Free Dead Beat by Jim Butcher

wasn't his father or his guardian angel or his sovereign king. I wasn't blessed with the wisdom of Solomon, or with the foresight of a prophet. If I chose Butters's path for him, in some ways it would make me no different from Grevane, or any number of other beings, human and nonhuman alike, who sought to control others.
    "If I tell you this," I said quietly, "it could be bad for you."
    "Bad how?"
    "It could force you to keep secrets that people would kill you for knowing. It could change the way you think and feel. It could really screw up your life."
    "Screw up my life?" He stared a me for a second and then said, deadpan, "I'm a five-foot-three, thirty-seven-year-old, single, Jewish medical examiner who needs to pick up his lederhosen from the dry cleaners so that he can play in a one-man polka band at Oktoberfest tomorrow." He pushed up his glasses with his forefinger, folded his arms, and said, "Do your worst."
    The words were light, but there was both fear and resolve just under the surface of them. Butters was smart enough to be scared. But he was also a fighter. I could respect him for both.
    "Okay," I said. "Let's talk."

Chapter Six
    Butters hadn't taken time to collect his coat when he left, and the last time the Beetle's heater had worked was before the demolition of the Berlin Wall. I ducked into the store, got us each a cup of coffee, then untwisted the wire that holds down the lid of the storage trunk. I dug out a worn but mostly clean blanket that I kept in the trunk to cover the short-barreled shotgun I stored in the event that I would ever need to give Napoleon's charging hordes a taste of the grape. Given the way the night was going, I got the shotgun, too, and slipped it into the backseat.
    Butters accepted the blanket and the coffee gratefully, though he shivered hard enough to slop a little of the drink over the side of the cup. I sipped a little coffee, slipped the cup into the holder I'd rigged on the car's dashboard, and got moving again. I didn't want to wait around in the same place for too long.
    "All right," I told Butters. "There are two things you have to accept if you want to understand what's going on."
    "Hit me."
    "First the tough one. Magic is real."
    I could feel him looking at me for a moment. "What do you mean by that?"
    "There's an entire world that exists alongside the everyday life of mankind. There are powers, nations, monsters, wars, feuds, alliances— everything. Wizards are a part of it. So are a lot of other things you've heard about in stories, and even more you've never heard of."
    "What kind of things?"
    "Vampires. Werewolves. Faeries. Demons. Monsters. It's all real."
    "Heh," Butters said. "Heh, heh. You're joking. Right?"
    "No joke. Come on, Butters. You know that there are weird things out there. You've seen the evidence of them."
    He pushed a shaking hand through his hair. "Well, yes. Some. But, Harry, you're talking about something else entirely here. I mean, if you want to tell me that people have the ability to sense and affect their environment in ways we don't really understand yet, I can accept that. Maybe you call it magic, and someone else calls it ESP, and someone else calls it the Force, but it's not a new idea. Maybe there are people whose genetic makeup makes them better able to employ these abilities. Maybe it even does things like make them reproduce their DNA more clearly than other people so that they can live for a very long time. But that is not the same thing as saying that there's an army of weird monsters living right under our noses and we don't even notice them."
    "What about those corpses you analyzed?" I said. "Humanoid but definitely not human."
    "Well," Butters said defensively, "it's a big universe. I think it's sort of arrogant to assume that we're the only thinking beings in it."
    "Those corpses were the bodies of vampires of the Red Court, and you don't want to meet a living one. There were a lot of them in town at one point. There aren't so