Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  Before the turtlenecks could turn their guns on the police, the officers had retreated to the cover offered by their car, out of direct line of sight from the parking lot. I could clearly hear one of them calling for backup, SWAT, and firefighters, his voice tense and tight with fear.

  I felt myself giggling with exhaustion and amusement as I grinned at Captain Turtleneck. “Bad boys, bad boys,” I sang, off-key. “Whatcha gonna do?”

  That made Molly cough up a chittering belly laugh, which shouldered my awareness aside and came bubbling out of our mouth.

  Captain Turtleneck stared at me without expression for a moment. He looked at the fire, the moat, and then at the police. Then he grimaced and made a single gesture. The turtlenecks began to move as a single body, retreating rapidly back the way they had come.

  Once I was sure they were gone, I dropped the wall and slumped to the ground. I sat there for a second, dazzled by the discomfort and the weariness, which I had rapidly grown accustomed to missing, apparently. The smell of hot asphalt, a strangely summertime smell, mingled with the scent of charred turtleneck.

  I shivered. Then I made a gentle effort and withdrew from the same space Molly occupied. The weariness and pain vanished again. So did the vibrant scents.

  The grasshopper looked up and around, sensing the change. Then she said, “Hold on, Harry,” and fumbled at her pockets. She produced a small silver tuning fork, struck it once against the ground, and then said, “I can hear you with this.”

  “You can?”

  “Yeah, no big deal,” she said, her voice slurred with fatigue. “See you, too, if I line it up right. And it’s easier to carry around than a bunch of enchanted Vaseline.”

  “We’ve got to get out of here,” I said. “Before the cops show up. They’d try to lock you up for a long time.”

  Molly shook her head.

  “Kid, I know you’re tired. But we have to move.”

  “No,” she said. “No cops.”

  I arched an eyebrow at her. “What?”

  “Never were any cops,” Molly said.

  I blinked, looked at the empty entrance to the parking lot, and then found myself slowly smiling. “They were another illusion. And you sold it to the turtlenecks because they thought you’d already blown your wad on the flashy stuff.”

  “Excellent,” purred Lea, appearing at my side again.

  I flinched. Again. Man, I hate that sudden-appearance stuff.

  “An unorthodox but effective improvisation, Miss Carpenter,” she continued. “Adding complexity on the meta level of the deception was inspired—especially against well-informed adversaries.”

  “Uh-huh, I’m a rock star,” Molly said, her voice listless. “Lesson over?”

  The Leanansidhe glanced at me and then back to Molly, still smiling. “Indeed. Both of them.”

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Which only goes to prove that you’re never too old, too jaded, too wise—or too dead—to be hoodwinked by one of the fae.

  “You set her up,” I snarled, “for my benefit? As a lesson for me?”

  “Child,” Lea said, “of course not. It was entwined with her own lesson as well.”

  Molly smiled very slightly. “Oh yes. I feel I have grown tremendously from my experience of nearly being incinerated.”

  “You saw that your survival depended on the protection of another,” my godmother responded, her voice sharp. “Without help from my godson’s spirit, you would have died.”

  “There are a lot of people who can say something like that,” Molly said. “There’s no shame in being one of them.”

  Lea looked from Molly to me and then said, “Children. So emotional—and so rarely grateful. I will leave you to consider the value of what I have this evening shown unto you both.”

  “Hold it,” I said. “You aren’t going yet.”

  Lea looked at me with a flat expression. “Oh?”

  “No. You’re giving Molly money first.”

  “Why would I do such a thing?”

  “Because she’s hungry, she’s tired, she survived your lesson, and she needs to eat.”

  Lea shrugged a shoulder. “What is that to me?”

  I scowled. “If you’re her mentor, your support of her physical needs while she learns is implicit in the relationship. And since you’re filling in for me anyway, and since my choice right now would be to get food into her, if you don’t do it, you’ll be failing in your duty.”

  The Leanansidhe rolled her eyes and murmured, with a trace of amusement, “Now is when you choose to begin paying attention to proper protocol, child?”

  “Apparently,” I said. “Stop being cheap. Cough up the dough.”

  Her green eyes narrowed dangerously. “I do not care for your tone, child.”

  “I’m through being intimidated by you,” I replied, and to my surprise, it came out in a calm and reasonable tone, rather than a defiant one. “You’re the one with an obligation. I’m not being unreasonable. Pay up.”

  The Leanansidhe turned to face me fully, those feline eyes all but glowing with either anger or pleasure. Or maybe both.

  Molly ordered the Moons Over My Hammy. And hot chocolate.

  I sat across the table from her at Denny’s, my elbow on its surface, my chin resting on the heel of my hand. The table could support my elbow because I had decided it should. Her tuning fork sat upright on the table, humming slightly, directly between us. She’d said she could see me if I didn’t move too far to the left or right.

  Molly tore into the food with a voracious appetite.

  “Weren’t you the one always trying to get me to eat healthier?” I mused.

  “Bite me,” she mumbled through a mouthful of food. “Freaking ice age out there. Gotta have fats, proteins, carbs, just to get my furnace going, keep my body temperature up.”

  “You know what else would keep it up?” I asked her. “Being indoors.”

  She snorted and ignored me for several minutes, venting a ravenous appetite onto the food. I watched her and found it oddly fulfilling. I’d been looking out for the grasshopper for a while. It made me feel good to see her hunger being satisfied because of something I had done.

  I guess ghosts have to take pleasure in the little victories—just like everyone else.

  I waited until she was cleaning up the remains to ask, “So. What’s with the Ophelia act in front of Murphy and company?”

  She froze for a second, then continued moving bits and pieces around her plate with somewhat less enthusiasm. “It isn’t . . .” She exhaled slowly, and her eyes moved around the room restlessly. “There’s more than one reason.”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “Well. Who says it’s an act?” She flipped a couple of bits of hash brown onto her fork and then into her mouth. “Look at me. I’m sitting here talking to my dead mentor. And half the restaurant is worried about it.”

  I looked around. She was getting covert stares, all right. “Yeah, but there’s hardly anyone here.”

  She laughed a bit harshly. “That makes me feel better.” She put her cup of hot chocolate to her lips and just held it there, trails of steam curling up around her blue eyes. “So. You’ve finally been inside me. I feel like I should be offering you a cigarette.”

  I choked and had to clear my throat. “Um. It wasn’t like that, kid.”

  “Of course it wasn’t,” she said, an edge in her voice. “It never was. Not for you.”

  I rubbed at the back of my neck. “Molly. When I met you . . .”

  “I was a child who didn’t need a bra,” she said.

  “It’s about your father, too,” I said. “Michael—”

  “Is the uncle you never had,” she said, her voice still calm but crisp. “You’ve always wanted his approval. Because he’s a good man, and if he approves of you, you can’t be a total wreck.”

  I scowled at her. “I’ve never said that,” I said.

  She looked at me through wisps of steam and said, “But it
’s true all the same. I had that worked out by the time I was about seventeen. You were afraid that if you touched me, you’d be losing his approval. That it would make you some kind of monster.”

  “I was afraid that I’d be losing my approval of me,” I responded. “And not a monster, Molly. Just an asshole.”

  “When I was a child,” she said, still speaking very quietly, “you’d have been right. I’m in my mid-twenties, Harry. I’m not a child.”

  “Don’t remind—” I paused. Then I said, “I was going to make an old-age joke.” I looked down at my immaterial self. “But all things considered . . .”

  She let out enough of a snort to stir the steam. She took a slow drink of hot chocolate. “Little inappropriate. Even if you were still alive.”

  “But funnier,” I said.

  “You’re not the one who is going to watch her entire family grow old and die, Harry.” She said it without malice. “Not just my parents. My brothers and sisters. All of them. I’m going to be beginning to get respect from other wizards about the same time Hope and Little Harry are dying of old age.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky and someone will kill you first.”

  She shrugged. “Lea’s been doing what she could about that. If it happens, it happens. As long as there’s a reason for it, that kind of death wouldn’t bother me.”

  I shivered, just from the emotionless tone of her voice. “Except for the dead part?”

  “Everyone dies, Harry,” she said. “There’s no use whining about it.”

  I waited for a couple of beats and then said, “Here’s where you talk about how what you do with your life is what’s truly important.”

  Her head fell back and she let out a belly laugh. It sounded warm and natural. Her eyes were just too wide, though, her smile too strained.

  “Yeah. Exactly.” She shook her head and looked at me intently. “Is that what it’s always like for you? Throwing fire that way?”

  I blinked and tried to change mental gears. I didn’t do it as smoothly as she had. Someone uncharitable or unbiased might note that it could be because Molly had stripped said gears. “Um. Oh, back at the fight with the Fomor guys?”

  “They weren’t the Fomor,” Molly corrected me. “They were humans the Fomor have altered. They’re called—”

  “Turtlenecks,” I said.

  She arched an eyebrow. “You and Murphy both. No, they’re known as servitors. The Fomor muck around with them. Install things. Gills, extra muscles, organs for sonar, night-vision eyes . . .”

  I whistled. “All kinds of fun.”

  She nodded. “The odd bits kind of turn to jelly when they die. Police are calling them transients.”

  I nodded, and tried to keep the conversation casual. “A lot of them dying around here?”

  “It’s Chicago,” she said. “There’s always someone dying around here. And you should see what these . . . these animals do, Harry. They take people right out of their beds. Grab children waiting for the school bus. They’ve tortured people to death for fun.”

  As she spoke, the calm in her voice had begun to fracture. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a break of her voice, an inhalation between sentences that was a little too harsh.

  “You can’t stand around doing nothing,” I said, nodding.

  “No,” she said. “They’ll come and scream at you in your sleep if you try. So . . .”

  “So?”

  Molly was silent. I didn’t push. Five minutes went by before she closed her eyes and whispered, “It’s easy. It shouldn’t be so easy.”

  Technically, I didn’t have a heart anymore. It couldn’t twist. It couldn’t break.

  It did anyway.

  “The first one was paying off a cop. Gold coins. He stood there with a little girl in a gym bag and paid the cop to look the other way.” She swallowed. “God, if I could be like you. Have so much power to pour out. Like water from a hydrant. But I’ve just got a squirt gun. Not even a Super Soaker. Just one of the little ones.” She opened her eyes and met mine. “But it was enough. They didn’t even know I was there.”

  “Molly,” I said gently, “what did you do?”

  “An illusion. A simple one. I made the bag of gold look like a gun. The cop drew his weapon and shot him. But the servitor lived long enough to break the cop’s neck.” She held up a pair of fingers. “Twofer. For one little illusion.”

  I swallowed. I couldn’t speak.

  Her voice slowly gained volume. “There have been others like that. I mean, God, they make it simple. You just need an opportunity and the right little nudge at the right time. Green traffic light instead of a red one. Put a knife in someone’s hand. Or a wedding ring on one finger. Add a spot of blood to someone’s collar. They’re animals. They tear into one another like animals.”

  “Molly,” I said gently.

  “I started leaving the bits of rag on them,” she said. “It hurt at first. Being near that kind of . . . experience. It still hurts. But I have to do it. You don’t know, Harry. What you did for this town.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t know how many things just didn’t come here before, because they were afraid.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  She looked at me as if her heart was breaking. “Of you, Harry. You could find anything in this town, but you never even noticed the shadow you cast.” Her eyes overflowed and she slashed at them angrily with one hand. “Every time you defied someone, every time you came out on top against things you couldn’t possibly have beaten, your name grew. And they feared that name. There were other cities to prey on—cities that didn’t have the mad wizard Dresden defending them. They feared you.”

  I finally understood. “The Rag Lady.”

  “Sometimes me,” Molly said. “Sometimes it’s Lea. She’s like a kid on recess when she takes a shift. I’m building a new name. Creating something else for them to fear. I can’t do what you did, Harry.” Her eyes, red and blue, flashed with something dangerous, deadly, and she slammed the heel of her hand onto the table as she leaned toward me. “But I can do that. I can kill them. I can make the fuckers afraid.”

  She stared at me, her breathing heavy. It took her several seconds to look slowly around the room.

  Every eye in the place was locked on Molly. A waitress stood with wide eyes and a telephone against her ear.

  Molly looked around at them for a moment and then said, “God, you people have it good. You don’t know. You wouldn’t know if one of them walked up to you and tore the thoughts out of your skull.”

  She rose, grabbed the tuning fork, and left a pile of wadded bills on the table. She pointed at the waitress and said, “Put the phone down. Or you won’t get a tip.”

  The telephone dropped from the woman’s fingers and clattered on the floor.

  “See?” she said, glancing back in my general direction. “It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good for.”

  I sat there, stunned and heartbroken, unable to think of anything to say or do to help Molly.

  I watched my mad apprentice stalk out of the silent restaurant and into the frozen night.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  I walked the shadowy streets, thinking. Or, at least, trying to think.

  When I’d been alive, walking was something I did when I needed to chew something over. Engage the body in effort and activity and the purely physical manifestations of a mental problem stop being distractions. I didn’t have a body anymore, but I didn’t know how else to cope with so many overwhelming troubles.

  So I walked, silent and invisible, my head down, and I thought furiously as I went.

  A single fact glared out at me, blazing in front of my mind’s eye in stark reality illuminated by all the lives that were on fire around me:

  In the end, when it had mattered most, I’d blown it.

  I grew up an orphan with nothing but a few vague memories of my father before he’d died. My childhood hadn’t been the kind of thing I’d wish on anyone. I had
run into some bad people. Justin was the worst—a true monster.

  When I was sixteen or seventeen, still agonized by his betrayal, and certain that I would never know anything like a home, friends, or family, I made myself a promise: I would never allow a child of mine to grow up as I had—driven from home to home, an easy victim with no protector, never stable, never certain.

  Never.

  When Susan had asked me to help her recover Maggie, I went all-in without a second thought. The child was my daughter. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t known about her or that I had never seen her with my own eyes. There was a child of my blood who needed my help and protection. I was her father. I would die to protect her if need be.

  End of story.

  I may have had good reasons. I may have had the best of intentions.

  But intentions aren’t enough, no matter how good they are. Intentions can lead you to a place where you’re able to make a choice.

  It’s the choice that counts.

  To get my daughter back, I’d crossed a line. Not just crossed it; I’d sprinted at it and taken a flying freaking leap over it. I made a pact with the Queen of Air and Darkness, giving away my free will, my very self, to Mab in exchange for power enough to challenge the Red King and his monstrous Court. That was stupid.

  I’d had excuses at the time. My back had been against the wall. Actually, it had been broken and against a wall. All the help I’d been able to call upon, all the allies and tricks and techniques in my arsenal, had not been enough. My home had been destroyed. So had my car. I couldn’t even get up and walk, much less fight. And the forces arrayed against me had been great—so great that even the White Council of Wizards was terrified of confronting them.

  In that bleak hour, I had chosen to sell my soul. And after that, I had led my closest friends and allies out on what I knew was practically a suicide mission. I’d known that such a battle would put a savage strain on Molly’s psychic senses, and that even if she did manage to survive, she might never be the same. I’d risked the two irreplaceable Swords of the Cross in my keeping, sending them into the battle even though I knew that if we fell, some of the world’s mightiest weapons for good would be captured and lost.