by Butcher, Jim
“Stu,” I heard Mort say. “You know knots, right?”
I glanced back and saw Sir Stuart nod. Mort nodded back and started gathering up the coils of rope I’d pulled off him. He beckoned to Sir Stuart. “Come in. I don’t want the man mountain there getting up and finishing what he started.”
I almost hesitated, to make sure Mort was all right, but I’d spent too much time down here already, and I could feel the hectic buzz of my fatigue growing by the moment. I had to get upstairs.
There was only one reason Corpsetaker would have taken down her own wards as she had. She wasn’t limited to such a small sampling of humanity now, when it came to seizing a new body. She’d wanted people to come inside her lair.
It would give her more variety to choose from.
I rushed up the stairs, praying that I would be in time to stop Kemmler’s protégé from taking one of my friends—for keeps.
Chapter Forty-eight
I pounded up the stairs and found that it was getting dark. Dammit. I’d gotten way too used to the upside of ghostliness. I reached up to my neck to find my mother’s pentacle amulet and . . .
. . . and it wasn’t there. Which it should have been. I mean, my actual duster had been destroyed, but the one I was wearing was an exact duplicate. There was no reason my mother’s amulet shouldn’t have been there, but it wasn’t. That was possibly something significant.
But I didn’t have time to worry about it at the moment. Instead, I sent a whisper of will into my staff, and the runes carved in it began to glow with blue-white wizard light, casting their shapes in pure light on the moldy stone walls and floor of the hallway, showing me the way. I didn’t have much magic left in me, but a simple light spell was much, much easier than any kind of violent spell, requiring far less energy.
I ran down the hall, past the filthy sleeping rooms with curtains for doors, and through the break in the wall, to the old electrical-junction room.
A flashlight lay on the floor, spilling light onto a patch of wolf fur from a couple of inches away and otherwise doing nothing to illuminate the scene. I had to brighten the light from my staff to see that Murphy and the wolves were lying in a heap on the floor, next to the unconscious Big Hoods.
The Corpsetaker was nowhere to be seen.
Neither was Molly.
I turned in a slow circle, looking for any sign of what had happened, and found nothing.
Feet scraped on rock and I turned swiftly, bringing up my staff, ready to unleash whatever power I had left in me—and found Butters standing halfway down the stairs, looking like a rabbit about to bolt. His face was pale as a sheet behind his glasses, and his dark hair was a wild mess.
“My God,” he breathed. “Dresden?”
“Back for a limited engagement,” I breathed, lowering the staff. “Butters, what happened?”
“I . . . I don’t know. They started shouting something and then they just . . . just collapsed.”
“And you didn’t?” I asked.
“I was out there,” he said, pointing behind him. “You know. Looking out for the police or whatever.”
“Being Eyes, huh?” I said. I turned back to Murphy and the wolves.
“Yeah, pretty much,” he said. He moved quietly down the stairs. “Are they all right?”
I crouched down over Murphy and felt her neck. Her pulse was strong and steady. Ditto for the nearest of the wolves. “Yeah,” I said, my heart slowing down a little. “I think s—”
Something cold and hard pressed against the back of my head. I looked down.
Murphy’s SIG was missing from its holster.
“Everyone trusts a doctor,” purred Butters, in a tone of voice that Butters would never have used. “Even wizards, Dresden.”
I felt myself tensing. “Corpsetaker.”
“You were able to manifest after all? Intriguing. You’ve a natural gift for darker magic, I think. My master would have snapped you up in an instant.”
I’d spent an afternoon with Murphy working on gun disarms, at Dough Joe’s Hurricane Gym. I tried to remember which way I had to spin to attempt to take the gun away. It depended on how it was being held—and I had no idea how Corpsetaker was holding the weapon on me. I was pretty sure Butters was a lefty, but I didn’t think that would matter to the Corpsetaker once she set up shop. “Oh, boy. I could have hung out with people like you? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have worked out.”
“Possibly not,” Corpsetaker said. “I accorded you far more respect than you merited, as an opponent. How much of you is left behind that body you’ve cobbled together? Scarcely more than one of those pathetic wraiths, I think. You could have made a viable move in time, but clearly you’ve no patience, no head for strategy.”
“Yeah. I guess I’ve still got a soul and a conscience where you installed that stuff.”
“Soul? Conscience?” Corpsetaker said, almost laughing. “Those are nothing but words. They aren’t even true limits—just the figments of them. Useless.”
“Just because something isn’t solid doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” I said. “If you had a brain in your head, you’d know that.”
“You’re obsessed with the fantasies of the young,” she replied with my friend’s breath. “Though I must admit that that the ironic reversal of our current state is simply delicious.”
And without a hesitation or any change in the tone of her voice, she put a bullet into the back of my head.
The pain was infinitely brief and indescribable, a massive spike of agony that felt as if it should have sent me flying. I saw a cloud of something fly forward and then splatter all over one of the wolves and the nearest Big Hood. Ectoplasm, I realized dully. My physical body had been destroyed. It had fallen back into the spirit matter from which I’d formed it.
The pain faded, and then I was back in the still, neutral absence of sensation of the ghost state. I reached for the splattered matter with an instinctive, unspoken yearning to return to it.
I could barely see my hand.
I tried to turn around, but it felt like I was submerged in something thicker and more viscous than water, and it took forever.
I stared into the Corpsetaker’s eyes within Butters’s face and watched the body-jumping lunatic smirk at me. “Not much of you now, is there?” she murmured. “You’ll be a wraith within days. I think that balances our account. Enjoy eternity, Dresden.”
I tried to snarl a curse, but I was just so tired. I couldn’t get the sound to come out of me. And by the time I had tried, Corpsetaker had taken Butters’s body back to the bottom of the stairs. She was moving so fast.
Or . . . or maybe I was just that slow.
I tried to follow, and all I could manage was to drift in the Corpsetaker’s wake, moving with grace, but slowly. So slowly.
Corpsetaker made a gesture and a veil fell away from another shade at the top of the stairs. It was Butters. He stood there dressed not in his winter gear, but in the scrubs I was far more used to seeing him wear. He was completely motionless except for his eyes, which rolled around frantically. A rapidly evaporating puddle of ectoplasm spread at his feet. An expression of pure confusion was locked onto his face.
Corpsetaker had been a big fan of body switching. When she left me and Morty in the basement, she must have come directly up here to grab a new body. She’d probably dropped some variant of a sleeping spell on Murphy and the wolves—and then Butters must have shown up.
Corpsetaker had gone with her usual trick, forcibly trading bodies with a victim—and the manifested ghost body she’d been in had fallen back into ectoplasm the moment she wasn’t there to give it energy and form. Butters’s essence, his soul, had just been booted out of his body, and now it stood there, vulnerable and unmoving—brightly colored but fading away, even as I watched. She’d tossed a quick veil over Butters’s shade so that no one who might come upon her would see him standing there, forlorn and confused, while she drove around in his hijacked body.
The thing that
really got to me? Corpsetaker threw a little smirk back at me as she got to Butters’s shade. There wasn’t anything I could do to stop her, but she wanted me to see how thoroughly she’d outthought and outmaneuvered me.
But the universe has a funny sense of humor, and apparently it’s not always aimed at me. While Corpsetaker looked back at me to smirk, Molly rippled forth from under a veil of her own, on the last step between Butters’s stolen body and the explosion-chewed door. She grabbed the Corpsetaker by the front of Butters’s coat. Butters wasn’t exactly heroic in build. Molly, on the other hand, was several inches taller than he and had her mother’s genes, everything I’d been able to teach her about mixing it up, and six months of hard time under the tender guiding hand of the Leanansidhe.
Molly slammed the Corpsetaker against the wall so hard that stolen teeth slammed together. Then she seized Butters’s freaking face in a clawlike hand and thrust her head close, locking eyes with the Corpsetaker.
I wanted to scream a negation, but nothing came out. I frantically tried to move faster. If I succeeded, it didn’t show.
“You want to play head games?” Molly snarled, her blue eyes blazing. “Let’s go.”
The Corpsetaker’s face contorted into an expression somewhere between murderous rage and that of an orgasm, and she opened her stolen eyes wide.
Molly and the dark wizard went into a soulgaze, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it—except keep trying to get closer.
I could feel power flickering between them, though, like bursts of heat coming out of a furnace, as I got glacially nearer. It was an entirely invisible struggle, a simultaneous and mutual siege of the personality. Mind magic is dangerous, slippery stuff, and doing combat with another mind is all about imagination, focus, and sheer willpower. Right now, Molly was thrusting an array of images and ideas at the Corpsetaker, trying to force the other to pay attention to them. Some of the thoughts would be there to undermine defenses, others to assault them, and still others trying to slip past unnoticed to wreak havoc from within. Some of the thoughts would be simple things—whispered doubts meant to shake the other’s confidence, for example. Others would be far more complex constructions, idea demons imagined ahead of time, prepared for such an occasion and unleashed upon the thoughts and memories of the foe.
The White Council hated mind magic, generally speaking. If you beat someone’s defenses, you could do a lot of things to them, and precious few of them were good. Events, however, had forced them to acknowledge the necessity of giving all of its members lessons in psychic self-defense that were more comprehensive than the simple wall technique that I’d been briefly introduced to. A couple of old-timers who knew how to play the game had begun dispensing the basics to everyone interested in learning.
As it turned out, I had a natural fortress of personality, which explained a lot—like how hard it had always been for faerie glamour to trick me for long, and why I’d been able to grind through several forms of mental assault over the years. If someone came in after me, they had a big badass castle to contend with. They could pound on it all day, as such things were measured, without breaking the defenses, and I’d been told that it would take an extended campaign to conquer my head entirely—like any decent castle, there were multiple lines and structures where new defenses could take hold. But I didn’t have much of a forward game. For me, the best offense had to be an obstinate defense.
Molly, on the other hand . . . well. Molly was sort of scary.
Her castle wasn’t huge and imposing—the damned thing was invisible. Made of mirrors, covered in fog, wrapped in darkness, and generally hard even to pin down, much less besiege; anyone who went into her head had better bring a GPS, a seeing-eye dog, and a backup set of eyeballs. Worse, her offense was like dealing with a Mongolian horde. She’d send in waves and waves of every kind of mental construction imaginable, and while you were busy looking at those, ninja thoughts would be sneaking through your subconscious, planting the psychological equivalent of explosives. We’d practiced against each other a lot—immovable object versus irresistible force. It generally ended in a draw, when Molly had to quit and nurse a headache, at which point I would join her in scarfing down aspirin. A couple of times, my thuggish constructions had stumbled over her defenses and started breaking mirrors. A couple of times, her horde had gotten lucky or particularly sneaky. We’d had the same thought-image set up to signal victory—Vader swooping down in his TIE fighter, smugly stating, “I have you now.” Once that got through, the game was over.
But outside of practice, that thought could just as easily be something more like, “Put your gun into your mouth and pull the trigger.” We both knew that. We both worked hard to improve as a result. It was a part of the training I’d taken every bit as seriously as teaching her theory or enchantments or exorcism, or any of a hundred other areas we’d covered over the past few years.
But we’d never done it for blood.
The Corpsetaker moved Butters’s hands up to gently frame Molly’s cheeks and said, “My, my, my. Training standards have improved.”
Molly slammed Corpsetaker’s head back against the wall with a short, harsh motion, and said, “Stop squirming and fight.”
Corpsetaker bared Butters’s teeth in a slow grin, and suddenly surged forward, slamming Molly’s back against the opposite wall while simultaneously moving up a stair, so that their eyes were on the same level. “Slippery little girl. But I was crushing minds like yours centuries before your great-grandfather’s grandfather left the Old Country.”
Molly suddenly let out a gasp, and her face twisted in pain.
“They never have the stomach to hurt their darling little apprentices,” Corpsetaker crooned. “That’s called pain. Let me give you a lesson.”
“Lady,” Molly panted, “did you pick the wrong part of my life in which to mess with me.” She took a deep breath and spoke in a ringing, furious voice. “Now get the fuck out of my friend. Ideru!”
I felt the surge of her will as she spoke the word, and suddenly reality seemed to condense around my apprentice. There was a terrible, terrible force that ripped forth from her, pulling hungrily at everything around it. I’d felt something similar once, when a nascent White Court vampire had unintentionally begun to feed on me—an energy that spiraled and swirled and pulled at the roots of my senses. But that was only one facet of the gravity that Molly exuded with the spell.
Corpsetaker’s eyes widened in surprise and sudden strain. Then she snarled, “Have it your way. The little doctor was my second choice, in any case.”
And then I saw Corpsetaker’s dark, mad soul flow into my apprentice on the tidal pull of the beckoning she’d performed.
The expression of Butters’s face went empty and he collapsed, utterly without movement of any kind. Three feet away, his shade’s helpless, confused gaze locked onto his fallen physical form, and his eyes went wide with terror.
Molly screamed in sudden shock—and fear. In that instant, I saw in her eyes the reflection of her terror, the panic of someone who has come loaded for bear and found herself face-to-face with a freaking dinosaur instead.
My drifting, dream-slow advance had finally gotten me close enough. With sluggish and agonizing grace, I stretched out one hand . . .
. . . and caught the Corpsetaker’s ankle as she slithered into my apprentice.
I settled my grip grimly and felt myself pulled forward, into the havoc of the war for Molly’s body, mind, and soul.
Chapter Forty-nine
I landed in the middle of a war.
There was a ruined city all around me. The sky above boiled with storm clouds, moving and roiling too quickly to be real, filled with contrasting colors of lightning. Rain hammered down. I heard screams and shouted imprecations all around me, overlapping one another, coming from thousands of sources, blending into a riotous roar—and every single voice was either Molly’s or the Corpsetaker’s.
As I watched, some great beast somewhere between a serp
ent and a whale smashed its way through a brick building—a fortress, I realized—maybe fifty yards away, thrashing about as it fell and grinding it to powder. A small trio of dots of bright red light appeared on the vast thing’s rubble-dusted flanks, just like the targeting of the Predator’s shoulder cannon in the movies of the same name, and then multiple streaks of blue-white light flashed in from somewhere and blew a series of holes the size of train tunnels right through the creature. Around me, I saw groups of soldiers, many of them in sinister black uniforms, others looking like idealized versions of United States infantry, laying into one another with weapons of every sort imaginable, from swords to rocket launchers.
A line of tracer fire went streaking right through me, having no more effect than a stiff breeze. I breathed a faint sigh of relief. I was inside Molly’s mindscape, but her conflict was not with me, and neither was the Corpsetaker’s. I was just as much a ghost here at the moment as I had been back in the real world.
The city around me, I saw, was a vast grid of fortified buildings, and I realized that the kid had changed her usual tactics. She wasn’t trying to obscure the location of her mental fortress with the usual tricks of darkness and fog. She had instead chosen a different method of obfuscation, building a sprawl of decoys, hiding the true core of her mind somewhere among them.
Corpsetaker had countered her, it would seem, by the simple if difficult expedient of deciding to crush them all, even if it had to be done one at a time. That vast beast construct had been something more massive than I had ever attempted in my own imagination, though Molly had tossed some of those at me once or twice. It wasn’t simply a matter of thinking big—there was an energy investment in creating something with that kind of mental mass, and Molly generally felt such huge, unsubtle thrusts weren’t worth the effort they took—especially since someone with the right attitude and imagination would take them down with only moderately more difficulty than small constructs.
Corpsetaker, though, evidently didn’t agree. She was a lot older than Molly or me, and she would have deeper reserves of strength to call upon, greater discipline, and the confidence of long experience. The kid had managed to take on the Corpsetaker on Molly’s most familiar ground, and to play her hand in her strongest suit—but my apprentice’s strength didn’t look like it was holding up well against the necromancer’s experience and expertise.