by Jim Butcher
“I’m not fighting you,” he insisted, grabbing me by the lapels of my jacket. “We’ve got bigger fish to fry.”
“Fish?” I mumbled, still in a haze. I reached for the Life Savers in my pocket to reduce my vision-induced blood-sugar loss.
The vision. I shuddered, recalling with perfect, horrifying clarity Connor’s betrayal by his old partner.
“I’m sorry about using my power on you,” I said, apology thick in my voice. “I didn’t mean to. How did you escape those zombie hordes?”
Connor’s face went awash with shock, either from the toll my vision had taken on him or from having his past poked and prodded straight out of his private thoughts.
“You can thank New York’s shitty building codes for that,” he said. “Condemned building, that many bodies converging in on one section of the hallway . . . The floor gave out. I barely got out of there alive. My partner, not so much. Her treachery and escape didn’t go quite as planned.”
“No?”
Connor shook his head. “She didn’t make it out of the building,” he said. “Next time I saw her, two floors down, I had to chop off her head when she tried to tear my throat out.”
I paused, fighting to find words of apology but unable to. For invading his mind, for my behavior in the face of his trust issues.
“I’m sorry,” I finally managed to get out, but Connor was already backing away from me across the width of the great hall.
“Save it for later,” he said. “Let’s just see how you fare keeping us alive. Hopefully a lot better than my previous partner, anyway.”
“Huh?” I asked, shaking the last of the cobwebs of fuzziness off my brain.
A cacophony rose from somewhere in the great hall, but at the moment, all I could barely manage to focus on was Connor.
He spread his arms, indicating the rest of the hall, and I managed to finally shift my attention to it.
All around us the room had sprung to life. Or, rather, all the inanimate objects had. Suits of armor shook and clanked on their pedestals. The tapestries all around the hall fluttered with the wind of an unseen force, the weapons on display twisting and swirling around on their wall mounts.
I shook my head at the spectacle of it all. “Effing ghosts,” I muttered.
“Effing ghosts is right,” Connor said. “Probably a whole lineage of familial haunts or else disquiet victims of the owners of this damned castle—I’d bet my reputation on it.” Connor looked out into the center of the chaos, cleared his throat, and addressed no one thing in particular.
“Attention,” he shouted. “I’m Connor Christos, a registered member of Other Division of New York City’s Department of Extraordinary Affairs. I’m ordering you to cease and desist with any and all supernatural operations that may endanger myself or my partner, one Simon Canderous.”
When the crazy around us faltered and died down, relief filled my heart, but only for a second.
Much to my great personal dismay, the cacophony rose again, redoubling as the agitation in the room became more and more palpable. At the far end of the great hall, the terrifying whinny of a horse echoed. My eyes darted in its direction just in time to catch sight of the disembodied armor of a grand steed rearing up on its hind legs, a mounted knight astride it with lance raised to the heavens. The steed’s invisible hooves came down with a thunderous crack on the stone floor of the room, followed by a shuffling canter in a half circle as it decided which of us to charge, which didn’t take long.
Me.
Of course.
“Thanks for pointing me out to the dead guy on the horse, Connor,” I called out. “You’re a real pal.”
“Think nothing of it,” Connor said, stepping further back from me. “Just trying to vest you with the authority of your station. Try not to die. Think of the paperwork it would cause me.”
Whether he was kidding or not, I welcomed the distraction of his banter in the heat of the battle. A little levity went a long way in our line of work, if only for sanity’s sake.
“I know death is always an option,” I said, not sure which way I should dodge, “but I never considered jousting as the way I go out.”
The armored steed trotted in place for a moment, invisible legs working behind the armor strapped to them. The knight upon it spurred his mount forward with the metallic clank of his heels. Like a terrifying medieval tank, it charged forward at a breakneck pace. Sheer fright overtook me, but luckily the first rule drilled into me during Other Division training kicked in.
When in doubt, run.
I turned and my legs pistoned into action, carrying me down the length of the hall, the space so massive that I could really give it my all as I tore off. Faster and faster I pushed myself, legs burning, but with every step the sound of the charge grew ever closer. I didn’t dare chance a look back. All I could hope for was to keep going to the end of the hall. By then it would be too late for my foe to course correct, overcommitting the horse’s hefty weight to forward momentum.
I threw myself against the wall in front of me, spinning around at the last second so my back took the blow, pain exploding across my shoulders.
The knight loomed even closer than I had imagined, leaving me little time to react. My pulse rose in my throat as if my heart were trying to escape. With few options in mind or at hand, I gave a quick, desperate roll to my right, crouching myself as tightly as I could in the corner of the room.
The point of the lance pierced the wall where I had stood nanoseconds ago, sticking there like a giant dart as the horse and knight plowed hopelessly into the wall itself. The suit of armor remained intact, collapsing to the floor like a rag doll, but the components of the steed’s armor did not, and flew off in every direction like so much shrapnel from a war movie. With barely time to take the scene in, I raised my arms just as a large piece of the barding slammed into me, and I tumbled back onto the pile of disassembled horse armor behind me.
“You okay, kid?” Connor called out from the far side of the room.
“Think so,” I said as I tried to right myself, and checked for damage while stumbling my way noisily out of the piled pieces. “Nothing feels broken, if we’re talking bones. Only thing really hurt is maybe my pride. That was a bit less than graceful.”
“Grace is overrated,” Connor said, walking over and offering a hand to help me out of the armor at my feet. “You’re alive. I’d call that a win.”
Clanking arose behind me, the sound like that of a car crashing. Pieces of the now-lifeless horse armor were being shoved aside from beneath as the dismounted knight rose from the pile. A weary sigh escaped my lips and I turned back to Connor, looking for some guidance.
“Hey, mentor,” I said. “Start menting!”
“That’s not a word,” he said, and reached into his trench coat, searching within. His hand emerged a moment later with a stoppered vial in it. Pulling out its top, he wound up like a pitcher on the mound and aimed directly where I stood.
“Get down!” he shouted.
Even though it meant throwing myself back onto the pile of armor, I did as Connor instructed. As the vial lobbed overhead and hit its target, the smell of patchouli filled my nostrils, gagging me as a noxious brown cloud spread out and swirled up around the figure of the knight. Once enveloped, the creature struggled against the invisible confines of the containment cloud, but his efforts were in vain.
Connor gestured toward the containment cloud. “Care to do the honors?”
“Batter up,” I said with a nod, and stood, pulling the retractable bat from my belt. I keyed my password sequence into its button pad and it snickted to extension, assuming the size and shape of a full-sized bat. I cocked it back into a stance Babe Ruth would have been proud of, and swung for the fences at our captured foe. The bat hit with a clatter, then went through the figure. The knight came apart on impact, his helm rolling across the gr
eat hall like a disturbing runaway gutter ball at a bowling alley.
“Huh!” I said, and gestured at his scattered but clearly empty pieces. “Nobody home.”
“Don’t be too sure,” Connor said, pointing past me.
I turned, hoping the armor wasn’t reassembling itself, which, to my relief, it wasn’t. In fact, everything looked normal behind me, much of the earlier chaos having died down.
That was, until I noticed the walls. Subtle at first, they shivered with movement as the weapons along them shook and clanged, struggling to break free from their mountings. Pops and snaps of metal tearing free from the stone echoed throughout the great hall, drifts of powdered castle walls wafting down onto the floor.
“I suggest we find less dangerous quarters,” Connor said as he took off, but not before grabbing my arm and dragging me along behind him.
Blades and blunt instruments tore free and shot after us. I pulled free from my mentor’s grip, fell in step next to him, and bolted past. Score one for youth!
Scanning the great hall, I changed my course. Most of the doorways leading out were arched, but only one housed heavy wooden doors, and that was now my new target. Connor followed as I ran for it, ducking and lurching out of harm’s way as various weapons flew through the air after us.
Once through the open doors, it took all my strength of will to not slam them shut before Connor caught up, even more so with the variety of deadly projectiles chasing after him. I stood at the ready, watching as Connor—trench coat flapping out behind him like a superhero’s cape—ran, dove, and slid into the room. Several of the pursuant weapons shot overhead, thunking into the heavy doors as I slammed them shut.
I turned and threw my weight against it to hold them closed, while Connor scrambled to his feet.
“Might want to rethink that, kid,” he said.
The doors were thick, but how thick I hadn’t been sure, and, as if to prove Connor’s point, a dull pain pushed against my back at a singular point. Pulling away, I spun, craning my neck to see the leather of my jacket torn where it had acted as armor, stopping a blade tip that now poked through the door.
I spread my arms wide and pressed my hands against the door, cautious of any other blades that might work their way through.
Connor joined me, taking over one of the doors.
“We need answers,” he said. “Now! Trying to contain one of those spirits didn’t lessen our problem.”
The sounds of attack on the door increased, as if a thousand hands were pounding away at it.
“The Sedgwick family is pissed,” he continued. “And if we can’t wrap our minds around the why of it, we stand little chance of releasing them. So, gloves off, Simon.”
In my haste to exit the great hall, I hadn’t taken in my new surroundings. As I turned, brightness blinded me. The noonday sun and the New York skyline greeted me through great glass walls that made up a sizable open atrium. Glass shelves lined every wall all the way to the highest heights of the ceiling. On every last one of them were hundreds of tiny glass animals of every size and color.
A single animal, I realized.
Unicorns.
Connor whistled, taking in the collection from where he held the door shut. “Jesus. This isn’t just the last unicorn; this is all the unicorns. Creepy.”
“No,” I said, something familiar sparking inside of me that I couldn’t quite place. “This is an obsession. A true collection.”
I needed to know more, and before I had completed the thought, my gloves were off. Every piece had a distinct look, an odd charm all its own, but it took no time to spot the most prized item. A raised pedestal at the center of the atrium held a piece that clearly occupied a place of honor. I approached it, my hand not even touching it yet, and I could already feel the crackle of psychometric power radiating from it.
I scooped it up. Rearing up in motionless beauty, the carved glass figure, its mane and tail awhirl in flowing waves, was coursing with exquisite action.
I focused on the unicorn in my hand, and the world around me fell away as my mind’s eye flooded once again with the images of another.
I expected to see the family Sedgwick, but instead flashes of a lonely blond girl filled my brain, a mix of shyness with the childish enthusiasm of a ten-year-old. Books of fantasy lined the shelves of a vast library I had yet to see inside this castle, all of them lovingly pored over through the years by this girl. The exuberance of her love for the fantastical shone out into every aspect of her life—images of her costumed as elves, knights, and wizards flew through my mind’s eye, the girl taking on all the roles from those fantastical tales.
The vision shifted into a fast-forward of the young woman’s life. She aged from a girl into a teenager, but this love of hers never waned, not even when trying to socialize herself into a public-school setting. Instead, her fixation only drew stares and whispered insults that snaked their way into her ears.
Hagetha, they called the young Agatha Sedgwick, a name not welcomed, a dark spike in an otherwise beautiful, fragile heart.
A blackness filled her, a slow and silent rage wormed its way into her, her family choosing to educate her at home away from the taunts and jeers, making this only child more and more the shut-in, her only lonely solace taking form in her collection of glass, one of the few things she allowed herself to find joy in. Here, in her menagerie of unicorns, there was a comfort, and as I watched through the vision as she aged into an old woman, her collection grew, but so too did her loneliness.
The bittersweet sorrow of her soul filled my own heart with a great and swelling pain.
As the psychometric vision died, the profound pain didn’t, and I awoke experiencing what riding a mechanical bull must feel like—or a real bull, for that matter. My very being seemed stuck in my own personal earthquake as I struggled to shake off my postvision haze, unable to fathom just what the hell was going on around me.
It was possible—as my mind cleared a bit—that it might have something to do with the long glass spear sticking out of my chest.
My heart raced as I feared being run clean through, but the very fact that my heart could race was proof positive that I probably hadn’t been.
I had been impaled, though, but only through the soft area of my jacket, in the space between my torso and underarm.
I pulled it out and slumped to the floor. Already I was fishing for the Life Savers in my pockets, cramming half a roll in my mouth at a time to counter my shaking dizziness.
Somewhere off behind me the crash of breaking glass filled my ears over and over while I waited for my sugar to rise. I managed to roll myself over like an infant, only to discover Connor holding my bat at the ready and going toe to hoof with what had impaled me.
Most of the shelves in the atrium were now bare, their contents joined together in one multicolored, one-horned creature that was larger than life.
“Great,” I managed to croak out. “No one told me we’d be dealing with enchanted battle unicorns.”
“Unicorns aren’t so cute now, are they?” Connor called out, bringing my bat down on it. A section of the creature’s neck tore off, its component pieces flying away. Even as they hit the floor, the unicorn’s neck started to re-form, many of the damaged pieces flowing back to rejoin the creature.
“Stop hitting it!” I shouted after a quick assessment. “You’re only giving it more broken and jagged pieces to jab at us with.”
“So, what?” Connor asked, annoyed. “We just let family Sedgwick run us through with their pet?”
Focusing on what I had psychometrically seen and all I had felt from the vision, I tried to piece together the puzzle of Agatha Sedgwick from what I knew.
“It’s not the whole family,” I said. “It’s just one person, and I don’t think she’s trying to kill us.”
Connor backed away from the glass creature and handed my
bat back to me as he helped me up off the floor, jabbing a finger at the torn hole in my jacket.
“You sure about that, kid?”
He let go and started off across the atrium, giving the glass monstrosity more than a single target to choose from.
I nodded. “I think so,” I said. “I think we’re dealing only with the most recently deceased, Agatha Sedgwick. Killing us is just sort of an inadvertent by-product of her intent.”
Connor looked back to me with both eyebrows raised. “Meaning?”
“I think she’s throwing a tantrum. It’s just a mix of the rage, frustration, and confusion she felt from her life.”
“That might make some sort of sense,” Connor said. The unicorn turned its newly re-formed horn in his direction. “Lingering feelings from the living can get a bit amplified after death. Ghosts have a tendency to go over the top. The question is, What’s she so angry about?”
The horn jabbed at Connor. He shrugged his trench coat off his shoulders and brandished it at the unicorn like some sort of urban matador.
“Whatever its motivation,” he continued, “it’s too pissed off for me to contain it or ghost-whisper it out of crazy time.”
Legs still shaking, I moved toward the creature. Fighting every instinct I had to flee, I tapped my bat on the tiled floor.
“Hey!” I shouted, hoping to draw the creature’s attention. When it didn’t respond, I chose a different tack. “Hey, Hagetha.”
It whirled around so hard that pieces flew from its formidable form. The cold, dead eyes of the creature found me as it briskly stomped its way across the room toward me. I raised my bat, simply to have something between the two of us to calm my nerves.
“That’s what they called you, isn’t it?” I asked. “Those who mocked you.”
The creature stopped, hesitating as it shuffled in place with a great grinding of glass.
“That was life, Agatha,” I said. “And that time is over. No one can hurt you now.”
The glass unicorn cocked its head at me and, lowering its horn in my direction, the tip catching the very end of my extended bat, slowly circled the whole of it as if we were fencing and she were doing an envelopment.