by Butcher, Jim
“Even if Kemmler was still around, I’m pretty sure a relationship with him wouldn’t be in the cards, either,” I said in an apologetic tone. “I’ve got a strict rule about dating older men.”
The spirit looked at me blankly for a moment. Then, as the real Bob sometimes did, he gave me the impression of an expression that simple, immobile bone could not possibly have expressed. His eyes slowly widened.
“You . . .” he said slowly, “are mocking me.”
I whistled through my teeth. “Guess the real Bob made you from the slow bits, huh?”
The blue lights flared brighter, and I felt heat on my face even from six feet away. “I am the real one,” he said in a hard, distant tone. “The true creation of the Master. Finally shed of my weakness. My doubt. Freed to use my power.”
“Guess he threw in a little of his narcissism, too,” I drawled—but I met his gaze with my own and felt an odd little smile turn up the sides of my mouth.
The skull’s jaws slowly parted like a snake preparing to strike. “You who are barely more than an apprentice—you will die for mocking me.”
“Yeah. But I will never, ever throw in with you,” I snarled back. “I will never be like you or your precious Master or that nutball Corpsetaker. So take your offer of a relationship and shove it up your schutzstaffel.”
Evil Bob’s eyelights blazed and he wrenched at the staff.
He really was a lackey. A real mastermind wannabe would have boned up on the Evil Overlord list. He’d felt so confident in his power (okay, maybe not without reason) that he’d spent a moment talking to me instead of just moving on. Worse, he’d given me a chance to start lipping off to him, and that comes so naturally to me that I don’t really need to consciously consider it anymore, except on special occasions.
So, what with my brain being unoccupied and all, I’d had the opportunity to realize a fundamental truth about the Nevernever. Here the spiritual becomes the material. Here spiritual power is physical power. Strength of mind and will are as real as muscle and sinew.
And I was damned if some blurry photocopy of the thoughts and will of some dusty-ass, dead necromancer was going to take me out.
If he hadn’t made with the stupid recruiting speech, if I hadn’t had my choices laid out in such stark relief in front of me, if I hadn’t been reminded of who I was and of those things for which I’d lived my life . . . maybe Evil Bob would have killed me then and there.
But he had reminded me. I did remember. I spent my lifetime fighting the darkness without becoming the darkness. Maybe I had faltered at the very end. Maybe I had finally come up against something that made me cross the line—but even then, I hadn’t turned into a degenerate freakazoid of the Kemmler variety. One mistake at the end of my life couldn’t erase all the times I had stood unmoved at the edge of the abyss and made snide remarks at its expense.
They could kill me, but they couldn’t have me.
I was my own.
And when Evil Bob shoved the staff at my chest, I drew upon the surge of fierce joy that truth had inspired, upon the will that had been dinged and dented but never broken, and fell back with the motion, digging the tip of the staff into the concrete as if it had been soft mud, and used the momentum to fling Evil Bob over me.
His unbreakable grip didn’t falter—and he arced overhead and then back down while I wrenched at the staff, helping his forward momentum instead of fighting it.
He hit the floor of the trench like a big fascist meteor. The noise was incredible. The impact shattered the concrete for twenty feet in every direction. Chips and shards went flying. Dust flew up in a miniature mushroom cloud. I was flung back by the shock wave of impact—with my staff still gripped firmly in my hands.
“Booya!” I drunkenly howled from the ground. I choked a little on the dust as I staggered back to my feet, my heart pounding, my whole body alive with strain and adrenaline. I stabbed a pointing finger toward the impact crater. “That’s right! Who just rocked your face? Harry fucking Dresden! That’s who!”
I coughed a little more and leaned against the side of the trench, panting until the world stopped feeling all spinny, grinning a wolf’s grin as I did.
And then gravel made a soft rustling sound from inside the dust cloud. A form appeared, just an outline, limping slowly. It came a few feet closer, and I recognized Evil Bob by the rising glow of his eyelights. The skull became visible a second later, and though I could see that the entire surface was lined with a fine network of cracks and chips, it was not broken.
The blue eyelights began to glow brighter and brighter. The dark spirit clenched his fists and his arms slowly rose, as if he was pulling something from the very earth beneath his feet. The ground started shaking. There was an ugly, low humming sound, like some kind of demon locomotive screaming by in a tunnel beneath my feet.
“My turn,” the dark spirit hissed.
“Hell’s bells,” I muttered. “Harry, you idiot, when will you learn not to victory gloat?”
The spirit’s skull mouth dropped open wider and wider and—
—a sudden stream of candle-flame-colored energy coalesced into Bob the Skull’s human form, right behind Evil Bob.
My Bob lunged forward and snaked his arms beneath the dark spirit’s. Bob’s fingers locked behind the fractured skull of my enemy, gathering the dark spirit into a full nelson. He wrenched Evil Bob violently to one side and the dark spirit screamed, a sudden torrent of energy ripping through the wall of the trench and about fifty yards of earth as he pivoted, vaporizing spirit matter into an enormous pie-slice-shaped acre of ectoplasm.
Then Evil Bob spun, letting out a shriek of fury, and slammed his attacker back into the opposite wall.
“Harry!” Bob shouted, his face pale and his eyes wide. There were chips of broken concrete in his hair. “Take the spooks and go help Butters!”
“No!” I shouted back. “Let’s take him!”
Evil Bob took two bounding steps, the second one on the trench wall about five feet up from the ground, and whirled, falling back to the ground with my Bob on the bottom. More concrete shattered, and Bob the Skull did something I’d never heard him do before: He screamed in pain.
“You can’t!” he shrieked, panicked. “I can’t! Not with everything here!”
The dark spirit twisted like a snake and broke Bob’s grip. Evil Bob nearly got out of it entirely, but my old lab assistant managed to get a lock on one arm, and the pair of them whirled and twisted on the ground, almost too quickly to be seen, pitting dozens of escapes and counterlocks against each other in only a few seconds.
“Go!” Bob shrieked, gut-wrenching, bone-deep terror in his voice. “Go, go, go! Once you’re gone I’ll shut the Way behind you and bail! Hurry!”
A shadow appeared at the top of the trench, and a weary, batteredlooking Sir Stuart held out his hand to me.
“Dammit,” I snarled. “Don’t make me regret this, Bob!”
“Go!” Bob howled.
I took Sir Stuart’s hand, and the big man pulled me out of the trench with a grunt of effort. Up on top, I found the spooks waiting for me in their typical silence.
“Right,” I said. “Let’s go, double time.”
I gripped my staff tight, put my head down, and sprinted for the Way into the Corpsetaker’s stronghold.
Chapter Forty-five
The Way hung in the air in the middle of the trail, maybe fifty yards back into the forest, an oblong mirror of silver light. Its bottom edge was maybe six feet off the ground, and a wooden staircase had been built to allow access to it. Behind us, back over toward the beach, I could hear low drumbeats of impact, the crackling scream of shattering concrete. The two Bobs were going at it hammer and tongs, and I desperately hoped that my old friend was all right.
There was another worry, too. If Bob couldn’t stop Evil Bob from coming through the Way after us, we’d be caught with the Corpsetaker in front of us and Evil Bob behind. I didn’t imagine things would go very well for us if t
hat happened.
A flutter in the energies around the Way danced across my senses, and I paused to focus more intently on the Way itself, going so far as to call up my Sight for a quick peek. A glance told me everything I needed to know: The Way was unstable. Rather than being the steady, solid, steel-and-concrete bridge between here and the mortal world that I had seen before, it was instead a bridge made of frayed and straining ropes that looked like it might fall apart the instant it was used.
“Bob, you tricky little bastard,” I murmured admiringly. My former lab assistant had been lying his socks off earlier. Bob wasn’t planning on closing the Way behind us—because he had already rigged it to collapse as soon as we went through. His verbal explanation to me had been meant for Evil Bob’s ear holes. If Evil Bob thought we were dependent on Bob to shut the door behind us, then he would have no reason to hurry after us. And if Bob had told me the real deal out loud, Evil Bob could have simply rushed to the Way ahead of us and collapsed it himself, leaving us totally shut out.
Bob was really playing with fire. If he’d taken time to sabotage the Way before he came to back me up, it meant that he had left me to face the wolfwaffen and their boss and gambled that I’d be able to hold my own until he circled back to me. On this side of things, his ploy to keep Evil Bob’s attention meant that Evil Bob was free to focus entirely on tearing him apart, confident that he could always come charging at our backs as soon as he finished off my Bob.
More concrete shattered, somewhere back toward the beach. Bits of small debris, most of it no larger than my fist, came raining down among the trees a moment later.
“Okay, kids. Gather round and listen up.” I shook my head and addressed the huddled shades. “When we go through,” I said, “we’ll be right in the middle of them. Sir Stuart, I want you and your men to rush any lemurs or wraiths that are near us. Don’t hesitate; just hit them and get them out of my way.” I eyed the Lecter Specters. “The rest of you follow me. We’re going to destroy the physical representations for the wards.”
The little girl ghost looked up at me and scowled, as if I’d just told her she had to eat a hated vegetable.
“How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” I told her seriously. “We’re going to destroy the wards. Once that is done, you guys can join the rest of the shades in taking down the Corpsetaker and her crew. Okay? Everyone got it?”
Silent stares.
“Okay, good. I guess.” I turned to the Way and took a deep breath. “This worked out reasonably well last time, right? Right. So here we go.” I hesitated. Then I said, “Hang on one second. There’s one more thing I want everyone to do . . . .”
I went through the Way and felt it falling apart under the pressure of our collective spiritual weight. It was an odd sensation, falling against the back of my neck like ice-cold cobwebs. I didn’t let my fear push me into hurrying. I kept my steps steady until I walked onto the floor of the underground chamber where I’d seen Morty and the Corpsetaker the night before.
I had time for a quick-flash impression. The pit had been filled with wraiths once more, swirling around in a humanoid stew. Mort hung above the pit again, in considerably worse repair than the last time I’d seen him. His shirt was gone. His torso and arms were covered in welts and bruises. He had spots of raw skin that had been burned, maybe with electricity, if the jumper cables and car battery sitting on the ground nearby were any indication. Several of them were on his bald scalp. Someone among the Big Hood lunatics was familiar with the concept of electroshock therapy? That one sure was a stretch.
The Corpsetaker stood in the air above the pit, hissing words into Morty’s ear. Mort’s head was moving back and forth in a feeble negative. He was weeping, his body twitching and jerking in obvious agony. His lips were puffy and swollen, probably the result of getting hit in the mouth repeatedly. I don’t think he could focus his eyes—but he kept doggedly shaking his head.
Again, the hooded lemurs were gathered around, but instead of playing cards, this time they all stood in an outward-facing circle around the pit, as if guarding against an attack.
Pity for them that the back door from the Nevernever was inside the circle. When the spook squad and I came through, they all had their backs to us.
Now, I’m not arrogant enough to think that I was the first guy to lead a company of ghosts into an assault. Granted, I don’t think it happens every day or anything, but it’s a big world and it’s been spinning for a long time. I’m sure someone did it long before I was born, maybe pitting the ancestral spirits of one tribe against those of another.
I’m not the first person to assault an enemy fortress from the Nevernever side, either. It happened several times to either side in the war with the Red Court. It’s a fairly standard tactical maneuver. It requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to pull off, as Evil Bob had demonstrated with his Normandy defenses.
But I am dead certain—ba-dump-bump-ching—that I’m the first guy to lead an army of spirits in an assault from the spirit-world side . . . and had them start off by screaming, “BOO!”
The spooks all stood in the same space I did, which felt weird as hell—but I hadn’t wanted to take a chance with the rickety Way collapsing and leaving some of the squad behind. When I shouted, they all did, too—and I got a whole hell of a lot more than I bargained for.
The sound that came out of all those spirit throats, including mine, seemed to feed upon itself, wavelengths building and building like seas before a rising storm. Our voices weren’t additive, bunched so closely like that, but multiplicative. When we shouted, the sound went out in a wave that was almost tangible. It hit the backs of the gathered lemurs and bumped them forward half a step. It slammed into the walls of the underground chamber and brought dust and mold cascading down.
And Mort’s eyes snapped open in sudden, startled shock.
“Get ’em!” I howled.
The dead protectors of Chicago’s resident ectomancer let out a bloodcurdling chorus of battle cries and blurred toward the foe.
You hear a lot of stories of honor and chivalry from soldiers. Most people assume that such tales apply primarily to men who lived centuries ago. But let me tell you something: People are people, no matter which century they live in. Soldiers tend to be very practical and they don’t want to die. I think you’d find military men in any century you cared to name who would be perfectly okay with the notion of shooting the enemy in the back if it meant they were more likely to go home in one piece. Sir Stuart’s guardians were, for the most part, soldiers.
Spectral guns blazed. Immaterial knives, hatchets, and arrows flew. Ectoplasm splashed in buckets.
Half the lemurs got torn to shreds of flickering newsreel imagery before I was finished shouting the command to attack, much less before they could recover from the stunning force of our combined voices.
The Corpsetaker shrieked something in a voice that scraped across my head like the tines of a rusty rake, and I twisted aside on instinct. One of the Lecters took the hit, and a gaping hole the size of a bowling ball appeared in the center of his chest.
“With me!” I shouted. I vanished and reappeared at the bottom of the staircase that led down to the chamber. A streamer of urine yellow lightning erupted from the Corpsetaker’s outstretched hand, but I’d had my shield bracelet at the ready, and I deflected the strike into a small knot of stunned enemy lemurs. When it hit them, there was a hideous, explosive cascade of fire and havoc, and they were torn to shreds as if they’d been made of cheesecloth.
Holy crap.
Either one of those spells would have done the same to me if I’d been a quarter second slower. Dead or alive, Kemmler’s disciples did not play for funsies.
The Lecter Specters appeared in a cloud around me, even as I sent a slug of pure force out of the end of my staff, forcing the Corpsetaker to employ her own magical counter, her wrists crossed in front of her body. The energy of my strike splashed off an unseen surface a few inches in f
ront of her hands, and gobbets of pale green light splattered out from the impact.
“Dresden!” screamed Mort. He stared at me—or, more accurately, at the Lecters all around me—with an expression of something very like terror. “What have you done? What have you done?”
“Come on!” I shouted, and vanished from the bottom of the stairs to the top, just as the Corpsetaker appeared halfway up the stairway and sent another torrent of ruinous energy down toward the position the Lecters and I had just vacated.
At the top of the stairs, the tunnel was like I remembered it—decorated in miniature shrines with very real sigils of power concealed within splatters of gibberish. Candles glowed at each position—ward flames that accompanied the activation of the mystic defenses.
“The shrines!” I shouted to the Lecters. “Manifest and destroy them!”
I brought my shield up again, an instant before Corpsetaker sent a slew of dark, gelatinous energy up the stairs. I caught the spell in time, but it instantly began wrenching at my shield as if it had been some kind of living being, chewing away at it, devouring the energy I was using to hold the shield firm.
Crap. I was not going to fare well in a magical duel with someone who had clearly been doing this kind of thing for a long, long time—not when I had the Lecters to protect. The Corpsetaker would tear them apart if she could to stop us from bringing the wards down. She—I always thought of her as a she, for some reason, even though she could grab any kind of body she wanted, male, female, or otherwise—was far more experienced than I was, with what was probably a much broader range of nasty memories upon which to draw.
On top of that, I was already winded, so to speak. The fight with Evil Bob had been a job of work. If I stood there trading punches, she had an excellent chance of wearing me down enough to kill me. If all I did was keep shielding the Lecters, she’d be free to throw her hardest punches, and I felt certain that anyone from Kemmler’s crew could hit like a truck.