Fire Work, A Building Faith Side Job
By Ellf
Chapter One

Disclaimer: Jim Butcher owns the Dresden Files, any other works of fiction mentioned are not owned by me.

Summers in Chicago meant a few things. School was out, the days were long, and the festivals were going strong. Last summer it would have meant plenty of time for hanging at the game shop, checking out new video games, going to the movies, going to the park with friends, enjoying a nice summer barbecue with everyone just before the lovely night of the Fourth of July celebration. Of course, for Glenn, Jason and Cecelia now, there'd be no trips to the park, no game shop fun, no summer barbecues. God, that made me so angry… So angry that I could… I just needed to…

"Infiernius!" I thrust my hand out, focusing my anger and my hate for what had happened to a point, and a small wisp of smoke came from my fingertips, with only the semblance of heat accompanying it. Sweat beaded on my brow as the smoke splattered against the edge of the circle I was in. That had been… God, that had been hard, and all I'd gotten was smoke? I'd done better with Harry's candle lighting spell, but that hadn't been meant for any sort of combat.

"Not bad, Grasshopper, for a first try." Harry swiveled his chair toward me. Even sitting down, he was stupidly tall. Today Harry wore a pair of blue jeans and a Star Wars tee. He'd taken Molly and I into his office with him so he could keep what he called "office hours" and let us practice in an environment he was able to keep under control. Sure, it probably would have been better if we were practicing in Harry's apartment, but the circles Molly and I were in would keep any energies from escaping in an untoward fashion.

Now Harry's office is in a building in midtown Chicago. The front door to it has a frosted glass window, on which the words "HARRY DRESDEN, WIZARD" are painted on. The inside is more or less what a typical PI's office would look like, except Harry has a selection of pamphlets with titles like "Real Witches Don't Float So Good," "Magic in the 21st Century," "Witches and You," "Want to Do Magic? Ask Me How!" and "Magic and You." Most of them were probably written by Harry himself, but I knew that one or two were penned by some of his friends. Harry also had his big desk along with the swivel chair he was currently sitting in.

Harry swiveled to face Molly. "Now you, my other Grasshopper. Give it a go. Just focus on the feeling, and ignite the spark."

I looked to my sister, who, like me, was sitting cross-legged in a circle. She'd cut her hair recently so that the two of us had the same length for our hair again, and today the two of us wore a pair of matching red and white summer dresses. Admittedly, we'd each worn them for different reasons. She wore hers because she wanted a certain man looking her way as he taught her, and I wore mine because of a certain girl who was planning on meeting up with me later. Hopefully both appreciated it.

I watched Molly close her eyes and start chanting under her breath. I couldn't quite feel what she was doing, given the two circle edges between us, but I could guess. Molly was probably doing what I did, calling up a memory and using the feelings it generated to focus her power. The issue was, while I wasn't that good at evocation…

"Infiernius!" Molly thrust her hand out and… nothing happened. No smoke no anything. I might not have been all that good with evocation, but Molly sucked at it. Of course, we'd only been learning magic for about five months at this point. It wasn't like we'd had a lot of time to get perfect at everything. Molly leaned forward in her circle, panting, and it was all I could do not to get up and head over to her just then.

"Okay," Harry said. "That wasn't bad. I wasn't really expecting either of you to completely get it the first try anyway."

I nodded, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Molly doing so as well. Sitting in this solo circle itched a bit. I wanted to be near my sister. "So, what did we do wrong?"

"Oh, there's probably any number of things you did wrong here, Faith, but ultimately you both committed one grave sin." Harry held up his left index finger. "Care to take a guess what that was?"

"We didn't focus enough," Molly said. "We were trying to push too much energy through too small a distance and we couldn't focus enough on it."

"Not quite," Harry said. "Faith?"

"We focused on the wrong thing. When we did the tracking spell, we were supposed to focus on the connection between the two items, but with this we were focusing on whatever we weren't supposed to be focusing on."

"Closer, but still wrong," Harry said. "What the two of you did wrong, and I made the same mistake once, was you didn't actually believe that you could do it. Magic comes down to belief most of the time. Believing that you can do it, believing you are right to do so. If you don't believe that you can do it, you're cutting yourself off at the knee from the beginning."

I glanced to my sister, and she locked gazes with me. Even with these circles in the way, I knew she knew what I knew. Lord, these circles were actually starting to hurt, but neither Molly nor I would give before Harry said we could. Harry wasn't wrong about the belief. Fire was hard to move, and creating fire from nothing took skill that I wasn't sure either of us would develop.

"Okay, say we do end up believing," I said. "How do we go about using that belief?"

"That… Well, that's something that I can't really show you in the office or the apartment." Harry looked at me, and I smiled.

"So, don't want to risk burning the place down, eh?" I asked. "Is that why you had us practicing here?"

"Well, I wanted to see the two of you practicing somewhere that wasn't my place," Harry said, glancing at the two of us. I could see Molly was having the same trouble I was; being cut off from her… it hurt. It was… off. We'd been in the circles for close to an hour by this point. "And I didn't think you'd be able to start anything capable of burning the place down here."

That was it. I kicked out sharply with my foot, breaking the circle as Molly did the same. Molly and I breathed simultaneous sighs of relief as we looked at Harry. "Well, we're done for now… at least with being in the circles."

"Too long?" Harry asked, and we nodded. Molly and I made our way to each other and I wrapped my arm around her back as she did the same with mine. "You lasted nearly an hour this time. I'd call that progress."

"We'd call it torture," we said, giving a half-glare at Harry. Sure, we knew that he was only trying to help, but being separate for too long hurt, and we didn't like that. "We wanted to get out of it sooner, but you had us focusing on the casting of the spell, and the best we could even come up with was a bit of smoke. Fire is hard, Harry."

"You mean the best Faith could come up with," Harry said.

"That's what we said, the best we could come up with." We paused. Well, that was separate. What if we were to do something together? It always seemed like it was easier to cast spells when we worked together, and we knew we were stronger as one. We looked to Harry. "We might be able to do better."

"I thought so," Harry smiled at us. "You two have a decent amount of power, and you seem to focus better when you're doing… whatever it is you're doing right now."

"So, why not have us do this from the beginning?" We cocked our heads slightly, lightly pressing together our hips. We weren't exactly trying to flirt with Harry, even if part of us desperately wanted to. Harry had a good thirteen years on us. While that wasn't exactly a long time for an adult, we hadn't quite turned fifteen yet, and we wouldn't until the end of the month.

"Because the two of you need to be able to perform magic separately, independent of each other." Harry gestured with a hand at one of us. "Each of you has different strengths, Grasshoppers. Faith, you seem to be good with your own perception, but Molly is good with dealing with other people's perceptions. You two can work hand-in-hand, but without working on what you're good at individually, you won't be able to bring your best when you work together."

"We guess that makes sense," we said, nodding and mulling over Harry's words. One thing occurred to us there though. "But if we're supposed to work on what we're good at, why have us doing fire evocations?"

"Fire's one of the best elements to use in magic," Harry said. "It purifies, it destroys, and it can eat through most hostile enchantments with ease. Besides, I'm not training the two of you to merely be focused practitioners. You're not going to be only good at one thing. I'm training the two of you to be wizards."

"Okay," we said, and we stood up to go get the chalk. "We're just about ready to try again, but this time we're going to try together."

"All right, Grasshoppers, just remember what I said. Focus on the feeling, shape your power, and ignite the spark you're using for the flame." Harry gestured to the candle on his desk. "Flickum bicus."

The candle ignited easily as magic leapt from his hand to its wick. We'd done something similar when… Cecelia… God. We hoped that her soul was at rest.

"You don't have us lighting a candle, Harry. You have us imitating your fire lance spell," we said as we started to draw a circle around us. Wait, there was something else we were supposed to tell Harry. We decided that we should probably do that before we forgot again. "Oh, Harry… Daddy did ask us to mention something to you about Monday."

"Oh?" Harry raised an eyebrow. "What's going on Monday?"

"Daddy's going to be—" We were cut off by a knock on the door of the office, and Harry gestured for us to stop as he stood up to answer. Tentatively, we felt out with our senses as Harry approached the door, dipping into his pocket as he pulled it open. We felt power, neatly hidden behind something, but it was clearly there. We weren't sure that Harry felt the same, but the person who was knocking clearly wasn't all they appeared to be.

Of course, given who was on the other side of the door, it was hard to imagine that they were what they appeared to be at all. The human-looking man on the other side of the door stood nearly as tall as Harry, coming only a few inches short of our mentor's height. He was a wizened man, maybe in his late fifties or early sixties. in a white collared shirt, wearing a blue overcoat and a red bowtie. He had a head of curly white hair that curled off in wisps from his head, and his dark eyes were framed by bushy white brows. He had a very distinctive nose overtop of a pair of masculine yet thick lips, and he had a shortly cut white beard that dipped a bit off his chin. Oh, and he was wearing red and white striped slacks.

"Can I uh, help you, sir?" Harry asked, looking the man over.

"Well that depends," said the man in an accent that reminded me of a fusion of someone from Brooklyn and someone from the South. "Are you the wizard?"

"Yes I am," Harry said with a grin. "And these are my apprentices, Faith and Molly. I'm Harry Dresden, how can I help you?"

The man stepped into the office at that. "Oh good. I was hoping It was you, Mister Dresden."

Harry stepped aside as the man did so and his… well, we could feel the power the man was concealing. We just couldn't figure out how we could tell Harry about it. Something wasn't right there, and given that the man was looking for Harry… It looked like Harry was going to be getting dragged into something again. We couldn't let him go it alone.

"So, who are you then?" we asked.

"Oh, excuse me. Where are my manners today?" The man reached up as if to remove something from his head, only his hand grasped nothing but air. He frowned and then placed his hand over his chest. "One of my names is Samuel. You can call me Uncle Sam."

"Uncle Sam, huh?" Harry said. "Guess it's that time of year. What can I do for you, Sam?"

We tensed ourselves as we watched the man. There was no way that Harry wasn't feeling this power. He had to.

"It is definitely that time of year, Mister Dresden," said "Uncle" Sam. "I am Uncle Sam, and I want you, Mister Dresden, to find my top hat. Before it's too late."

Wait. What?