Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  I never suspected a thing about what he really wanted, until the day Elaine stayed home sick. Concerned about her, I skipped my last class and came home early. The house seemed too quiet, and an energy I had never sensed before hung in the air like cloying, oily perfume. The second I walked in the door, I found myself tensing up.

  It was my first encounter with black magic, the power of Creation itself twisted to maim and destroy everything it touched.

  Elaine sat on the couch, her expression calm, her spine locked rigidly into perfect posture. I now know that Justin had put the mental whammy on her while I was gone, but at the time I knew only that my instincts were screaming that something was wrong. A wrongness so fundamental it made me want to run away screaming filled the room.

  And besides. Elaine only sat like that when she was making a statement—generally, a sarcastic one.

  I still remembered it, plain as day.

  Justin appeared in the kitchen doorway, on the other side of Elaine, and stood there for a moment, looking at me, his expression calm.

  “You skipped class again.” He sighed. “I probably should have seen that coming.”

  “What’s going on here?” I demanded, my voice high and squeaky with fear. “What have you done?”

  Justin walked to the couch to stand over Elaine. Both of them stared at me for a long moment. I couldn’t read their expressions at all. “I’m making plans, Harry,” he said in a steady, quiet voice. “I need people I can trust.”

  “Trust?” I asked. His words didn’t make sense. I couldn’t see how they applied to the current situation. I couldn’t see how they would make sense at all. I looked from Elaine back to Justin again, searching for some kind of explanation. Their expressions gave me nothing. That was when my eyes fell to the coffee table and to the object lying quietly next to my well-mauled paperback copy of The Hobbit.

  A straitjacket.

  There was something quietly, calmly sinister in the congruence. I just stared for a moment, and the bottom fell out of my stomach as I finally realized, for the first, awful time, what my instinct had been screaming at me: I was in danger. That my rescuer, teacher, my guardian meant to do me harm.

  Tears blurred my vision as I asked him, in a very quiet, very confused voice, “Why?”

  Justin remained calm. “You don’t have the knowledge you need to understand, boy. Not yet. But you will in time.”

  “Y-you can’t do this,” I whispered. “N-not you. You saved me. You saved us.”

  “And I still am,” Justin said. “Sit down next to Elaine, Harry.”

  From the couch, Elaine said in a quiet, dreamy monotone, “Sit down next to me, Harry.”

  I stared at her in shock and took a step back. “Elaine . . .”

  Justin threw kinetomancy at me when I looked away.

  Some instinct warned me in the last fraction of a second, but instead of trying to block the strike, I moved with it, toward the front picture window, weaving my own spell as I went. Instead of interposing my shield, I spread it wide in front of me like a sail, catching the force of Justin’s blast and harnessing it.

  Me, my shield, Justin’s energy, and that picture window exploded onto the front lawn. I remembered the enormous sound of the shattering glass and wood, and the hot sting of a dozen tiny cuts from bits of flying glass and wood. I remember being furious and terrified.

  I went through the open space where the window had been, fell onto the lawn, took it in a roll, and came up sprinting.

  “Boy!” Justin said, projecting his voice loudly. I looked over my shoulder at him as I ran. His eyes were more coldly furious than I had ever seen them. “You are here with me—with Elaine. Or you are nowhere. If you don’t come back right now, you are dead to me.”

  I lopped the last two words off the sentence to get his real meaning and poured on more speed. If I stayed, he meant to render me helpless, and from that beginning there could be no good endings. If I went back angry, I could fight him, but I couldn’t win—not against the man who taught me everything I knew. I couldn’t call the cops and tell them Justin was a mad wizard—they’d write me off as a nutcase or prankster without thinking twice. It wasn’t like I could run to Oz and ask a more powerful wizard for help.

  He’d never told me about the White Council or the rest of the supernatural world. Abusers like to isolate their victims. People who feel that they are completely alone tend not to fight back.

  “Boy!” Justin’s voice roared, now openly filled with rage. “Boy!”

  He didn’t need to say anything more. That rage said it all. The man who had given me a home was going to kill me.

  It hurt so much, I wondered if he already had.

  I put my head down and ran faster, my tears making the world a blur, with only one thought burning in my head:

  This wasn’t over. I knew that Justin could find me, no matter where I ran, no matter how well I hid. I hadn’t escaped that straitjacket. I had only delayed it for a little while.

  I didn’t have any choice.

  I had to fight back.

  “What happened next?” asked a fascinated voice.

  I shook my head and snapped out of the reverie, looking up to the sunlit sky outside my grave. Winter’s hold was definitely weakening. The sky was grey clouds interspersed with streaks of summer blue sky. There was a lot of water dripping down the edges of my grave, though the snow at the bottom was still holding its chill.

  The Leanansidhe sat at the edge of my grave, her bare, dirty feet swinging back and forth. Her bright red hair had been bound back in a long tail, and she was dressed in the shreds of five or six different outfits. Her head was wrapped in a scarf that had been knitted from yarn duplicating various colors of dirty snow, and the tattered ends of it hung down on either side of her head. It gave her a sort of lunatic-coquette charm, especially considering the flecks of what looked like dried blood on the pale skin of her face. She looked as happy as a kid on Christmas morning.

  I just stared up for a moment and then shook my head faintly. “You saw that? What I was thinking?”

  “I see you,” she said, as though that explained it. “Not what you were thinking. What you were remembering.”

  “Interesting,” I said. It made a certain amount of sense that Lea could discern the spirit world better than I could. She was a creature who was at least partly native to the Nevernever. I probably looked like some kind of pale, white, ghostly version of myself to her, while the memories that were my substance played across the surface.

  I thought about the wraiths and lemurs that Sir Stuart had put down on my first night as a ghost, and how they had seemed to bleed images as they faded away.

  “Yes,” she said, her tone pleased. “Precisely like that. My, but the Colonial Knight put on a display for you.”

  “You knew Sir Stuart?”

  “I have seen him in battle on several occasions,” Lea said, her eyes somewhat dreamy. “He is a worthy gentleman, in his fashion. Quite dangerous.”

  “Not more dangerous than the Corpsetaker,” I said. “She destroyed him.”

  Lea thrust out her lower lip and her brow furrowed in annoyance. “Did she? What a contemptible waste of a perfectly doughty spirit.” She rolled her eyes. “At least, my godchild, you have discerned your foe’s identity—and that of her pet.”

  I shivered. “Her and Evil Bob.”

  She waved a hand. “Evil is mainly an aesthetic choice. Only the spirit’s power is significant, for your purposes.”

  “Not true,” I said mildly. “Though I know you don’t agree.”

  Her expression was pensive for a moment before she said, “You have your mother’s Sight, you know.”

  “Not her eyes?”

  “I’ve always thought you favored Malcolm.” The serious expression vanished and she kicked her feet again. “So, young shade. What happened next?”

  “You know. You were there.”

  “How do the mortals say it?” she murmured. “I missed that episo
de.”

  I coughed out a surprised little laugh.

  She looked faintly miffed. “I do not know what happened between the time you left Justin and the time you came to me.”

  “I see.” I grinned at her. “Do you think I just give away stories for free? To one of the Sidhe?”

  She tilted back her head and laughed, and her eyes twinkled. Like, literally, with little flashes of light. “You have learned much. I began to despair of it, but it seems you may have acquired wisdom enough, and in time.”

  “In time to be dead,” I said. “But, yeah. I’ve worked out by now that the Sidhe don’t give anything away. Or take anything for free. And after however long, I realized why that might be: because you can’t.”

  “Indeed,” she said, beaming at me. “There must be balance, sweet godchild. Always balance. Never take a thing without giving such a thing in return; never give a favor without collecting one in kind. All of reality depends on balance.”

  I squinted at her. “That’s why you gave Bianca Amoracchius years ago. So that you could accept that knife from her. The one Mab took from you.”

  She leaned toward me, her eyes all but glowing with intensity and her teeth showing in a sudden, carnivorous smile. “Indeed. And such a treacherous gift it was, child. Oh, but if that deceitful creature had survived you, such a vengeance I would have wreaked that the world would have spoken of it in whispers for a thousand years.”

  I squinted at her. “But . . . I killed Bianca before you could balance the scales.”

  “Indeed, simple boy. Why else, think you, that I gifted you with the most potent powers of faerie to protect you and your companions when we battled Bianca’s ultimate progenitors?”

  “I thought you did it because Mab ordered you to.”

  “Tsk. In all of Winter, I am second in power only to Mab—which she has allowed because I have incurred with it proportionate obligation to her. She is my dearest enemy, but even I do not owe Mab so much. I helped you as much as I did, sweet child, because I owed you for collecting a portion of my due justice from Bianca,” the Leanansidhe said. Her eyes grew wider, wilder. “The rest I took from the little whore’s masters. Though I admit, I hadn’t expected the collection to be quite so thorough.”

  Memories flashed in my head. Susan. An obsidian knife. I felt sick.

  I’ll get over it, I told myself. Eventually. It hadn’t been much more than a day from my point of view. I was probably still in shock or trauma or something—if ghosts could get that, I mean.

  I looked up and realized that Lea was staring at me, at my memories, with undisguised glee. She let out a contented sigh and said, “You do not settle things by half measures, do you, my godson?”

  I could get mad at her for being callous about calling those memories to my mind, or I could revile her for taking such joy in so much destruction and pain, but there wasn’t a point in doing so. My godmother was what she was—a being of violence, deceit, and the thirst for power. She wasn’t human. Her attitudes and reactions could not fairly be called inhumane.

  Besides. I had gotten to know Lea’s sovereign, Queen Mab, in a fashion so hideously intimate that I could not possibly describe it. And believe me. If Lea had been the high priestess of murder, bloodlust, scheming, and manipulation, then Mab was the goddess my godmother worshipped.

  Come to think of it, that was probably an apt description of their relationship.

  Six of one, a half dozen of another. My godmother wasn’t going to change. There was no sense in holding what she was against her. So I just gave her a tired, whimsical smile instead.

  “Saves time,” I told her. “Do it thoroughly once, and you don’t have to fool around with it again later.”

  She dropped back her head and let out a deep-throated laugh. Then she tilted her head and looked at me. “You didn’t realize what would happen to mortal kind when you struck down the Red King and his brood. Did you?”

  “I saw the opportunity,” I said, after a moment. “If I’d stopped to think about the trouble it would create . . . I don’t know if I’d have done it any differently. They had my girl.”

  Her eyes gleamed. “Spoken as someone worthy to wield power.”

  “Coming from you,” I said, “that’s . . . a little bit unsettling, actually.”

  She kicked both feet, girlishly pleased, and smiled down at me. “How sweet of you to say so.”

  The best thing about my faerie godmother is that the creepy just keeps on coming.

  “I’ll trade you,” I said. “The rest of the tale for information.”

  She nodded her head in a businesslike fashion. “The tale for questions three?”

  “Done.”

  “Done, done, and done,” she replied.

  So I told her.

  Chapter Thirty-one

  I ran and ran for a good long while. I wasn’t on the cross-country team at school, but I often went running with Elaine. It was how we’d hidden sneaking off to make out—and stuff—from Justin. He was a thorough sort of guy, so we made sure to actually do the running, too, in order to make our deception flawless. And the whole time, we thought we were getting away with it.

  As an adult, I could see that our efforts were about as obvious as they could possibly be. Justin had known, I was certain—now. But back then, Elaine and I had been sure that we were masters of deceit.

  That scheme’s trappings were sure as hell turning out to be handy that day. My strides slowed but turned longer, steadier, machinelike. I was sixteen. I didn’t wind down for almost an hour.

  When I finally stopped, the terror had faded, if not the heartache, and I found myself in an entirely unexpected position.

  I didn’t know what was coming next. I didn’t know what was expected of me.

  I had to think. All by myself.

  I ducked off the road and into a large culvert, huddling there while I got my breath back and flailed at the wet paper bag my brain was trapped within.

  Mostly, I just kept thinking that I should have known. No one in my life had gone an inch out of their way to look out for me once my parents were gone. Justin’s generosity, even seasoned with the demands of studying magic, had been too good to be true. I should have known it.

  And Elaine. She’d just sat there while he’d been doing whatever he was going to do. She hadn’t tried to warn me, hadn’t tried to stop him. I had never known anyone in my life I had loved as much as Elaine.

  I should have known she was too good to be true, too.

  I wept for a while. I was tired and cold and my chest ached with the pain of loss. In a single moment, my home had been destroyed. My life had been destroyed.

  But I shook my head ferociously, wiping my eyes and my nose on the leather sleeves of my jacket, heedless of what it did to them. I was still in danger. I had to think.

  I had no means of travel, no money, and no idea of where to go. Hell’s bells, I was lucky I had my shiny new driver’s license in my pocket. It was mid-November, and my school letter jacket wasn’t going to be enough to keep me warm once it got dark. My stomach made a cavernous noise, and I added starving hunger to my list of problems.

  I needed shelter. I needed food. I needed to find someplace safe to hide from my mentor until I could figure out how to take him on—and to get all of that, I needed money. And I needed it fast.

  So, once it got dark, I, uh . . .

  Look. I was sixteen.

  Once it got dark, I sort of knocked over a convenience store.

  For lack of anything better to hide my face, I’d tied my sweaty T-shirt around my head in a sort of makeshift balaclava. I didn’t have anything else to wear except my letter jacket, which seemed more or less like a screaming advertisement to make it simple for the cops to figure out my identity. There wasn’t much I could do except to rip all the patches off of it and hope for the best. After that, I’d scavenged a paper sack from a trash bin, emptied it, and stuck my right hand in it.

  Once I had my equipment ready, I looked up
at the streetlights glowing outside the QuikStop and flicked a quick hex at them.

  Learning magic is hard, but if you can do even fairly modest spells, you find out that wrecking technology is easy. Anything with electronics built into it is particularly susceptible to a hex, but if you put enough oomph into it, even simpler technology can be shorted out or otherwise made to malfunction. At sixteen, I wasn’t anywhere near the wizard I would be even five or six years later—but those lights didn’t have a prayer. The two streetlights over the parking lot flickered and went black.

  I hit the lights outside the store next, and two security cameras. I was getting increasingly nervous as I went along, and the last hex accidentally blew out the store’s freezers and overhead lights along with the security camera. The only lighting left in the place came from a pinball machine and a couple of aging arcade video games.

  I swallowed and hit the door, going through in a half-doubled-over crouch, so that there wouldn’t be any way to compare my height to the marker on the inside frame of the door. I held out my right hand like it was a gun, which it might have been: I had the paper sack I’d acquired pulled over it. There was something cold and squishy and greasy on the inside of the bag. Mayonnaise, maybe? I hated mayo.

  I hustled up to the cashier, a young man with a brown mullet and a Boston T-shirt, pointed the paper sack at him, and said, “Empty the drawer!”

  He blinked reddened, watery eyes at me. Then at the paper bag.

  “Empty the drawer or I’ll blow your head off!” I shouted.

  It probably would have been more intimidating if my voice hadn’t cracked in the middle.

  “Uh, man,” the cashier said, and I finally twigged to the scent of recently burned marijuana. The guy didn’t look scared. He looked confused. “Dude, what is . . . Did you see the lights just . . . ?”

  I really hadn’t wanted to do this, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I made a little bit of a production of turning the “gun” to point at the liquor bottles behind the counter, gathered up my will, and screamed, “Ka-bang! Ka-bang!”