He smiled at me, or at least he tried to. "Harry," he said. "I'm sorry."

"For what?"

"I…" He shook his head. "I was useless back there. Worse than useless. You could have been hurt."

Thomas appeared in the doorway to the kitchen, pale and silent. He arched his brow, somehow managing to say, "I told you so," without actually opening his mouth.

I glared back at him, in an effort to convey several uncharitable things. He smiled a little and faded back into the kitchen. Butters missed the whole thing.

"Don't worry about it," I said. "You ever had anything like this happen before?"

"Like zombies and ghosts and necromancers?" Butters asked.

"Like life-threatening and dangerous," I said.

"Oh." He was quiet for a minute. "No. I tried to go into the army, but I couldn't make it through boot. Wound up in the hospital. Same thing when I tried to be a policeman. The spirit was willing, but Butters was weak."

"Some people just aren't cut out for that kind of thing," I told him. "That's nothing to be ashamed of."

"Sure, it isn't," he said, but he wasn't agreeing with me.

"You can do a lot that I can't," I told him. I nodded at my leg.

"But this stuff is… hell, it's simple" Butters said. "I mean, the words get a little bit long. But all in all, it isn't that complicated."

"Listen to yourself, Butters," I told him. "You're sitting there with a straight face saying that medicine and medical forensics is simple, except for the long words. Do you have any clue what it's like to not be as intelligent as you?"

He shook his head impatiently. "I'm not some kind of genius." He frowned. "Okay, well, technically I have a genius IQ, but that isn't the point. A lot of people do. The point is that I've spent most of my adult life doing this. That's why I can do it well."

"And the point is," I told him, "that I've spent most of my adult life doing zombies and ghosts and other things trying to kill me. That's why I can do it well. We've got different specialties. That's all. So don't beat yourself up for not being better at my job than I am."

He started cleaning up the medical detritus, throwing things away and stripping out of the gloves. "Thanks, Harry. But it's more than that. I just… I couldn't think. When those things grabbed me. When he was hitting me. I knew I should have been doing something, planning something, but my brain wouldn't work." He slammed something down into the trash can with more force than necessary. "I was too afraid."

I was too tired to move, and for the first time I started to notice how cold it was without my coat. I folded my arms and tried not to shiver. I watched Butters quietly for a moment and said, "It gets easier."

"What does?"