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believe that monsters and fiends and whatnot even exist.”
    “Most people don’t believe in love potions, either, but you’ve got that in there.”
    I held on to a flash of bad temper. “The point,” I told Bob, “is to have an advertisement that looks solid, professional, and reliable.”
    “Yeah. Advertising is all about lying,” Bob said.
    “Hey!”
    “You suck at lying, Harry. You really do. You should trust me on this one.”
    “No monsters,” I insisted.
    “Fine, fine,” Bob said. “How about we do a positive-side spin, then? Something like, ‘Maidens rescued, enchantments broken, villains unmasked, unicorns protected.’”
    “Unicorns?”
    “Chicks are into unicorns.”
    I rolled my eyes. “It’s an ad for my investigative business, not a dating service. Besides, the only unicorn I ever saw tried to skewer me.”
    “You’re sort of missing the entire ‘Advertising is lying’ concept, Harry.”
    “No unicorns,” I said firmly. “It’s fine the way it is.”
    “No style at all,” Bob complained.
    I put on a mentally challenged accent. “Style is as style does.”
    “Okay, fine. Suppose we throw intelligence to the winds and print only the truth. ‘Vampire slayer, ghost remover, faerie fighter, werewolf exterminator, police consultant, foe of the foot soldiers of Hell.’”
    I thought about it for a minute, then got a fresh piece of paper and wrote it down. I stared at the words.
    “See?” Bob said. “That would look really hot, attract notice, and it would be the truth. What have you got to lose?”
    “This week’s gas money,” I said, finally. “Too many letters. Besides, Lieutenant Murphy would kill me if I went around blowing trumpets about how I help the cops.”
    “You’re hopeless,” Bob said.
    I shook my head. “No. I’m not in this for the money.”
    “Then what are you in it for, Harry? Hell, in the past few years you’ve been all but killed about a million times. Why do you do it?”
    I squinted up at the skull. “Because someone has to.”
    “Hopeless,” Bob repeated.
    I smiled, picked up a fresh pencil, and went back to my formulas—formulae. “Pretty much.”
    Bob sighed and fell quiet. My pencil scratched over clean white paper while the candles burned warm and steady.

SOMETHING BORROWED
    —from My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding , edited by P. N. Elrod
     
Takes place between Dead Beat and Proven Guilty
     
     
    I wrote this for the very first anthology in which I’d ever been invited to participate. I’d met Pat Elrod at a convention and thought she was quite a cool person, and when she asked me to take part in her anthology, I was more than happy to do so.
    When I wrote this story, I was thinking that the Alphas hadn’t gotten nearly enough stage time in the series thus far, and it seemed like a good opportunity to give them some more attention, while at the same time showing the progression of their lives since their college days, which I felt was best demonstrated by Billy and Georgia’s wedding.
    Inane trivia: While I was in school writing the first three books of the Dresden Files, my wife, Shannon, watched Ally McBeal in the evenings, often while I was plunking away at a keyboard. I didn’t pay too much attention to the show, and it took me years to realize I had unconsciously named Billy and Georgia after those characters in Ally McBeal .
    Who knew? TV really does rot your brain!
    S teel pierced my leg and my body went rigid with pain, but I could not allow myself to move. “Billy,” I growled through my teeth, “kill him.”
    Billy the Werewolf squinted up at me from his seat and said, “That might be a little extreme.”
    “This is torture,” I said.
    “Oh, for crying out loud, Dresden,” Billy said, his tone amused. “He’s just fitting the tux.”
    Yanof the tailor, a squat, sturdy little guy who had recently immigrated to Chicago from Outer Sloboviakastan or somewhere, glared up at me, with another dozen pins clutched between