White Night by Jim Butcher

it. "And you'll scare them if you just walk through it like it wasn't there."
    "Yeah," I said quietly. "They're frightened, Murph. I've got to be gentle, or they won't give me anything that can help them."
    Murphy nodded and knocked on the door.
    She rapped three times, and the doorknob was already turning on the third rap.
    A small, prettily plump woman opened the door. She was even shorter than Murphy, mid-forties maybe, with blond hair and rosy, cherubic cheeks that looked used to smiling. She wore a lavender dress and carried a small dog, maybe a Yorkshire terrier, in her arms. She smiled at Murphy and said, "Of course, Sergeant Murphy, I know who you are."
    Maybe half a second after the woman started speaking, Murphy said, "Hello, my name is Sergeant Murphy, and I'm a detective with the CPD."
    Murphy blinked for a second and fell silent.
    "Oh," the woman said. "I'm sorry; I forget sometimes." She made an airy little gesture with one hand. "Such a scatterbrain."
    I started to introduce myself, but before I got my mouth open, the little woman said, "Of course, we all know who you are, Mister Dresden." She put her fingers to her mouth. They were shaking a little. "Oh. I forgot again. Excuse me. I'm Abby."
    "Pleased to meet you, Abby," I said quietly, and extended my hand, relaxed, palm down, to the little Yorkie. The dog sniffed at my hand, quivering with eagerness as he did, and his tail started wagging. "Heya, little dog."
    "Toto," Abby said, and before I could respond said, "Exactly, a classic. If it isn't broken, why fix it?" She nodded to me and said, "Excuse me; I'll let our host speak to you. I was just closest to the door." She shut the door on us.
    "Certainly," I said to the door.
    Murphy turned to me. "Weird."
    I shrugged. "At least the dog liked me."
    "She knew what we were going to say before we said it, Harry."
    "I noticed that."
    "Is she telepathic or something?"
    I shook my head. "Not in the way you're thinking. She doesn't exactly hide what she's doing, and if she was poking around in people's heads, the Council would have done something a long time ago.
    "Then how did she know what we were about to say?"
    "My guess is that she's prescient," I said. "She can see the future. Probably only a second or two, and she probably doesn't have a lot of voluntary control over it."
    Murphy made a thoughtful noise. "Could be handy."
    "In some ways," I said. "But the future isn't written in stone."
    Murphy frowned. "Like, what if I'd decided to tell her my name was Karrin Murphy instead of Sergeant, at the last second?"
    "Yeah. She'd have been wrong. People like her can sense a… sort of a cloud of possible futures. We were in a fairly predictable situation here even without bringing any magical talents into it, basic social interaction, so it looked like she saw exactly what was coming. But she didn't. She got to judge what was most probable, and it wasn't hard to guess correctly in this particular instance."
    "That's why she seemed so distracted," Murphy said thought fully.
    "Yeah. She was keeping track of what was happening, what was likely to happen, deciding what wasn't likely to happen, all in a window of a few seconds." I shook my head. "It's a lot worse if they can see any farther than a second or two."
    Murphy frowned. "Why?"
    "Because the farther you can see, the more possibilities exist," I said. "Think of a chess game. A beginning player is doing well if he can see four or five moves into the game. Ten moves in holds an exponentially greater number of possible configurations the board could assume. Master players can sometimes see even further than that—and when you start dealing with computers, the numbers are even bigger. It's difficult to even imagine the scope of it."
    "And that's in a closed, simple environment," Murphy said, nodding. "The chess game. There are far more possibilities in the real world."
    "The biggest game." I shook my head. "It's a dangerous talent to have. It can leave you subject to