by Butcher, Jim
Thinking, I referenced a mental map of the city. I felt a little bad making Mort come out into weather like this—I mean, given that he wasn’t dead and all. I was going to feel like crap if something bad happened to him, and it wouldn’t be a kindness to ask him to go farther than he absolutely had to. Besides, with the weather worsening, his one-hour time limit seemed to put further constraints on my options.
“Murphy’s place,” I said quietly. I gave him the address.
Mort grunted. “The ex-cop?”
I nodded. Murph had gotten herself fired by showing up to help me one too many times. She’d known what she was doing, and she’d made her own choices, but I still felt bad about it. Dying hadn’t changed that. “She’s a pretty sharp lady. Better able than most in this town to look out for you.”
Mort grunted again and pulled out into the snow, driving slowly and carefully. He was careful to keep his expression blank as he did it.
“Mort,” I said. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Driving over here,” he said.
I made a rude sound. Then I looked back over my shoulder at Sir Stuart. “Well?”
Sir Stuart reached into his coat and drew out what looked like a briar pipe. He tapped something from a pouch into it, struck an old wooden match, and puffed it to life. The smoke rose until it touched the ceiling of the car, where it congealed into a thin coating of shining ectoplasm—the residue of the spiritual when it becomes the physical.
“To hear him tell it,” he said, finally, indicating Mort, “the world’s gone to hell the past few months. Though I’ve got to admit, it doesn’t seem much different to me. Everything’s been madness since those computers showed up.”
I snorted. “What’s changed?”
“The scuttlebutt says that you killed the whole Red Court of Vampires,” said Sir Stuart. “Any truth to that?”
“They abducted my daughter,” I said. I tried for a neutral tone, but it came out clipped and hard. I hadn’t even known Maggie existed until Susan Rodriguez had shown up out of nowhere after years overseas and begged for my help in recovering our daughter. I’d set out to get her back by any means necessary.
I shivered. I’d . . . done things, to get the child away from the monstrous hands of the Red Court. Things I wasn’t proud of. Things I would never have dreamed I would be willing to do.
I could still remember the hot flash of red from a cut throat beneath my fingers, and I had to bow my head for a moment in an effort to keep the memory from surging into my thoughts in all its hideous splendor. Maggie. Chichén Itzá. The Red King. Susan.
Susan’s blood . . . everywhere.
I forced myself to speak to Sir Stuart. “I don’t know what you heard. But I went and got my girl back and put her in good hands. Her mother and a whole lot of vampires died before it was over.”
“All of them?” Sir Stuart pressed.
I was quiet for a moment before I nodded. “Maybe. Yeah. I mean, I couldn’t exactly take a census. The spell could have missed some of the very youngest, depending on the details of how it was set up. But every single one of the bastards nearby me died. And the spell was meant to wipe the world clean of whoever it targeted.”
Mort made a choking sound. “Couldn’t . . . I mean, wouldn’t the White Council get upset about that? Killing with magic, I mean?”
I shrugged. “The Red King was about to use the spell on an eightyear-old girl. If the Council doesn’t like how I stopped that from happening, they can kiss my immaterial ass.” I found myself chuckling. “Besides. I killed vampires, not mortals, with that magic. And what are they gonna do anyway? Chop my head off? I’m dead already.”
I saw Mort trade a look with Sir Stuart in the rearview mirror.
“Why are you so angry at them, Harry?” Mort asked me.
I frowned at him and then at Stuart. “Why do I feel like I should be lying on a couch somewhere?”
“A shade is formed when something significant is left incomplete,” Sir Stuart said. “Part of what we do is work out what’s causing you to hold on to your life so hard. That means asking questions.”
“What? So I can go on my way? Or something?”
“Otherwise known as leaving me alone,” Mort muttered.
“Something like that,” Sir Stuart said quickly, before I could fire back at Mort. “We just want to help.”
I gave Sir Stuart the eye and then Mort. “That’s what you do? Lay spirits to rest?”
Mort shrugged. “If someone didn’t, this town would run out of cemetery space pretty fast.”
I thought about that for a moment. Then I said, “So how come you haven’t laid Sir Stuart to rest?”
Mort said nothing. His silence was a barbed, stony thing.
Sir Stuart leaned forward to put a hand on Mort’s shoulder, seemed to squeeze it a little, and let go. Then he said to me, “Some things can’t be mended, lad. Not by all the king’s horses or all the king’s men.”
“You’re trapped here,” I said quietly.
“Were I trapped, it would indicate that I am the original Sir Stuart. I am not. I am but his shade. One could think of it that way nonetheless, I suppose,” he said. “But I prefer to consider it differently: I regard myself as someone who was truly created with a specific purpose for his existence. I have a reason to be who and what and where I am. How many flesh-and-blood folk can say as much?”
I scowled as I watched the snowy road ahead of us. “And what’s your purpose? Looking out after this loser?”
“Hey, I’m sitting right here,” Mort complained.
“I help other lost spirits,” Sir Stuart said. “Help them find some sort of resolution. Help teach them how to stay sane, if it is their destiny to become a mane. And if they become a lemur, I help introduce them to oblivion.”
I turned to frown at Sir Stuart. “That’s . . . kinda cut-and-dried.”
“Some things assuredly are,” he replied placidly.
“So you’re a mane, eh? Like the old Roman ancestral ghost?”
“It isn’t such a simple matter, Dresden. Your own White Council is a famous bunch of namers,” he said. “Their history is, I have heard, rooted in old Rome.”
“Yeah,” I said.
He nodded. “And, like the Romans, they love to name and classify and outline facts to the smallest, permanently inflexible, set-in-stone detail. The truth, however, is that the world of remnant spirits is not easily cataloged or defined.” He shrugged. “I dwell in Chicago. I defend Mortimer’s home. I am what I am.”
I grunted. After a few moments, I asked, “You teach new spirits?”
“Of course.”
“Then can I ask you some questions?”
“By all means.”
Mort muttered, “Here we go.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m a ghost and all now. And I can go through just about anything—like I went through this car door to get inside.”
“Yes,” Sir Stuart said, a faint smile outlining his mouth.
“So how come my ass doesn’t go through the seat when I sit down on—”
I was rudely interrupted by the tingling sensation of passing through solid matter, beginning at my butt and moving rapidly up my spine. Cold snow started slamming into my rear end, and I let out a yelp of pure surprise.
Sir Stuart had evidently known what was coming. He reached over, grabbed me by the front of my leather duster, and unceremoniously dragged me back up into the car and sat me on the seat beside him, back in the passenger compartment. I clutched at the door handle and the seat in front of me for stability, only to have my hands go right through them. I pitched forward, spinning as if I were floating in water, and this time it was my face plunging toward the icy street.
Sir Stuart hauled me back again and said, in a faintly annoyed tone, “Mortimer.”
Mort didn’t say anything, but when I was once again sitting down, I didn’t fall right through the bottom of the car. He smirked at me in the rearview mirror.
“You don’t fall through the bottom of the car because on some deep, instinctual level, you regard it as a given of existence here,” Sir Stuart said. “You are entirely convinced that illusions such as gravity and solidity are real.”
“There is no spoon,” I said.
Sir Stuart looked at me blankly.
I sighed. “If I believe in an illusory reality so much, then how come I can walk through walls?” I asked.
“Because you are convinced, on the same level, that ghosts can do precisely that.”
I felt my eyebrows trying to meet as I frowned. “So . . . you’re saying I don’t fall through the ground because I don’t think I should?”
“Say instead that it is because you assume that you will not,” he replied. “Which is why, once you actively considered the notion, you did fall through the floor.”
I shook my head slowly. “How do I keep from doing it again?”
“Mortimer is preventing it, for the time being. My advice to you is not to think about too much,” Sir Stuart said, his tone serious. “Just go about your business.”
“You can’t not think about something,” I said. “Quick, don’t think about a purple elephant. I dare you.”
Sir Stuart let out a broad laugh, but stopped and clutched at his wounded flank. I could tell it hurt him, but he still wore the smile the laugh had brought on. “It usually takes them longer to recognize that fact,” he said. “You’re right, of course. And there will be times when you feel like you have no control whatsoever over such things.”
“Why?” I asked, feeling somewhat exasperated.
Sir Stuart wasn’t rattled by my tone. “It’s something every new shade goes through. It will pass.”
“Huh,” I said. I thought about it for a minute and said, “Well. It beats the hell out of acne.”
From the front seat, Mort let out an explosive little snicker.
Stars and stones, I hate being the new guy.
Chapter Eight
Murphy inherited her house from her grandmother, and it was at least a century old. Grandma Murphy had been a notorious rose gardener. Murphy didn’t have a green thumb herself. She hired a service to take care of her grandmother’s legacy. The flower garden in front would have fit a house four times as large, but it was a withered, dreary little place when covered in heavy snow. Bare, thorny branches, trimmed the previous fall, stood up from the blanket of white in skeletal silence.
The house itself was a compact colonial, single story, square, solid, and neat-looking. It had been built in a day when a ten-by-ten bedroom was considered a master suite, and when beds were routinely used by several children at a time. Murphy had upgraded it with vinyl siding, new windows, and a layer of modern insulation when she moved in, and the little house looked as if it could last another hundred years, no problem.
There was a sleek, expensive, black town car parked on the street outside Murphy’s home, its tires on the curbside resting in several inches of snow. It couldn’t have looked more out of place in the middle-class neighborhood if it had been a Saint Patrick’s Day Parade float, complete with prancing leprechauns.
Sir Stuart looked at me and then out at our surroundings, frowning. “What is it, Dresden?”
“That car shouldn’t be there,” I said.
Mort glanced at me and I pointed out the black town car. He studied it for a moment before he said, “Yeah. Kind of odd on a block like this.”
“Why?” asked Sir Stuart. “It is an automatic coach, is it not?”
“An expensive one,” I said. “You don’t park those on the street in weather like this. The salt-and-plow truck comes by, and you’re looking at damage to the finish and paint. Keep going by, Morty. Circle the block.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mort said, his tone annoyed. “I’m not an idiot.”
“Stay with him,” I told Sir Stuart.
Then I took a deep breath, remembered that I was an incorporeal spirit, and put my feet down through the floorboards of the car. I dug in my heels on the snowy street as the solid matter of the vehicle passed through me in a cloud of uncomfortable tingles. I’d meant to simply remain behind, standing, when the car had passed completely through me. I hadn’t thought about things like momentum and velocity, and instead I went into a tumble that ended with me making a whump sound as I hit a soft snowbank beside the home next to Murphy’s. It hurt, and I pushed myself out of the snowbank, my teeth chattering, my body blanketed in cold.
“N-n-no, H-Harry,” I told myself firmly, squeezing my eyes shut. “Th-that’s an illusion. Your mind created it to match what it knows. But you didn’t hit the snowbank. You can’t. And you can’t be covered in snow. And therefore you can’t be wet and cold.”
I focused on the words, putting my will behind them, in the same way I would have to attract the attention of a ghost or spirit. I opened my eyes.
The snow clinging to my body and clothes was gone. I was standing, dry and wrapped in my leather duster, beside the snowbank.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s bordering on cool.”
I stuck my hands in my pockets, ignored the snow and the steady, gentle northern wind, and trudged across Grandma Murphy’s rose garden to Murphy’s door. I raised my hand and knocked as I’d done so often before.
A couple of things happened.
First, my hand stopped above the door, close enough that you could have slid one or two pieces of paper between my knuckles and the wood, but definitely not three. There was a dull, low thud of solid impact, even though I hadn’t touched the door itself. Second, light flashed, and something like a current of electricity swarmed up my arm and down my spine, throwing my body into a convulsion that left me lying on the ground, stunned.
I just lay there on the snow for a moment. I tried the whole “there is no spoon” thing again, but apparently there was perception of reality and then there was hard-core, undeniable, real reality. It took me several seconds to recover and sit up again, and several more seconds to realize that I had been hit by something specifically engineered to stop intruding spirits.
Murphy’s house had been warded, its natural defensive threshold used as a foundation for further, more aggressive defenses. And while I was only a shade of my former self, I was still wizard enough to recognize my own damned wards—or at least wards that were virtually identical to my own.
The door opened and Murphy appeared in it. She was a woman of well below average height, but built of spring steel. Her golden hair had been cut into a short brush over her scalp, and the stark style showed off the lines of muscles and tendons in her neck, and the pugnacious, stubborn set of her jawline. She wore jeans and a plaid shirt over a blue tee, and held her SIG in her right hand.
Something stabbed me in the guts and twisted upon seeing her.
A rush of memories flooded over me, starting with our first meeting, on a missing-persons case years ago, when I’d still been doing my time as an apprentice PI and Murphy had been a uniform cop working a beat. Every argument, every bit of banter and repartee, every moment of revelation and trust that had been built up between us, came hammering into me like a thousand major-league fastballs. The last memory, and the sharpest, was of facing each other in the hold of my brother’s boat, trembling on the edge of a line we hadn’t ever allowed ourselves to cross before.
“Karrin,” I tried to say. It came out a whisper.
Murphy’s brow furrowed and she stood still in the doorway, despite the cold wind and falling snow, her eyes scanning left and right.
Her eyes moved over me, past me, through me, without stopping. She didn’t see me. She couldn’t hear me. We weren’t a part of the same world anymore.
It was a surprisingly painful moment of realization.
Before I could get my thoughts clear of it, Murphy, still frowning, closed the door. I heard her close several locks.
“Easy, lad,” said Sir Stuart in a gentle, quiet voice. He hunkered down to put a hand on my shoulder. “There is no need to rush regaining your feet.
It hurts. I know.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. I swallowed and blinked away tears that couldn’t really be real. “Why?”
“As I told you, lad. Memories are life here. Life and power. Seeing the people you care for most again is going to trigger memories much more strongly than they would in a mere mortal. It can take time to grow accustomed to it.”
I wrapped my arms around my knees and rested my chin on my kneecap. “How long?”
“Generally,” Sir Stuart said very softly, “until those loved ones pass on themselves.”
I shuddered. “Yeah,” I said. “Well. I don’t have time for that.”
“You have nothing but time, Dresden.”
“But three of my people don’t,” I said, my voice harsh. “They’re going to get hurt if I don’t make things right. If I don’t find my killer.” I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths. I wasn’t actually breathing air. I didn’t need to breathe. Habit. “Where’s Mort?”
“Waiting around the corner,” Sir Stuart said. “He’ll come in once we’ve given him the all clear.”
“What? I’m the little chicken’s personal Secret Service now?” I grumbled. I pushed myself up to my feet and eyed Murphy’s house. “Do you see anything threatening around here?”
“Not at the moment,” Sir Stuart said, “other than the allegedly suspicious auto coach.”
“Well, the house is warded. I’m not sure if the defenses are purely against insubstantial intruders or if they might also attack a living intruder. Tell him not to touch the house with anything he wants to keep.”
Sir Stuart nodded and said, “I’m going to circle the place. I’ll return with Mortimer.”
I grunted absently, reaching out a hand to feel the wards around the place again. They were powerful, but . . . flawed, somehow. My wards were all built into the same, solid barrier of energy. These wards had solidity, but it was a piecemeal thing. I felt like I was looking at a twelvefoot wall built from LEGO blocks. If someone with enough mystic muscle hit it right, the ward would shatter at its weakest seams.