the kid seemed familiar to me. He wasn't looking for his parents, but rather his Godfather. He obviously knew about magic, but he didn't know any of the basics, such as the White Council or the touch of another magic-user. What he did know was specific: he had a combat focus he was familiar enough with to do a perfect draw in extremely uncomfortable circumstances, no mean feat for a kid as young as he appeared. I knew it was no mean feat because I knew the practice necessary to achieve that kind of skill at that age.
When I was about this kid's age, I was adopted by a man named Justin Du Morne. Justin was a warlock, a wizard who practiced dark magics, but at the time I didn't know that. All I knew was that he took me in and gave me the first home I'd known since my father died years before. He taught me magic and trained me to become his personal enforcer, loyal to only him. He tried to bind me to his will. We fought.
I only learned of the White Council and the rest of the outside world when they came to arrest me after I killed Justin.
This kid's situation might not be the same, but signs were definitely there. It was enough that I knew I needed to tread lightly.
I needed someone else there, though, at least as backup. Someone from the Council would be tricky, especially if the kid was trained by a warlock, but there were two people I felt I could trust in that situation. Ebenezer McCoy was my old mentor and a member of the Senior Council, and I knew he would back me up and help the kid. But Ebenezer was the Blackstaff and the Council was at war, so it would need to be something major before I would feel comfortable calling him in. Carlos Ramirez was a fellow Warden, the Regional Commander of the west coast, and a friend. We'd recently gone to war together against the White Court of vampires, and he was one of the few wizards I fully trusted. But Carlos had just recovered from serious injuries and was fighting through a major backlog of work in Los Angeles, and -- like Ebenezer -- I didn't want to pull him away unless the situation was dire. So the Council was out for now.
Sgt. Karrin Murphy was a Chicago cop and one of my best friends. We'd gone to battle together many times, and I'd long since lost track of the number of times she saved my ass. Still, she was a firm believer in the law, and she hated it when I tried to keep the human authorities out of a situation. She would want to put the kid into the system, and I thought that was a huge mistake. I definitely wanted to bring her in, but I wanted to get a firmer grasp on the kid first.
Molly, my apprentice, was definitely out. She was learning, but she was still a former warlock herself and very impressionable. I wasn't about to let her near the kid until I got a handle on him.
Michael, a Knight of the Cross and another of my best friends, was Molly's father. It would be too difficult to bring Michael in and keep Molly out.
I needed someone reliable, completely trustworthy, and capable of handling himself if the kid turned out nasty. Really, there was only one choice.
Quietly, I picked up the phone and called my brother, Thomas.
-:-