Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  I frowned. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Of course, child. You are not Sidhe.” She crossed her ankles, frowning, and I saw a distinct spark of irritated rebellion enter her eyes. “I’m of a mind to tell you and end this charade.”

  YO U MUST NOT.

  Eternal Silence’s voice wasn’t quite the same mind-destroying artillery shell it had been the first time the verdigris-encrusted statue had thought-spoken to me, but that might have been a function of me being sheltered in what amounted to a foxhole. The force of it blew Lea’s long hair straight back, and her head snapped to one side as sharply as if she’d been slapped on the cheek. A shadow fell across my grave, and I looked up to see the statue looming overhead.

  In broad daylight.

  Which meant . . . which meant that whatever the thing was, it wasn’t a ghost like me. I’d have been withered and blasted into the scraps of what I was now if I’d ventured out of my grave. The lingering power of the dawn wouldn’t destroy me, but it would hurt, a lot, and it would cripple and weaken me.

  Eternal Silence was apparently having no problems with it.

  Lea turned her head back to the statue, her eyes and expression cold. “I am perfectly aware of the situation,” she spat. Then she tilted her head to one side and paused, as if listening to a speaker I couldn’t hear. She sighed. “Fear not, ancient thing. I have no intention of depriving either of you.”

  What? What!?! Either of who?

  It was one of those questions to which I knew damned well that no one would tell me the answer.

  Crud.

  Clearly I should have haggled for seven questions.

  “Child,” Lea said, “I will tell you an answer that is true. But it is not the answer that you desire.”

  “Three true answers,” I shot back immediately. “The bargain was made in good faith.”

  Lea puffed out a little breath and made a very contained and elegant gesture that somehow managed to convey the same meaning as if she had thrown her hands up. “Will you never cease pushing?”

  “Never, ever,” I said.

  “Impossible child. Oh, very well. If it will fill that bottomless well you call curiosity.” She shook her head, glanced again at Eternal Silence, and said, “The first truth is that you are acquainted with your killer.”

  I swallowed. The single truly redeeming factor of the Sidhe, Winter or Summer, is that they can’t knowingly speak a lie. They are, in fact, completely incapable of it. That’s not the same thing as saying that they can’t deceive—they are past masters of deceit, after all. But they can’t do it by directly speaking words that aren’t true.

  Which meant that, assuming Lea’s information was good, I had just eliminated better than six billion possible suspects—and Lea’s information was always good.

  Lea nodded at me, the gesture so slight that I almost thought I imagined it. “The second truth is that your murder was but one of thousands at the killer’s hands.”

  I took that in as well, trying to look at it from all angles. I knew some people and things who were stone-cold killers, but beings who had killed thousands of mortals were few and far between. Famous snipers in the World Wars hadn’t accumulated more than a few hundred kills. Serial killers working for decades hadn’t done any better. But supernatural predators, especially the long-lived ones, could add up that kind of count in a particularly active century or two.

  Oh, and I had done my best to shut down pretty much every one of them I actually knew. The suspect pool was rapidly growing smaller.

  “The final truth,” Lea said. She suddenly looked very tired. “Your killer was but the proxy of another being, and one mightier and more dangerous than he.”

  He. Male. The pool dwindled by half, give or take.

  So. . .

  So, aside from the dick who killed me, I also had his boss to worry about.

  Super.

  “I can say no more, Godson,” Lea said.

  YOU HAVE ALREADY SAID TOO MUCH.

  Lea lifted her hand as if to shield her face from a sudden wind and scowled in Eternal Silence’s direction. “Your knowledge of mortals is relatively scarce. It is done. Desist your howling.” Lea paused to look to one side again, stiffened her back a little, and added a belated and unenthusiastic, “If you please.”

  The silent figure looked from my godmother to me, and though it didn’t have lungs with which to draw breath, I somehow sensed that it was about to speak.

  “I know,” I said hurriedly. “I know. Know my path. No need to blow my brains out repeating yourself.”

  Eternal Silence seemed faintly, vaguely annoyed. There came a purely psychic sensation, something that . . . that really reminded me of an unsatisfied grunt. Then the statue turned away and vanished from my sight.

  “Huh,” I said, after the figure had gone. “What the hell was that about?”

  “Proxies,” the Leanansidhe muttered, barely audible. “Always proxies. And respect.”

  “What?”

  She gave me a direct look, and I had the impression that she was saying something with particular meaning. “Proxies, child. Those who appear to speak on behalf of another who cannot be present. Much as I have served as a proxy for my queen over the years, or she for me.” Lea shook her head and said, “I must go, child.”

  “Wait,” I said, reaching up to touch her foot with my hand.

  My ectoplasmic flesh did not sink through hers. My hand felt nothing, yet met an odd resistance to its motion. I didn’t pass into her as I had Mort or Molly. I blinked a little at that.

  “I am of two worlds,” she said, her tone slightly impatient. As she often did, she had evidently guessed at my thoughts. “Of course I don’t feel the same as mortal flesh.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Uh. Listen. I just want . . . I need to know that you’re going to take care of Molly.”

  She tilted her head and studied me for a moment. “But . . . child. It was never your responsibility to care for the young woman.”

  “Yes, it was,” I said. “She was my apprentice.”

  “Indeed. Someone whom you had pledged to teach—not to care for. Child, did you miss the entire point of the exercise?”

  I opened my mouth and then closed it again. “Maybe I did. What was supposed to happen?”

  “You were supposed to teach her to care for herself,” Lea replied in a matter-of-fact tone. “Your failure to do so . . .” She frowned. “I confess that I have only a limited understanding of the concepts of good and evil. The differences seem largely semantic to me when applied to empiric situations. Yet it seems to me that you did her no great kindness by being gentle.”

  I met the Sidhe’s impassive gaze for a moment before I looked away. “You might be right.”

  “I am very old, child. It is a safe assumption in most circumstances.” She sniffed and leaned down to pat my hand in a rather peremptory gesture. “Now, then. Listen to the nice statue. And do try to destroy anyone who seeks to do you harm. Death should be a learning experience, after all, or what’s the point?”

  Something in my godmother’s words managed to land on the ghost of a functioning brain cell somewhere, and a flash of inspiration hit me. “That’s it!” I blurted. “That’s how to handle the Corpsetaker.”

  Lea tilted her head, her eyes intent, and then smiled a knowing smile. “Ahhh. If you can do it.”

  I swallowed. “Yeah.”

  “Interesting,” she murmured. “If you can control them. They are a power potentially deadly even to the one who wields it. Explosive. Dangerous. And very typical of you. Excellent.” Then she moved the fingers of her right hand through a series of little gestures and was gone.

  That left me alone in my grave with my thoughts.

  I leaned against the wall again, but I didn’t settle down on the ground. Instead I thought about Molly and how screwed up she was.

  That was my fault, in a lot of ways.

  First thing to jump out at me: I never should have let Molly go to C
hichén Itzá.

  I had led her into the fight of my life against the Red Court, to save my daughter. But I shouldn’t have exposed Molly to that. She was a sensitive, a wizard whose magical senses were naturally attuned to the finest, lightest, most delicate workings of the Art. Or, to put it in more Harryfriendly terms, she had great big, honking Dumbo ears that were extremely sensitive to loud noises.

  Magic is life. Some forms of death—like murder, the abrupt and violent termination of a life that was not otherwise ending—were the equivalent of enormous, screeching feedback to her senses. And I had dragged her into a freaking concert hall of it at Chichén Itzá. Murderpalooza. Not to mention setting off the biggest, most violent magical curse to be unleashed in the past century—hell, I wasn’t exactly a sensitive guy, magically speaking, but even I had a blank spot in my memory over the minutes right after that arcane explosion.

  It’s got to be bad for me to shut it out. For Molly, it had to have been a whole lot worse. And, oh yes, she had been shot and nearly killed to go with everything else. I had watched her collapse from blood loss.

  Mistake. It had been a big damned mistake. At the time, I had been so focused on getting Maggie out that I’d let Molly persuade me that she deserved to be on the team. I never would have let her do that if I’d been thinking straight. I would have told her to stay at home, hold the fort, or maybe stay in the car. That was what I’d always done when I was on my way to a slugfest. Exposure to that kind of noise could quite effectively shatter her sanity.

  And maybe it had.

  Even if her mental house was still on a good foundation, you didn’t need monsters or magic to get damaged by a brush with death. Soldiers coming home from wars had known that for centuries. Post-traumatic stress disorder from life-threatening injuries had screwed up the lives of a lot of people—people who didn’t have supernatural powers as a possible outlet for their anger, fear, grief, or guilt.

  And who had been there to catch her? The freaking Leanansidhe, deputy of Her Wickedness, with her Nietzsche and Darwin Were Sentimental Pansies outlook on life.

  Stars and stones. When Molly insisted on going, why didn’t I just tell her, “Of course you can come, grasshopper. I’ve always wanted to create a mentally mutilated monster of my very own.”

  Man. It wasn’t the legacy I’d wanted to leave behind me. I mean, I hadn’t ever thought much about leaving a legacy, truth be told, but an apprentice with a crippled heart and mind who was probably going to get hunted down by her own people was definitely never in the plan.

  “Oh, kid,” I breathed to no one. “Molly. I’m so sorry.”

  It turns out ghosts can cry.

  “Over here,” said a familiar voice. It was later, but not much later. Sometime after noon, maybe? It was hard to tell from the grave.

  “You’ve never even been here before,” answered another. “I was at the funeral. How the hell would you know where his grave was?”

  I heard Fitz let out a sigh front-loaded with so much drama that only a teenager could have managed it without hurting himself. “Is it the gaping hole in the ground over there, with the big pentacle on the headstone?”

  There was a brief, miffed pause, and Butters answered, “Okay. Maybe it is.”

  Footsteps crunched through wet, melting snow. Fitz and Butters appeared at the edge of my grave and peered down.

  “Well?” Butters asked. “Is he there?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Fitz replied. “I don’t see dead people. I hear them. And I don’t hear anything.”

  “Hey, Fitz,” I said.

  The kid jumped. He was wearing his newly laundered clothes and had added one of Forthill’s old coats over the top of everything. “Christ. Yeah, he’s there.”

  “Oh, fantastic,” Butters said. “Hi, Harry. Here, man. Help me down.”

  “Help you down? It’s, like, five feet to the bottom, if that. Just jump down.”

  “Jump into an open grave? What kind of idiot are you?” Butters replied. “I might as well put on a red shirt and volunteer for the away team. There’s snow and ice and slippery mud down there. That’s like asking for an ironically broken neck.”

  “Are all doctors whiny girls like you?” Fitz asked.

  “Hey. This whiny girl is still alive because he doesn’t do stupid crap.”

  Fitz snorted. “So I help you down, my foot slips, we both fall in and die.”

  Butters lifted an eyebrow and grunted. “Huh. True.”

  I pinched at the bridge of my nose. “Oh, Hell’s bells, guys. Either get a room or stop flirting and get down here.”

  “Ha-ha,” Fitz said toward me crossly. “He just called us gay.”

  Butters blinked. “For not jumping into a hole we might not be able to climb out of? That’s kind of insensitive.”

  “Not for that, for . . .” Fitz let out a sigh of vintage teenage impatience. “Christ, just give me your hand, okay? I’ll swing you down.”

  Butters fussed for a moment more, making sure that Fitz had a solid place to plant his feet, and then he swung down into my grave. He was wearing his winter gear again and carrying the gym bag. Once he was down, he made sure he was out of direct sunlight and started opening the bag.

  “What’s up?” I asked Fitz.

  “Trouble,” Fitz said.

  “We need your help, Harry,” Butters said.

  “Hey, wait,” I said, scowling. “How did Butters find you, Fitz?”

  “He asked,” Fitz said to Butters.

  The little ME nodded. “Harry, I got from Murphy that you were apparently going into social work. It wasn’t hard to figure out who you’d ask for help, so I went over to the church to talk to Forthill about the situation—except he wasn’t there.”

  Fitz bit his lip. “Look, Dresden. The father and I talked. And he decided he was going to go talk to Aristedes on my behalf.”

  I blinked and pushed away from the grave wall. “What?”

  “I tried to tell him,” Fitz said. “He wouldn’t listen. He was . . . I think he was angry. But he said he was going to resolve this before it came to some kind of bloodshed.”

  Hell’s bells. I’d known Aristedes’ type in the past. If it suited him, he’d kill Forthill without an instant’s hesitation. The good father was in danger.

  “Murphy would go in guns blazing,” Butters said. “She’s going to break my arm when she finds out I didn’t tell her. We need you to help talk us through this.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “Go in guns blazing!”

  “It’s too late for that,” Fitz said. “Look, Forthill is already there. I just met the guy but . . . but . . . I don’t want him to get hurt for me. We have to move now.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I can’t move around in broad daylight.”

  “We thought of that,” Fitz said. “Butters said you needed a shielded vessel.”

  “Butters said that, did he?” I asked wryly.

  Butters rose from the bag, holding the plastic flashlight case holding Bob’s skull. He winked at me, held it out, and said, “Hop in.”

  I blinked.

  Then I said, “Right. Let’s go.”

  I took a deep breath and willed myself forward, into the staring eye sockets of the skull.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  There was a very, very odd swirling sensation as my spirit-self leapt forward, and then I was standing . . .

  . . . In an apartment.

  Okay, when I say apartment, I don’t mean it like my old place. I lived in a mostly buried box that was maybe twenty by thirty total, not including the subbasement where my lab had been. Apartment Dresden had been full of paperback books on scarred wooden shelves, and comfortable secondhand furniture.

  This was more like . . . Apartment Bond, James Apartment Bond. Penthouse Bond, really. There was a lot of black marble and mahogany. There was a fireplace the size of a carport, complete with a modest—relatively modest—blaze going in it. The furniture all matched. The rich hardwoods fro
m which it had been made were hand-carved in intricate designs. It wasn’t until the second glance that I saw some of the same rune and sigil work I’d used on my own staff and blasting rod. The cushions on the couches (plural, couches) and recliners and sedans and chaises (plural, chaises), were made of rich fabric I couldn’t identify, maybe some kind of raw silk, and embroidered with more of the same symbols in gold and silver thread. A nearby table boasted what looked like a freshly roasted turkey, along with a spread of fruits and vegetables and side dishes of every kind.

  It was sort of ridiculous, really. There was enough food there to feed a small nation. But there weren’t any plates to fill up, and there weren’t any utensils to eat it with. It looked gorgeous and it smelled incredible, but . . . there was something inert about it, something lifeless. There was no nourishment on that table, not for the body or for the spirit.

  One wall was covered in a curtain. I started to pull it aside and found it responding to the touch, spreading open of its own accord to reveal a television the size of billboard, a high-tech stereo system, and an entire shelf lined with one kind of video-game console after another, complicated little controls sitting neatly next to each one. I can’t tell a PlayBox from an X-Station, but who can keep track of all of them? There are, like, a thousand different kinds of machines to play video games on. I mean, honestly.

  “Um,” I said. “Hello?” My voice echoed quite distinctly—more than it should have, huge marble cavern or not. “Anybody home?”

  There was, I kid you not, a drumroll.

  Then, from a curtained archway there appeared a young man. He looked . . . quite ordinary, really. Tall, but not outrageously so; slender without being rail thin. He had decent shoulders and looked sort of familiar. He was dressed like James Dean—jeans, a white shirt, a leather biker’s jacket. The outfit looked a little odd on him, somehow forced, except for a little skull embroidered in white thread on the jacket, just over the young man’s heart.

  Cymbals crashed and he spread his arms. “Ta-da.”

  “Bob,” I said. I felt one side of my mouth curling up in amusement. “This? This is the place you always wanted me to let you out of? You could fit five or six of mine in here.”