by Butcher, Jim
There was darkness in Molly. I’d soulgazed her. I’d seen it in more than one of her possible futures. I’d felt it in the black magic she had worked, with the best of intentions, on fragile mortal minds.
But though she’d fought tooth and nail at Chichén Itzá, beside the rest of us . . . she wasn’t a killer. Not Molly.
Was she?
People could be driven to extremes by the right events, the right stakes. I’d bargained away my future and my soul when I had needed to do it to save my daughter.
And I was Molly’s teacher. Her mentor. Her example.
Had she let herself be driven to extremes at my loss, the way I had been to the potential loss of my daughter? Had she turned aside from everything I’d tried to teach her and let herself slide down into the violent exercise of power?
Why shouldn’t she have done so, moron? I heard my own voice say in the dark of my thoughts. You showed her how it worked. She’s always been an able student.
Worse, Molly was a sensitive, a wizard whose supernatural senses were so acute that surges of powerful magic or the emotions that accompanied life-and-death situations were something that caused her psychic and physical pain. It was something I had barely even considered when I dragged her along to Chichén Itzá with me for the largest, most savage, and deadliest brawl I had ever personally participated in.
Had the pain of participating in the battle done something to my apprentice? Had it left her with permanent mental damage, just as the gunshot wound she’d received must have left her a permanent scar? Hell, it didn’t require any supernatural elements at all for war—and that was what Chichén Itzá was, make no mistake—to screw up young soldiers who found themselves struggling to stay alive. Throw in all the mystic menace on top of it, and it started to seem a little bit miraculous that I’d gotten as far as I had while remaining mostly sane.
I didn’t want to admit it or think about it, but I couldn’t deny that it was possible that my apprentice hadn’t been as lucky as I had.
“Hey,” Butters said quietly. “Harry? You all right?”
“That’s . . . kinda subjective, all things considered,” I answered.
He nodded. “No one wanted to be the one to tell you the details. But Murphy’s pretty sure. She says that if she was still working as a cop, she’d be convinced and digging as hard as she could to turn up enough evidence to let her put the perp away.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I get what she means by that.” I swallowed. “Why hasn’t she?”
“We need Molly,” Butters said. “She’s made the difference between happily ever after and everyone dying in two raids against the Fomor.”
I rubbed my eyes. “Okay. It’s . . . something I’ll start processing. But I’m not saying that I believe it. Not until I talk to her about it. See her reaction with my own eyes.”
“Right,” Butters said, his voice gentle.
I eyed him. “Murphy wouldn’t want you telling me this.”
He shrugged. “Murphy’s not full all the way to the brim herself some days. What she’s been doing . . . It’s been hard on her. She’s gotten more and more guarded.”
“I can imagine.”
Butters nodded. “But . . . I’ve always been kind of a trust-my-instincts guy. And I think you need to know this stuff.”
“Thanks,” I said. “We’ve got some other problems, too.”
His tired, worried face lifted into a sudden grin. “Of course we do. Harry Dresden is in town. What’s that?”
I put Sir Stuart’s pistol into the voluminous pocket of my duster and said, “A cannon. Someone gave it to me.”
“Huh.” His voice turned casual. “Could something like that hurt me?”
I grinned and shook my head. “Nah. Ghost-on-ghost action only. Assuming I’m able to make it work in the first place.”
The snow had stopped falling, and Butters turned off his windshield wipers. “What’s it like?”
“What is what like?”
“Being . . . you know.”
“Dead?”
He shrugged a shoulder, betraying his discomfort. “A ghost.”
I thought about my answer for a moment. “Everything in my body that used to hurt all the time got better. I don’t feel hungry or thirsty. Other than that, it feels a lot like being alive, except . . . my magic is gone. And, you know, hardly anyone can see me or hear me.”
“So . . . so the world is the same?” he asked.
I shivered. “No. It’s chock-full of all sorts of weird stuff. You wouldn’t believe how many ghosts are running around this place.”
Even as I spoke, I turned my head to watch two wraiths glide down the sidewalk as the car passed them. I frowned. “Including one of you, Bob.”
Bob the Skull snorted. “I’m not mortal. I don’t have a soul. The only thing waiting for me when I cease to be is entropy. I can’t leave a ghost.”
“Then how come I saw a floating skull with blue eyelights helping attack Mort Lindquist’s place last night?”
The skull just stared for a moment. Then he suggested lamely, “You were high?”
I snorted. “Can’t be many things like that running around,” I said. “What do you know?”
“I have to think about this,” Bob said in a rushed tone, and his orange eyelights winked out.
Butters and I both stared at the skull.
“Huh,” Butters said. “I’ve never seen anyone make him shut up before.”
I grunted. Then I said quietly, “Scared the hell out of me, seeing that. Thought something had happened to him.”
“He’s fine,” Butters said. “Best roommate I ever had.”
“I’m glad you’re taking care of him,” I said. “He wouldn’t do well alone.”
“It’s not a big deal, right?”
“What isn’t a big deal?”
“If there’s an Evil Bob out there,” he said. “I mean . . . it’ll just be another nerd like this one, right? Only with a black hat?”
The orange eyelights winked back on, and Bob said, “Hey!”
“Butters . . . Bob is spooky strong,” I said quietly. “Knowledge is power, man. Bob has a lot of it. When I accidentally flipped his switch to black hat a few years ago, he nearly killed me in the first sixty seconds.”
Butters blinked several times. He tried to talk for a few seconds, swallowed, and then said in a small voice, “Oh.” He eyed Bob sideways.
“I don’t like to make a big thing of it, sahib,” Bob said easily. “Not really my bag to do that kind of thing anyway.”
I nodded. “He was created to be an assistant and counselor,” I said. “It’s unprofessional to treat him as anything else.”
“Which sahib doesn’t,” Bob noted. “Due to complete ignorance, but he doesn’t.”
“Oh,” Butters said again. Then he asked, “How do I . . . make sure not to set him on black hat?”
“You can’t,” Bob said. “Harry ordered me to forget that part of me and never to bring it out again. So I lopped it off.”
It was my turn to blink. “You what?”
“Hey,” Bob said, “you told me never to bring it out again. You said never. As long as I was with you, that wouldn’t be an issue—but the next guy could order me to do it and it would still happen. So I made sure it couldn’t happen again. No big whoop, Dresden. Oy, but you are such a little girl sometimes.”
I blinked several more times. “Oy?”
“My mother calls me twice a week,” Butters explained. “He listens in.”
“She’s right, you know, sahib,” Bob said brightly. “If you’d just do something with your hair and wear nicer clothes, you’d find a woman. You’re a doctor, after all. What woman doesn’t want to marry a doctor?”
“Did he just get a little Yiddish accent?” I asked Butters.
“I get it twice a week already, Bob,” Butters growled. “I don’t need it from you, too.”
“Well, you need it from somewhere,” Bob said. “I mean, look at you
r hair.”
Butters ground his teeth.
“Anyway, Harry,” Bob began.
“I know,” I said. “The thing I saw with the Grey Ghost must be the piece that you cut off.”
“Right,” he said. “Got it in one.”
“Your offspring, one might say.”
The skull shuddered, which added a lot of motion to the bobblehead thing. “If one was coming from a dementedly limited mortal viewpoint, I guess.”
“So it’s a part of you, but not all of you. It’s less powerful.”
Bob’s eyelights narrowed in thought. “Maybe, but . . . the whole of any given being is not always equal to the sum of its parts. Case in point: you. You aren’t working with a lot of horsepower in the brains department, yet you manage to get to the bottom of things sooner than most.”
I gave the skull a flat look. “Is it stronger than you or not?”
“I don’t know,” Bob said. “I don’t know what it knows. I don’t know what it can do. That was sort of the whole point in amputating it. There’s a big hole where it used to be.”
I grunted. “How big?”
Bob rolled his eyes. “Do you want me to tell you in archaic measurements or metric?”
“Ballpark it.”
“Um. A hundred years’ worth of knowledge, maybe?”
“Damn,” I said quietly. I knew that Bob had once been owned by a necromancer named Kemmler. Kemmler had fought the entire White Council in an all-out war. Twice. They killed him seven times over the course of both wars, but it didn’t take until number seven. Generally remembered as the most powerful renegade wizard of the second millennium, Kemmler had at some point acquired a skull inhabited by a spirit of intellect, which had served as his assistant.
Eventually, when Kemmler was finally thrown down, the skull had been smuggled away from the scene by a Warden named Justin DuMorne—the same Justin who had adopted me and trained me to grow up into a monster, and who had eventually decided I wasn’t tractable enough and attempted to kill me. It didn’t go as he planned. I killed him and burned down his house around his smoldering corpse instead. And I’d taken the same skull, hidden it away from the Wardens and company, and named it Bob.
“Is that bad?” Butters asked.
“A bad guy had the skull for a while,” I said. “Big-time dark mojo. So those memories Bob lost are probably everything he learned serving as the assistant to a guy who was almost certainly the strongest wizard on the planet—strong enough to openly defy the White Council for decades.”
“Meaning . . . he learned a lot there,” Butters said.
“Probably,” Bob said cheerfully. “But it’s probably limited to pretty much destructive, poisonous, dangerous stuff. Nothing important.”
“That’s not important?” Butters squeaked.
“Destroying things is easy,” Bob said. “Hell, all you really have to do to destroy something is wait. Creation, now. That’s hard.”
“Bob, would you be willing to take on Evil Bob?”
Bob’s eyes darted nervously. “I’d . . . prefer not to. I’d really, really prefer not to. You have no idea. That me was crazy. And buff. He worked out.”
I sighed. “One more thing to worry about, then. And meanwhile, I still don’t know a damned thing about my murder.”
Butters brought the Road Runner to a stop and set the parking break. “You don’t,” he said. “But we do. We’re here. Come on.”
Chapter Eighteen
I gritted my teeth and got out of Butters’s car, then paused to look at my surroundings. The piled snow was deep, and the mounds on either side of the street were like giant-sized versions of the snow ramparts that appeared every year in the Carpenters’ backyard. They changed the outlines of everything—but something was familiar.
I stopped and took at least half a minute to turn in a slow circle. As I did, I noticed a pair of fleeting shadows moving easily over the snow—wolves. Murphy’s comment about sending shadows to escort Butters home made more sense in context. I watched one of the wolves vanish into the darkness between a pair of half-familiar pines, and only then did I recognize where we stood. By then, Butters had taken Bob from his holder in the car and was carrying him in the handheld spotlight case again. He shone the light around for a moment until he spotted me, then asked, “Harry?”
“This is my house,” I said after a moment. “I mean . . . where my house was.”
Things had changed.
A new building had been put up where my old boardinghouse—my home—had been. The new place was four stories tall and oddly cubical in appearance. The walls fell even farther out onto the lawn than those in the old building had, encasing it in a strip of yard only slightly wider than my stride.
I moved close enough to touch the wall and pushed my hand inside. It hurt, but the hurt never varied as I pushed in farther. This was no facade. It was made of stone. I’m not kidding. Freaking stone. Basalt, maybe? I’m no stonemason. It was dark grey with veins and threads of green and silver running through it, but I could only see them from up close.
The windows were narrow—maybe nine inches wide—and deep. There were bars on the outside. I could see more bars on the inside, and there was at least a foot between them. The roof was lined with a staggered row of blocks—real by-God crenellation. As the pièce de résistance, gargoyles crouched at the corners and at the midpoint of each wall, starting up at the second floor and moving in three rows of increasingly ugly statuary toward the roof.
Someone had turned the ruin of my home into a freaking fortress.
A plaque hung over what had to be the main entrance. It read, simply, BRIGHTER FUTURE SOCIETY.
Butters followed my gaze to the plaque. “Ah,” he said. “Yeah. We named it that because if we didn’t do something, there wasn’t going to be much of a future for this town. I wanted Brighter Future Group, actually, for the initialism, but I got voted down.”
“Hell’s bells,” I said. I did some math. To build on the ruins of the boardinghouse, construction would have had to start practically the same day that I died. Actual stone is expensive to build with because it’s difficult and time-consuming. This place was as big as a small castle. It should have taken months and months and months to build. It had gone up in six. Probably significantly less, given the weather. “This place cost a damned fortune.”
“Meh,” Butters said, and walked to the front door. “Hang around a bit and you’ll take it for granted like the rest of us.” He entered a sequence of numbers on the keypad beside the door. They made a little mechanical clicking sound that reminded me of a manual typewriter. He put his hands back into his pockets and waited.
A moment later, a heavily accented basso voice emerged from a crackling speaker box. “Who goes there?”
“Butters,” he said. “With Dresden’s shade. Hi, Sven.”
The speaker made a rumbling sound. “Waldo,” it said, pronouncing it Valdo. “The night is dangerous. One day you will stumble across a fox and it will eat you.”
Roars of laughter erupted from the speakers—evidently, several other men were with the door guard.
Butters didn’t laugh, but he did grin. “I’ll just get stuck in his throat until you can haul your walrus ass over to him and save me, Sven.”
Louder laughter erupted from the speaker, and a voice half-choked with it said something in a language that had come from somewhere in northern Europe. There was a click, and Butters opened the door. I started to follow him in—and remembered, in time, to put my hand out and check the doorway first. My hand moved smoothly past the twelve inches of stone, but then hit something as solid as a brick wall where the doorway opened up into the entry hall.
“Uh, Butters,” I said.
He smacked the heel of his hand against his forehead. “Right, sorry. Please come in.”
The invisible wall vanished, and I shook my head. “It’s got a threshold. People live here?”
“Bunch of ’em,” Butters confirmed, and we went insid
e. “Lot of Paranetters come through for a little while when they don’t have a safe place to sleep. Uh, visiting Netters who are passing through town. Venatori, when they meet with us. That kind of thing.”
I felt anger stirring in me, irrational but no less real. “My home . . . is a supernatural flophouse?”
“And armory! And jail!” Bob said enthusiastically.
Ghosts can sputter in outrage. “Jail?”
“And day care!” Bob continued.
I stopped in my tracks and threw my hands up. “Day care? Day care?!”
“People have kids, man. And they have jobs,” Butters said in a gentle voice. “The Fomor aren’t above using children to get what they want. High-risk kids come here on workdays. Now, shut up, Bob. And get off your high horse, Harry. People need this place.”
I turned my gaze to Butters and studied him for a minute. The little guy had come a long way from the somewhat timid, insecure man I’d first met years before. That Butters would never have said anything like that to me.
Or maybe he was the same guy. Butters went right to the wall for the sake of the truth, even when it cost him his job and got him locked up in a nuthouse. He was a man of principles.
And he was probably right. This wasn’t my home anymore.
We passed the guard station after we got buzzed through a security gate. Four of the biggest, toughest-looking men I’d ever seen were stationed there. They wore biker leathers—and swords. Their muscles swelled tight against their skin, their beards bristled, and their uniformly pale eyes watched us pass with calm attention.
“Einherjaren,” Butters said quietly. “Soldiers of Valhalla, if they’re telling the truth.”
“They are,” I replied just as quietly. “Where did we get them?”
“Marcone. They aren’t cheap.”
“Him again.”
Butters shrugged. “I don’t like the guy, either, Harry. But he’s smart enough to realize that if the Fomor take control of the streets, they’re going to get rid of him as a matter of course.”