Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  “The, uh, the ghost,” Butters said. “It’s hurt?”

  “Quite severely,” the being said. “But it’s easily mended—if you wish to do it.”

  Butters blinked at him. “What? Yes, yes, of course I wish it.”

  “Very good, sahib,” the being said. And then it whipped and darted through the night air, gathering up all the floating, glittering gems from the vanishing remains of the lemurs. It brought them together into a single mass and then knelt down next to my head.

  “Bob,” I said quietly.

  Bob the Skull, formerly my personal assistant and confidant, hesitated beside me as I said his name. Once again, I became aware of his intense regard, but if he saw anything, it didn’t register on his featureless face.

  “Harry,” he said. “Open up. You need to restore these memories to your essence.”

  “Restore what?” I asked.

  “Eat ’em,” Bob said firmly. “Open your mouth.”

  I was tired and confused, so it was easier to just do as he said. I closed my eyes as he dropped the mass of gems into my open mouth. But instead of feeling hard gems, fresh, cool water flowed into my mouth, swirling over my parched tongue and throat as I eagerly swallowed it down.

  Pain vanished instantly. The disorientation began to fade and disappear. My confusion and weariness followed those others within a moment, and a deep breath later, I was sitting up in place, feeling more or less as sane and together as I had been when I had woken up that evening.

  Bob offered me a hand and I took it. He pulled me to my feet as if I’d weighed less than nothing. “Well,” he said. “At least you don’t seem to be a bad copy. I was half-afraid you’d be some kind of demented Winter Knight wannabe with an eye patch and a goatee or something.”

  “Um,” I said. “Thank you?”

  “De nada,” Bob said.

  “Bob,” Butters said in a firm voice. “You’ve fulfilled your task.” Bob the Skull sighed and turned to bow in a florid gesture of courtesy toward Butters, before dissolving into a cloud of orange sparks again and flowing back toward the flashlight. I saw then that the spotlight casing hadn’t contained lightbulbs and batteries and such—just Bob’s skull, a human-bone artifact of a long-dead enchanter who had built it as a haven that could harbor the essence of a spiritual being.

  “Hey, Bob,” I said. “Could you relay my voice to Butters?”

  “Don’t have to, former boss,” Bob said cheerfully. “On account of the fact that Butters is a whole heck of a lot more talented at magical theory than you.”

  I frowned. “What?”

  “Oh, he doesn’t have a lick of magical talent,” Bob assured me. “But he’s got a brain, which, let’s face it, hasn’t always been your most salient feature.”

  “Bob,” Butters said in a scolding tone. Then he fumbled in his parka’s pocket and produced a small, old radio. “Here, see? I had Bob go over your notes from the Nightmare case, Harry. Bob said you created a radio that he could communicate through. So . . .”

  I refrained from hitting my own head with the heel of my hand, but just barely. “So it wasn’t much of a trick to turn it into a baby monitor. You just needed an old crystal radio.”

  Butters listened with his head tilted toward the radio and nodded. “I explained the concept to Molly this morning and she put it together in an hour.” He waved the spotlight housing Bob’s skull. “And I can see spooks by the light of the spirit’s form. So I can see and hear you. Hi!”

  I stared at the skinny man and didn’t know if I wanted to break out into laughter or wild sobs. “Butters . . . you . . . you figured this all out on your own?”

  “Well . . . no. I mean, I had a tutor.” He bobbled the spotlight meaningfully.

  “Ack! Don’t make me puke,” Bob warned him. “You won’t like me when I puke.”

  “Hush, Bob,” said Butters and I in exactly the same tone at exactly the same time.

  We both turned to eye each other for a moment. He might have tucked the skull close to his side in a protective gesture of possession.

  “You shouldn’t stay here, with all the official types around,” I said.

  “Just thinking the same thing,” Butters said. “Come with me?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Uh. Where?”

  “Headquarters,” he said.

  From Butters’s other pocket, there was a hiss and a squawk from what proved to be a long-range walkie-talkie. He picked it up, looked at something on its little display, and said, “Eyes here.”

  “We’ve got nothing at his old place,” said Murphy’s tired voice. “What about you, Eyes?”

  “He’s standing right here talking to me,” Butters said, and not without a trace of pride.

  It looked good on him.

  “Outstanding, Eyes,” Murphy said, her voice brightening with genuine pleasure. “I’m sending you some shadows. Bring him in right away.”

  “Wilco,” Butters said. “Out.” He put the radio away, beaming to himself.

  “Eyes?” I asked him.

  “Daniel kind of gave me the nickname,” he said. “They kept putting me on watch, and he wanted to know why they kept making the foureyed guy our lookout. It stuck as my handle.”

  “Except we have six eyes,” Bob the Skull said. “I tried to get him to get me a pair of glasses, and then we’d have eight. Like spiders.”

  I nodded, suddenly understanding. “You still work for the morgue.”

  Butters smiled. “There are plenty of people listening to our transmissions. Murphy wouldn’t let me use my name.”

  “Murphy is smart,” I said.

  “Extremely,” Butters said, nodding agreement.

  “She gave Bob to you?”

  “She did,” he said. “You being dead and all. She wanted to keep it need-to-know.”

  “It doesn’t upset me,” I said, even though it sort of did. “I entrusted those things to her judgment.”

  “Oh, hey, great segue. Speaking of judgment, you’d better come with me.”

  “I can do that,” I said, and fell into pace beside him. “Where are we going?”

  “The Batcave,” he said. “Headquarters.”

  “Headquarters of what?” I asked.

  He blinked at me. “The Alliance, of course. The Chicago Alliance.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “What Chicago Alliance?”

  “The one he organized to help defend the city from the Fomor,” Butters replied.

  “He?” I asked. “Fomor? What he? He who?”

  “I’m sorry, Harry,” he said. He bit his lip and looked down. “I figured you knew . . . Marcone. Baron John Marcone.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  I found Stu’s pistol on the ground where I’d dropped it during the struggle. Then I followed Butters to his car—an old Plymouth Road Runner. It looked almost worse than my old VW Beetle had the last time I’d seen it. Dents and dings covered its all-steel frame, and some of them looked suspiciously like they’d been raked into the metal with a two-pronged claw—but its engine throbbed with impressive, harmonious power. Its license plates read: MEEPMEEP.

  “I kinda traded in my old one,” Butters told me as I got in, going straight through the door. I didn’t make any noise about the discomfort. Not in front of Butters. It would totally blow my ghostly cool.

  “For another old one,” I said. My voice issued out of the radio he slipped into a clip attached to the car’s sun visor.

  “I like steel better than fiberglass,” he said. “The Fomor and the faeries are apparently related. Neither one of them likes the touch of any metal with iron in it.”

  Bob’s skull rested in a container that had been custom mounted on the Road Runner’s dash—a wooden frame set on a plate that made the skull wobble back and forth like a bobblehead doll. “Lot of interbreeding there,” Bob said. “Back in the old, old, old days. Before the Sidhe Wars.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “I haven’t heard much about it.”

  “Crazy stuff,” Bob said
with tremendous enthusiasm. “Even before my time, but I’ve heard all kinds of stories. The Daoine Sidhe, the Tuatha, the Fomor, the Tylwyth Teg, the Shen. Epic alliances, epic betrayals, epic battles, epic weddings, epic sex—”

  “Epic sex?” I sputtered. “By what standards, precisely, is sex judged to be epic?”

  “And tons and tons of mortal simps like you used as pawns.” Bob sighed happily, ignoring my question. “There are no words. It was like The Lord of the Rings and All My Children made a baby with the Macho Man Randy Savage and a Whac-A-Mole machine.”

  Butters sputtered at that image.

  But . . . I mean, Hell’s bells. Who wouldn’t?

  “Anyway,” he choked out a moment later, “the Fomor have a lot of faerie blood in their makeup. I like having Detroit steel around me when I drive.”

  “Murphy said something about the Fomor last night,” I said. “I take it they’ve been moving in on the town?”

  His face grew more remote. “Big-time. I’ve been busy.” He exhaled a slow breath. “Um. Look, man. It’s really you?”

  “What’s left of me,” I said tiredly. “Yeah.”

  He nodded. “Um. There’s a problem with Molly.”

  “I saw,” I said.

  “You didn’t see,” he said. “I mean, I heard that Murphy told you she was a couple bubbles off plumb last night, but there’s more than that.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Seventeen people murdered in the past three months,” he replied in a steady voice.

  I didn’t say anything for a couple of blocks. Then I said, “Who?”

  “Scum,” he said candidly. “Mostly. A cop who was maybe raping a prostitute. Petty criminals. Muggers. She doesn’t even try to avoid being seen. She’s gone totally Dark Knight. Witnesses left and right have reported a tall woman dressed in layers and layers of ragged, cast-off clothing. Took the papers about two weeks to name her the Rag Lady. People call her various versions, to make fun, to show her they aren’t afraid, but . . .”

  “A lot of people get killed in this town,” I said. “Doesn’t mean it’s Molly.”

  “Harry . . .” Butters stopped at a light and gave me a direct look. “I’ve examined twelve of the victims. Different manner of death for each of them, but I found them all with a scrap of torn cloth stuffed in their mouths.”

  “So?” I demanded.

  “I matched the cloth. It’s the same as what was left of the clothes you wore to Chichén Itzá. They had some of it in evidence when they investigated the scene of your . . . your murder. Only someone got in there without being seen by anyone or any camera, and took it right out.”

  Memory flashed at me, hard. The silent stone ziggurats in the night. The hiss and rasp of inhuman voices. The stale, reptilian scent of vampires. My faerie godmother (yes, I’m serious. I have one, and she is freaking terrifying) had transformed my clothes into protective armor that had probably saved my life half a dozen times that night without my even being aware of it. When they had turned back into my coat, my shirt, and my jeans, there had been little left of them but tatters and scraps.

  Sort of like me.

  Someone who had major issues with my death was killing people in my town.

  Could it be my apprentice?

  She had a thing for me, according to practically every woman I knew. I didn’t have a thing back. Yes, she was gorgeous, intelligent, quickwitted, brave, thoughtful, and competent. But I’d known her when her bra had been a formality, back when I’d begun working with her father, one of the very few men in the world I hold in genuine respect.

  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.”