by Butcher, Jim
“Stop,” I said, pointing a finger at him. “Don’t you dare tell me to make this choice in the dark. Captain Jack gave me a half-truth that sent me running around Chicago again. Another angel told me a lie that got me killed. If you really care so much about my free will, you’ll be willing to help me make a free, informed choice, just as if I was a grown-up. So either admit that you’re trying to push me in your own direction or else put your principles where your mouth is and make like the Ghost of Christmas Present.”
He stared at me for a long moment, his brow furrowed. “From your perspective . . . yes, I suppose it does look that way.” Then he nodded firmly and extended his arm toward me. “Take my hand.”
I did.
The white expanse gave way to reality once more. Suddenly, I stood with Uriel inside the Corpsetaker’s hideout, on the stairs where that final confrontation had come. Molly was at the top of the stairs, leaning back against the wall. Her body was twisting and straining, her chest heaving with desperate breaths. Blood ran from both nostrils and had filled the sclera of her eyes, turning them into inhuman-looking blue-and-red stones. She let out little gasps and choked screams, along with whispered snatches of words that didn’t make any sense.
Uriel did that thing with his hand again, and suddenly I could see Molly even more clearly—and saw that some kind of hideous mass was wound around her, like a python constricting its prey. It consisted of strands of some kind of slimy jelly, purple and black and covered with pulsing pustules that reeked of corruption and decay.
Corpsetaker.
Molly’s duel with the Corpsetaker was still under way.
Butters’s body lay at Molly’s feet, empty of life and movement. And his shade—now I could see that it was bound into near immobility by threads of the Corpsetaker’s dark magic—stood exactly as he had when I last saw him, staring down at his own body in horror. Down here in the electrical-junction room, Murphy and the wolves were bound with threads of the same dark magic as Butters—a sleeping spell that had compelled them all into insensibility.
Molly whimpered, drawing my gaze back to the top of the stairs as her legs gave way. She slid slowly down the wall, her eyes rolling wildly. Her mouth started moving more surely, her voice becoming stronger. And darker. For about two seconds, one of the Corpsetaker’s hate-filled laughs rolled from Molly’s lips. That hideous, slimy mass began to simply ooze into the young woman’s skin.
“Do something,” I said to Uriel.
He shook his head. “I cannot interfere. This battle was Molly’s choice. She knew the risks and chose to hazard them.”
“She isn’t strong enough,” I snapped. “She can’t take on that thing.”
Uriel arched an eyebrow. “Were you under the impression that she did not know that from the beginning, Harry? Yet she did it.”
“Because she feels guilty,” I said. “Because she blames herself for my death. She’s in the same boat I was.”
“No,” Uriel said. “None of the Fallen twisted her path.”
“No, that was me,” I said, “but only because one of them got to me.”
“Nonetheless,” Uriel said, “that choice was yours—and hers.”
“You’re just going to stand there?” I asked.
Uriel folded his arms and tapped his chin with one fingertip. “Mmmm. It does seem that perhaps she deserves some form of aid. Perhaps if I’d had the presence of mind to see to it that some sort of agent had been sent to balance the scales, to give her that one tiny bit of encouragement, that one flicker of inspiration that turned the tide . . .” He shook his head sadly. “Things might be different now.”
And, as if on cue, Mortimer Lindquist, ectomancer, limped out of the lower hallway and into the electrical-junction room, with Sir Stuart’s shade at his right hand.
Mort took a look around, his dark eyes intent, and then his gaze locked onto Molly.
“Hey,” he croaked. “You. Arrogant bitch ghost.”
Molly’s eyes snapped fully open and flicked to Mort. They were filled with more bitter, venomous hate than my apprentice could ever have put into them.
“I’m not really into this whole hero thing,” Mort said. “Don’t have the temperament for it. Don’t know a lot about the villain side of the equation, either.” He planted his feet, facing the Corpsetaker squarely, his hands clenched into fists at his side. “But it seems to me, you half-wit, that you probably shouldn’t have left a freaking ectomancer a pit full of wraiths to play with.”
And with a howl, more than a thousand wraiths came boiling around the corner in a cloud of clawing hands, gnashing teeth, and screaming hunger. They rode on a wave of Mort’s power and no longer drifted with lazy, disconnected grace. Now they came forth like rushing storm clouds, like racing wolves, like hungry sharks, a tide of mindless destruction.
I saw Molly’s eyes widen and the pulsing spiritual mass that was the Corpsetaker began to pull away from the young woman.
My apprentice didn’t let her.
Molly let out a wheezing cackle and both hands formed into claws that clutched at the air. I saw the energy of her own magic surround her fingers so that she grasped onto the Corpsetaker’s essence as if it had been a nearly physical thing. The necromancer’s spirit began to ooze through Molly’s grip. The exhausted girl could only slow the Corpsetaker down.
But it was enough.
The tide of wraiths slammed into the Corpsetaker like a freight train, their wails blending into a sound that I had heard before, in the train tunnel where Carmichael saved me. The Corpsetaker had begun to resume her usual form the instant she disengaged from Molly, and I could see the sudden shock and horror in her beautiful eyes as that spiritual tide overwhelmed her. I saw her struggle uselessly as the wraith train carried her up the stairs and out into the night. The train swept her straight up into the air—and then reversed itself and slammed her down, into the earth.
I saw her try to scream.
But all I heard was the blaring howl of the horn of a southbound train.
And then she was gone.
“You’re right,” Uriel said, his tone filled with a chill satisfaction. “Someone needed to do something.” He glanced aside at me, gave me a slight bow of his head, and said, “Well-done.”
Mort limped up the stairs to check on Molly. “You’re the one who called to me, eh?”
Molly looked up at him, obviously too exhausted to move more than her head. “Harry . . . Well, it’s sort of complicated to explain what was going on. But he told me you could help.”
“Guess he was right,” Mort said.
“Where is he?” Molly asked. “I mean . . . his ghost.”
Mort glanced around and looked right at me—right through me. He shook his head. “Not here.”
Molly closed her eyes and began to cry quietly.
“I got her, boss,” Molly said quietly. “We got her. And I’m still here. Still me. Thank you.”
“She’s thanking me,” I said quietly. “For that.”
“And much more,” Uriel said. “She still has her life. Her future. Her freedom. You did save her, you know. The idea to have her call to Mortimer in the closing moments of the psychic battle was inspired.”
“I’ve cost her too much,” I said quietly.
“I believe that when you went after your daughter, you said something about letting the world burn. That you and your daughter would roast marshmallows.”
I nodded bleakly.
“It is one thing for you to say, ‘Let the world burn.’ It is another to say, ‘Let Molly burn.’ The difference is all in the name.”
“Yeah,” I croaked. “I’m starting to realize that. Too late to do any good. But I get it.”
Uriel gave me a steady look and said nothing.
I shook my head. “Get some rest, kid,” I called, though I knew she wouldn’t hear me. “You’ve earned it.”
The scene unfolded. Murphy and the wolves woke up less than a minute after the Corpsetaker was shown to the door.
Will and company changed back to their human forms, while Mort, after a whispered tip from Sir Stuart, rushed over to Butters’s fallen body. He worked a subtle, complex magic that made some of mine look pretty crude, and drew Butters’s spirit from the disintegrating tangle of the Corpsetaker’s spell and back down into his physical body.
It took several minutes, and when Butters woke up, Andi and Marci, both naked, both rather pleasant that way, were giving him CPR. They’d kept his body alive in the absence of his soul.
“Wow,” Butters slurred as he opened his eyes. He looked back and forth between the two werewolf girls. “Subtract the horrible pain in my chest, this migraine, and all the mold and mildew, and I’m living the dream.”
Then he passed out.
The cops showed up a bit after that. Two of them were guys Murphy knew. The werewolves vanished into the night a couple of seconds before the blue bubbles of the cop cars showed up, taking the illegal portions of Murphy’s armament with them. Murphy and Mort told them all about how Mort had been abducted and tortured by the Big Hoods, and if they didn’t tell the whole story, what they did tell was one hundred percent true.
Molly and Butters got handed off to EMTs, along with several of the Big Hoods who had been knocked around and chewed up. Mort got some attention, too, though he refused to be taken to a hospital. The rest of the Big Hoods got a pair of cuffs and a ride downtown. Boz was carted out like a tranquilized rhinoceros.
Karrin and Mort stood around outside as the uniforms sorted everything out, and I walked over to stand close enough to hear them.
“. . . came back to help,” Mort said. “It happens sometimes. Some people die feeling that something was incomplete. I guess Dresden thought that he hadn’t done enough to make a difference around here.” Mort shook his head. “As if the big goon didn’t turn everything upside down whenever he showed up.”
Karrin smiled faintly and shook her head. “He always said you knew ghosts. You’re sure it was really him?”
Mort eyed her. “Me and everyone else, yeah.”
Karrin scowled and stared into the middle distance.
Mort frowned and then his expression softened. “You didn’t want it to be his ghost. Did you?”
Murphy shook her head slowly, but said nothing.
“You needed everyone to be wrong about it. Because if it really was his ghost,” Mort said, “it means that he really is dead.”
Murphy’s face . . . just crumpled. Her eyes overflowed and she bowed her head. Her body shook in silence.
Mort chewed on his lip for a moment, then glanced at the cops on the scene. He didn’t say anything else to Murphy or try to touch her—but he did put himself between her and everyone else, so that no one would see her crying.
Damn.
I wished I’d been bright enough to see what kind of guy Morty was while I was still alive.
I stood there watching Karrin for a moment and then turned away. It hurt too much to see her in pain when I couldn’t reach out and touch her, or make an off-color joke, or find some way to give her a creative insult or otherwise show her that I cared.
It didn’t seem fair that I should get to say good-bye to her, even if she couldn’t hear it. She hadn’t gotten to say it to me. So I didn’t say anything. I gave her a last look and then I walked away.
I went back over to Uriel to find him conversing with Sir Stuart.
“Don’t know,” Sir Stuart was saying. “I’m not . . . not as right as I used to be, sir.”
“There’s more than enough left to rebuild on,” Uriel said. “Trust me. The ruins of a spirit like Sir Stuart’s are more substantial than most men ever manage to dredge up. I’d be very pleased to have you working for me.”
“My descendant,” Sir Stuart said, frowning over at Morty.
Uriel watched Mort shielding Karrin’s sorrow and said, “You’ve watched over him faithfully, Stuart. And he’s grown a great deal in the past few years. I think he’s going to be fine.”
Sir Stuart’s shade looked at Mortimer and smiled, undeniable pride in his features. Then he glanced at Uriel and said, “I still get to fight, aye?”
Uriel gave him a very sober look and said, “I think I can find you something.”
Sir Stuart thought about it for a moment and then nodded. “Aye, sir. Aye. I’ve been in this town too long. A new billet is just what I need.”
Uriel looked past Sir Stuart to me and winked. “Excellent,” he said, and shook hands with Sir Stuart. “A man named Carmichael will be in touch.”
I lingered until everyone had vanished into the thick mist that still cloaked the earth. It took less time than it usually did for these sorts of things; no one had died. No need to call in the lab guys. The uniform cops closed the old metal door as best they could, drew a big X over it with crime-scene tape, and seemed willing to ignore the hole that had been blasted in it.
“They’re going to be all right, you know,” Uriel said quietly. “Tonight’s injuries will not be lethal to any of them.”
“Thank you,” I said. “For telling me that.”
He nodded. “Have you decided?”
I shook my head. “Show me my brother.”
He arched an eyebrow at me. Then he shrugged, and once again offered his hand.
We vanished from the night and appeared in a very expensively furnished apartment. I recognized my brother’s place at once.
It had changed a bit. The brushed steel décor had been softened. The old Broadway musical posters had been replaced with paintings, mostly pastoral landscapes that provided an interesting counterpoint of warmth to the original style of the place. Candles and other decorative pieces had filled in the rather Spartan spaces I remembered, adding still more warmth. All in all, the place looked a lot more like a home now, a lot less like a dressed stage.
A couple of things were out of place. There was a chair in the living room positioned in front of the large flat-screen, high-definition television set the size of a dining room table. The chair was upholstered in brown leather and looked comfortable, and it didn’t match the rest of the room. There were also food stains on it. Empty liquor bottles littered the side table next to it.
The door opened and my brother, Thomas, walked in. He might have been an inch under six feet tall, though it was hard for me to tell—he had worn so many different kinds of fashionable shoes that his height was always changing subtly. He had dark hair, currently as long as my shortest finger, and it was a mess. Not only was it messy, it was simply messy, instead of attractively messy, and for Thomas that was hideous. He had a couple of weeks’ growth of beard; not long enough to be an actual beard yet, but too long to be a sexy shadow.
His cold grey eyes were sunken, with dark rings beneath them. He wore jeans and a T-shirt with drink stains on it. He hadn’t even pretended to need a coat against the night’s cold, and breaking their easily maintained cover as human beings was something that the vampires of the White Court simply did not do. For God’s sake, he was barefoot. He’d just walked out like that, apparently to the nearest liquor store.
My brother took a bottle of whiskey—expensive whiskey—from a paper bag and let the bag fall to the floor. Then he sat down in the brown leather chair, pointed a remote at the television, and clicked it on. He clicked buttons and it skipped through several channels. He stopped clicking based, apparently, on his need to take a drink, and stopped on some kind of sports channel where they were playing rugby.
Then he simply sat, slugged from the bottle, and stared.
“It’s hard for the half-born,” Uriel observed in a quiet, neutral tone.
“What did you call him?” I asked. Belligerently. Which probably wasn’t really bright, but Thomas was my brother. I didn’t like the thought of anyone judging him.
“The scions of mortals and immortals,” Uriel said, unperturbed. “Halflings, half-bloods, half-born. The mortal road is difficult enough without adding a share of our burdens to it as well.”
I grunted. “Tha
t skinwalker got hold of him a while back. It broke something in him.”
“The naagloshii feel a need to prove that every creature they meet is as flawed and prone to darkness as they themselves proved to be,” Uriel said. “It . . . gives them some measure of false peace, I think, to lie to themselves like that.”
“You sound like you feel sorry for them,” I said, my voice hard.
“I feel sorry for all the pain they have, and more so for all that they inflict on others. Your brother offers ample explanation for my feelings.”
“What that thing did to Thomas. How is that different from what the Fallen did to me?”
“He didn’t die as a result,” Uriel said bluntly. “He still has choice.” He added, in a softer voice, “What the naagloshii did to him was not your fault.”
“I know that,” I said, not very passionately.
The door to the apartment opened, and a young woman entered. She was in her twenties and gorgeous. Her face and figure were appealing, glowing with vitality and health, and her hair was like white silk. She wore a simple dress and a long coat, and she slipped out of her shoes immediately upon entering.
Justine paused at the door and stared steadily at Thomas for a long moment.
“Did you eat anything today?” she asked.
Thomas flicked the television to another channel and turned up the volume.
Justine pressed her lips together. Then she walked with firm, purposeful strides into the apartment’s back bedroom.
She came out again a moment later, preceded by the click of her high heels. She was dressed in red lace underthings that left just enough to the imagination, and in the same shade of heels. She looked like the cover of a Victoria’s Secret catalog, and moved with a sort of subsurface, instinctive sensuality that could make dead men stir with interest. I had empirical evidence of the fact.
But I also knew that my brother couldn’t touch her. The touch of love, or anyone who was truly beloved, was anathema to the White Court, like holy water was for Hollywood vampires. Thomas and Justine had nearly killed themselves for the sake of saving the other, and ever since then, every time my brother touched her, he came away with second-degree burns.