by Butcher, Jim
“Not so,” Bob beamed. “Your spirit’s demesne, remember? Even if only a temporary one. Means you have the home field advantage. It didn’t help, since it got the drop on you, but you had it.”
“Oh.”
“Do you remember anything in particular, any figure or character in the dream that wouldn’t have been acting the way you thought it should have?”
“Yeah,” I said. My shaking hands went to my belly, feeling for tooth marks. “Hell’s bells, yeah. I was dreaming of that bust a couple of months back. When we nailed Kravos.”
“That sorcerer,” Bob mused. “Okay. This could be important. What happened?”
I swallowed, trying not to throw up. “Um. Everything went wrong. That demon he’d called. It was stronger than it had been in life.”
“The demon was?”
I blinked. “Bob. Is it possible for something like a demon to leave a ghost?”
“Oh, uh,” Bob said, “I don’t think so—unless it had actually died there. Eternally perished, I mean, not just had its vessel dispersed.”
“Michael killed it with Amoracchius,” I said.
Bob’s skull shuddered. “Ow,” he said. “Amoracchius. I’m not sure, then. I don’t know. That sword might be able to kill a demon, even through a physical shell. That whole faith-magic thing is awfully strong.”
“Okay, so. We could be dealing with the ghost of a demon, here,” I said. “A demon that died while it was all fired up for a fight. Maybe that’s what makes it so . . . so vicious.”
“Could be,” Bob agreed, cheerily.
I shook my head. “But that doesn’t explain the barbed-wire spells we’ve been finding on those ghosts and people.” I grabbed onto the problem, the tangled facts, with a silent kind of desperation, like a man about to drown who has no breath to waste on screaming. It helped to keep me moving.
“Maybe the spells are someone else’s work,” Bob offered.
“Bianca,” I said, suddenly. “She and her lackeys are all messed up in this somehow—remember that they put the snatch on Lydia? And they were waiting for me, that first night, when I came back from being arrested.”
“I didn’t think she was that big time a practitioner,” Bob said.
I shrugged. “She’s not, horribly. But she just got promoted, too. Maybe she’s been studying up. She’s always had a little more than her share of freaky vampire tricks—and if she was over in the Nevernever when she did it, it would have made her stronger.”
Bob whistled through his teeth. “Yeah, that could work. Bianca stirs things up by torturing a bunch of spirits, gets all the turbulence going so that she can prod this Nightmare toward you. Then she lets it loose, sits back, and enjoys the fun. She got a motive?”
“Regret,” I said, remembering a note I’d read more than a year ago. “She blames me for the death of one of her people. Rachel. She wants to make me regret it.”
“Neat,” Bob said. “And she could have been everywhere in question?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, she could have been.”
“Means, opportunity, motive.”
“Damn shaky logic, though. Nothing I could justify to the Council in order to get their backup, either. I don’t have any proof.”
“So?” Bob said. “Hat up, go kill her. Problem solved.”
“Bob,” I said. “You can’t just go around killing people.”
“I know. That’s why you should do it.”
“No, no. I can’t go around killing people, either.”
“Why not? You’ve done it before. And you’ve got a new gun and everything.”
“I can’t arbitrarily end someone’s life because of something they may have done.”
“Bianca’s a vampire,” Bob pointed out cheerfully. “She’s not alive in the classic sense. I’ll get Mister and go fetch the bullets and you—”
I sighed. “No, Bob. She’s got lots of people around her, too. I’d probably have to kill some of them to get to her.”
“Oh. Damn. This is one of those right and wrong issues again, isn’t it.”
“Yeah, one of those.”
“I’m still confused about this whole morality thing, Harry.”
“Join the club,” I muttered. I took a shaking breath and leaned forward to put my hand over the circle, and will it broken. I almost cringed when its protective field faded from around me, but forced myself not to. I was as recovered as I was going to get. I needed to focus on work.
I stood up and walked to my worktable, my eyes by now adjusted to the dimness. I reached for the nearest candle, but there weren’t any matches handy. So, I pointed my finger at it, frowned, and muttered the words, “Flickum bicus.”
Chapter Nineteen
There’s a kind of mathematics that goes along with saving people’s lives. You find yourself running the figures without even realizing it, like a medic on a battlefield. This patient has no chance of surviving. That one does, but only if you let a third die.
For me, the equation broke down into fairly simple elements. The demon, hungry for its revenge, would come after those who had struck it down. The ghost would only remember those who had been there, whom it had focused on in those last moments. That meant that Murphy and Michael would be its remaining targets. Michael had a chance of protecting himself against the thing—hell, maybe a better chance than me. Murphy didn’t.
I got on the phone to Murphy’s place. No answer. I called the office, and she answered with a fatigue-blurred, “Murphy.”
“Murph,” I said. “Look, I need you to trust me on this one. I’m coming down there and I’ll be there in about twenty minutes. You could be in danger. Stay where you are and stay awake until I get to you.”
“Harry?” Murphy asked. I could hear her starting to scowl. “You telling me you’re going to be late?”
“Late? No, dammit. Look, just do what I said, all right?”
“I do not appreciate this crap, Dresden,” Murphy growled. “I haven’t slept in two days. You told me you’d be here in ten minutes, and I told you I’d wait.”
“Twenty. I said twenty minutes, Murph.”
I could feel her glare over the phone. “Don’t be an asshole, Harry. That’s not what you said five minutes ago. If this is some kind of joke, I am not amused.”
I blinked, and a cold feeling settled into my gut, into the hollow place the Nightmare had torn out of me. The phone line snapped, crackled, and popped, and I struggled to calm down before the connection went out. “Wait, Murphy. Are you saying you talked to me five minutes ago?”
“I am about two seconds short of killing the next thing that pisses me off, Harry. And everything keeping me out of bed is pissing me off. Don’t get added to the list.” She hung up on me.
“Dammit!” I yelled. I hung up the phone and dialed Murphy’s number again, but only got a busy signal.
Something had talked to Murphy and convinced her she was talking to me. The list of things that could put on someone else’s face was awfully long, but the probabilities were limited: either another supernatural beastie had wandered onto the stage or, I gulped, the Nightmare had taken a big enough bite of me that it could put on a convincing charade.
Ghosts could take material form, after all—if they had the power to form a new shape out of material from the Nevernever, and if they were familiar enough with the shape. The Nightmare had eaten a bunch of my magic. It had the power it needed. And it had the familiarity it needed.
Hell’s bells, it was pretending to be me.
I hung up the phone and tore around the house frantically, collecting car keys and putting together an improvised exorcism kit from stuff in my kitchen: Salt, a wooden spoon, a table knife, a couple of storm candles and matches, and a coffee cup. I stuffed them all into an old Scooby-Doo lunch box, then, as an afterthought, reached into a bag of sand that I keep in the kitchen closet for Mister’s litter box, and tossed a handful into a plastic bag. I added the scorched staff and blasting rod to the accumulating pile of jun
k in my arms. Then I ran for the door.
I hesitated, though. Then went to the phone and dialed Michael’s number, fingers dancing over the rotary. It was also busy. I let out a shriek of purest frustration, slammed down the phone, and ran out the door to the Blue Beetle.
Chapter Twenty
I wouldn’t have thought you could find a peaceful, suburbanish neighborhood in the city of Chicago. Michael had managed, not too far west of Wrigley Field. Ancient old trees lined either side of the street in stately splendor. The homes were mostly old Victorian affairs, restored after a fluctuating economy and a century of wear and tear had reduced them to trembling firetraps. Michael’s house looked like it was made of gingerbread. Fancy trim, elegant paint in ivory and burgundy—and, perhaps inevitably, a white picket fence around the house and its front yard. The porch light cast a circle of white radiance out onto the front lawn, almost to the edge of the property.
I slewed the Beetle up onto the curb in front of the house and pushed my way through the swinging gate, clomping up the stairs to rattle the knocker against the front door. I figured that it would take Michael a minute to stagger out of bed and come down the stairs, but instead I heard a thump, a pair of long steps, and then the curtains of the window beside the door stirred. A second later, the door opened, and Michael stood there, blinking sleep out of his eyes. He wore a pair of jeans and a T-shirt with JOHN 3:16 across his chest. He held one of his kids in his brawny arms, one I hadn’t seen yet—maybe a year old, with a patch of curly, golden hair, her face pressed against her daddy’s chest as she slept.
“Harry,” Michael said. His eyes widened. “Merciful Father, what’s happened to you?”
“It’s been a long night,” I said. “Have I been here yet?”
Michael peered at me. “I’m not sure what you mean, Harry.”
“Good. Then I haven’t. Michael, you’ve got to wake your family up, now. They could be in danger.”
He blinked at me again. “Harry, it’s late. What on earth—”
“Just listen.” In terse terms, I outlined what I’d learned about the Nightmare, and how it was getting to its victims.
Michael stared at me for a minute. Then he said, “Let me get this straight. The ghost of a demon I killed two months ago is rampaging around Chicago, getting into people’s dreams, and eating their minds from the inside.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And now it’s taken a part of you, manifested a body that looks like you, and you think it’s coming here.”
“Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”
Michael pursed his lips for a moment. “Then how do I know that you aren’t this Nightmare, trying to get me to invite you in?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Then said, “Either way, it’s better if I stay out here. Charity would probably gouge out my eyes for showing up at this hour.”
Michael nodded. “Come on in, Harry. Let me put the baby to bed.”
I stepped inside, into a small entry hall with a polished hardwood floor. Michael nodded toward his living room, to the right, and said, “Sit down. I’ll be back in a second.”
“Michael,” I said. “You should wake your family up.”
“You said this thing is in a solid body, right?”
“It was a few minutes ago.”
“Then it’s not in the Nevernever. It’s here, in Chicago. It can’t get into people’s dreams from here.”
“I don’t think so, but—”
“And it’s going to be after the people who were near it when it died. It’s going to come after me.”
I chewed on my lip for a second. Then I said, “It’s got a part of me in it, too.”
Michael frowned at me.
“If I was going to come after you, Michael,” I said. “I wouldn’t start with you.”
He looked down at the child he carried. His face hardened, and he said, in a very soft voice, “Harry. Sit. I’ll be down in a moment.”
“But it might—”
“I’ll see to it,” he said in that same soft, gentle voice. It scared me. I sat down. He took the child, walking softly, and vanished up a stairway.
I sat for a moment in a big, comfortable easy chair, the kind that rocks back and forth. There was a towel and a half-emptied bottle off to my left, on the lamp table. Michael must have been rocking the little girl to sleep.
Beside the bottle was a note. I leaned forward and picked it up, reading:
Michael. Didn’t want to wake you and the baby. The little one is demanding pizza and ice cream. I’ll be back in a few minutes—probably before you wake up and read this. Love, Charity.
Chapter Twenty-one
I’ve done smarter things in my life. Once, for example, I threw myself out of a moving car in order to take on a truckload of lycanthropes single-handedly. That had been nominally smarter. At least I had been fairly certain that I could kill them, if I had to, at the time.
Which put me one step ahead of where I was, now. I had already killed the Nightmare—or helped to kill it, at least. Something about that just didn’t seem fair. There should be some kind of rule against needing to kill anything more than once.
Rain fell in sheets rather than drops, sluicing down into my eyes. I had to keep on wiping my brow, sweeping water away, only to have it fill my vision again. I started to give serious thought to what it might be like to drown, right there on the sidewalk.
I cut across the street toward the cemetery fence. Seven feet of red brick, the fence rose in a jagged stair-step fashion every hundred feet or so, keeping up with the slow slope of the street along its southern perimeter as it moved west. At one point, a gaping slash of darkness marred the fence’s exterior, and I slowed as I approached it. The bricks had been torn like paper, and lay in rubble two feet deep around the hole in the wall. I tried to peer beyond it, and saw only more rain, green grass, the shadows of trees cast over the carefully tended grounds.
I paused, outside the graveyard. A dull, restless energy pressed against me, like when weariness and caffeine mix around three-thirty in the morning. It rolled against my skin, and I heard, actually heard whispering voices, through the rain, dozens, hundreds of whispers, ghostly sussurance. I put my hand on the wall, and felt the tension there. There are always fences around cemeteries. Always, whether stone or brick or chain-link. It’s one of those unwritten things that people don’t really notice, they just do it by reflex. Any kind of wall is a barrier in more than merely a physical sense. Lots of things are more than what they seem in a purely physical sense.
Walls keep things out. Walls around cemeteries keep things in.
I looked back, hoping that Michael had followed me, but I didn’t or couldn’t see him in the rain. I still felt weak, shaken. The voices whispered, clustering around the weak point in the wall, where the Nightmare had torn its way in. Even if only one death in a thousand had produced a ghost (and more than that did) there might be dozens of restless spirits wandering the grounds, some even strong enough for non-practitioners of the Art to experience.
Tonight, there weren’t dozens. Dozens would have been a happy number. I closed my eyes and could feel the power they stirred up, the way the air wavered and shook with the presence of hundreds of spirits, easily crossed over from the turbulent Nevernever. It made my knees shake, my belly quiver—both from the wounds that had been inflicted on me by the Nightmare and from simple, primitive fear of darkness, the rain, and a place of the dead.
The inmates of Graceland felt my fear. They pressed close to the break in the wall, and I began to hear actual, physical moans.
“I should wait here,” I muttered to myself, shaking in the rain. “I should wait for Michael. That would be the smart thing to do.”
Somewhere, in the darkness of the cemetery, a woman screamed. Charity.
What I wouldn’t have given to have my Dead Man’s talisman back, now. Son of a bitch.
I gripped my staff, knuckles white, and got out my blasting rod. Then I clambered through the
break in the wall and headed into the darkness.
I felt them the moment I crossed into the cemetery, the second my shoes hit the ground. Ghosts. Shades. Haunts. Whatever you want to call them, they were dead as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore. They were weak spirits, each of them, something that would barely have given me a passing shiver on a normal night—but tonight wasn’t.
A chill fell over me, abrupt as winter’s first wind. I took a step forward and felt a resistance, but not as though someone was trying to keep me out. It felt more like those movies I’ve seen with tourists struggling through crowds of beggars in dusty Middle Eastern cities. That’s what I experienced, in a chilling and spectral kind of way—people pushing against me, struggling to get something from me, something that I wasn’t sure I had and that I didn’t think would do any good even if I gave it to them.
I gathered in my will and slipped my mother’s amulet from around my neck. I held it aloft in the smothering, clammy darkness, and fed power into it.
The blue wizard light began to glow, to cast out a dim radiance, not so bright as usual. The silver pentagram within the circle was the symbol of my faith, if that’s what you wanted to call it, in magic. In the concept of power being controlled, ordered, used for constructive purpose. I wondered, for a minute, if the dimness was a reflection of my injuries or if it said something about my faith. I tried to think of how often I’d had to set something on fire, the past few years, how many times I’d had to blow something up. Or smash a building. Or otherwise wreak havoc.
I ran out of fingers and shivered. Maybe I’d better start being a little more careful.
The spirits fell back from that light, but for a few who still clustered close, whispering things into my ears. I didn’t pay them any attention, or stop to listen. That way lay madness. I shoved forward, more an effort of the heart than of the body, and started searching.
“Charity!” I shouted. “Charity, where are you?”
I heard a short sound, a call, off to my right, but it cut off swiftly. I turned toward it and began moving forward at a cautious lope, glowing pentacle held aloft like Diogenes’s lamp. Thunder rumbled again. The rain had already soaked the grass, made the dirt beneath my feet soft and yielding. A brief, disturbing image of the dead tearing their way up through the softened earth brought me a brief chill and a dozen spirits clustering close as though to feed from it. I shoved both fear and clutching, unseen fingers aside, and pressed forward.