Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  The way to a dim minion’s heart was evidently through his stomach. Josh snapped up the bar with both hands and said, up toward the top of the stairs, “Won’t you please come inside?”

  I took a tentative step forward and felt no resistance. The threshold had parted. Molly did the same and hurried down the stairs.

  “Will, Andi, Marci,” Molly said in a calm voice. “Back a couple of steps, please.”

  The wolves glanced at Murphy and then started backing up.

  “What are you doing?” Murphy asked.

  “I’m making sure we don’t need to hurt them, Ms. Murphy,” Molly said. “Trust me.”

  “Grasshopper?” I asked.

  “It’s legal,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t worry. And we can’t just stand around. What’s the response time to this block?”

  “Eight minutes,” Murphy said calmly. “Ish.”

  “It’s been about four since the charge went off,” Molly said. “Ticktock.”

  Murphy grimaced. “Do it.”

  Molly turned to Josh and said, “Go stand with your friends. You guys look tired.”

  Josh had a mouthful of whatever it was. He nodded. “Always tired.” And he shuffled over to the dazed-looking group in the corner.

  “A lot of cults do that,” Molly said quietly. “It makes them easier to influence and control.” She closed her eyes for a moment, then took a slow, deep breath and opened them. She lifted her right hand and murmured, in a silken-soft tone, “Neru.”

  And the dozen or so Big Hoods just sank down to the floor.

  “Mother of God,” Murphy said softly, and turned to stare at Molly.

  “Sleep spell,” I said quietly. “Like the one I had to use on you, Murph.”

  I didn’t mention that the spell I’d used on Murphy had taken every bit of skill I’d had and ten times as long to put together. Molly had just done the same thing, only a dozen times bigger—touching each individual mind and crafting the spell to lull it to sleep. What she’d just done was hard.

  In fact, it was what one could only have expected from a member of the White Council.

  Maybe my godmother had a point.

  Molly shuddered and rubbed at her arms. “Ugh. They aren’t . . . they aren’t right, Ms. Murphy. They weren’t stable, and they could have had their switches flipped to violence at any time. This will at least make sure they won’t hurt themselves or anyone else until morning.”

  Murphy studied her for a moment and then nodded. “Thank you, Molly.”

  My apprentice nodded back.

  Murphy took up her gun again and then looked at her. She smiled and shook her head. “Rag Lady, huh?”

  Molly looked down at her outfit and back up. “I didn’t pick the name.”

  The diminutive woman shook her head, her expression firm with disapproval. “If you’re going to create a persona, you’ve got to think of these things. Do you know how many extra PMS jokes are flying out there now?”

  Molly looked serious. “I think that just makes it even scarier?”

  Murphy pursed her lips and shrugged a shoulder. “Yeah. I guess it might.”

  “Scares me,” I said.

  Murphy smiled a little more. “Because you’re a chauvinist pig, Dresden.”

  “No,” I snorted. “Because I realize a lot better than you two do how dangerous you are.”

  Both of them stopped at that, blinked, and looked at each other.

  “Okay, ghosty-scout time,” I said. “Sit tight for a second. I’m going to check below.”

  “Meet you at the top of the next stairway,” Murphy said.

  “Got it,” I said. “Oh. Nice work on that spell, grasshopper.”

  Molly’s cheeks turned pink, but she said, casually, “Yeah. I know.”

  “Atta girl,” I said. “Never let them think you’re out of your depth.”

  I vanished and appeared in the main chamber below. I was unprepared for the sight that waited for me.

  Corpsetaker was standing about twenty feet from where Mort hung suspended. Her jaw was . . . was unhinged, like a snake’s, open much wider than it should have been able. As I watched, she made a couple of convulsive motions with her entire body and swallowed down a recognizable object—a child’s shoe, circa nineteenth century. She tilted her head back, as if it helped her slide whichever one of the two child ghosts she’d eaten last down her gullet, and then lowered her chin and smiled widely at Mort Lindquist.

  Sir Stuart’s faded form was the only one still visible in the room. The wispy, camera-lit mists of several other spirits were still dissolving, all around the room.

  Mort spotted me and slurred, “Dresden. You moron. What have you done?”

  Corpsetaker tilted her head back and laughed.

  “I wasn’t keeping them shut away because they might hurt this bitch,” Morty said. He sounded hurt and exhausted and furious. “I was protecting them because she was going to eat them.”

  I stared for a second.

  The Corpsetaker had been going to eat the Lecters. The most vicious, dangerous, powerful spirits in all of Chicago.

  Just like she had planned to do to Chicago’s ghosts when Kemmler’s disciples had attempted a ritual called a Darkhallow several years before, I realized—a ritual that, if successful, would have turned the necromancer who pulled it off into a being of godlike power.

  “Ahhhh,” the Corpsetaker said, the sound deep and rich and full of satisfaction.

  I got a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “I’m almost full,” she continued. She smiled at me with very wide, very white, very sharp-looking teeth. “Almost.”

  Chapter Forty-seven

  One thing you never do in a fight, no matter how emotionally satisfying it might seem, is pause to gloat with an enemy standing right in front of you. Savvy foes aren’t going to just hang around letting you yak at them. They’re going to take advantage of the opening you’re giving them.

  The same goes for desperate foes who aren’t interested in trying to win a fair fight.

  Before the Corpsetaker finished speaking, I snapped my staff forward and snarled, “Fuego!”

  Fire lashed toward her. She deflected the strike with a motion of her hand, like you’d use to ward off a fly. The memory-fire went flying on by her, through the wall and gone.

  “Such a pity,” she said. “I was just going to—”

  She wanted to keep up the gloating, I was game.

  I hit her again, only harder.

  This time I sent it flying a lot faster and it stung, though she slapped the fire aside before it could do much more than singe her. She let out a furious sound. “Fool! I will—”

  Some people. I swear they never learn.

  I’d built up a rhythm. So I gave her my best evocation, a burst of fire and force, sizzling with a lot of curve and English on it, an ogre-buster the size of a softball, blazing with scarlet and golden light.

  She swept both arms into an X-shaped defensive stance, fingers contorted in a desperate defensive gesture, and she snapped out a string of swift words. She stopped the strike, but an explosion of flame and force rolled over her and she screamed in pain as she was driven twenty feet back and into the solid rock of the wall.

  “Yahhh!” I shouted in wordless defiance, even as I reached for my next spell . . .

  . . . and suddenly felt very strange.

  “—sden, stop!” Mort was screaming. His voice sounded very far away. “Look at yourself !”

  I had the next blast of fire and energy ready in my mind, but I stopped to glance at my hands.

  I could barely see them. They were faded to the point of near invisibility.

  The shock drove the spell out of my head, and color and substance rushed back into my limbs. They were still translucent, but at least I could see them. I turned wide eyes to where Mort still hung over the wraith pit. His voice suddenly snapped back up in volume, becoming very clear.

  “You keep throwing your memories at
her,” Mort said, “but part of what you are now goes out with them—and it doesn’t come back. You’re about to destroy yourself, man! She’s luring you into it!”

  Of course she was, dammit. Why stand around trying to block my attacks when she could just vanish from in front of them? Evil Bob’s fortifications, it seemed, had served a purpose other than simply barring the way—I’d used up way too much of myself on the way through them. And then here, trading punches with Corpsetaker, I’d used up a lot more, slinging out the memory of my magic left and right, when I’d seen how careful Sir Stuart was to recover such expended power practically the minute I’d gotten out of Captain Jack’s car.

  I couldn’t see her without bringing up my Sight, but Corpsetaker’s mocking laugh rolled through the underground chamber from the section of wall I’d knocked her into. I stared at my hands again and clenched them in frustration. Mort was right. I’d already done too much. But how the hell else was I supposed to fight her?

  I turned to Mort. He was having trouble keeping his eyes on me as he twisted slowly on the rope. He closed them. “Dresden . . . you can’t do anything more. Get out of here. I don’t want anyone else to give themselves away for me,” he said, his voice raw. “Not for me.”

  Sir Stuart’s shade, floating protectively beside Mort, regarded me with sober, distant eyes.

  Corpsetaker’s mad laughter mocked us all. Then she said, “If I’d known you would deliver so thoroughly, Dresden, I’d have gone looking for you ages ago. Boz. Kill the little man.”

  There was a growl and the stirring of a large animal. And then a human garbage truck started climbing out of the wraith pit, emerging from the stewing broil of wraiths like Godzilla rising out of the surf. Boz had a stench to him so thick that it carried over into the realm of spirit—a psychic stink that felt like it might have choked me unconscious had I still been alive. The guy’s brain had been down there stewing in wraiths for only God knew how long, and if Morty’s reaction to exposure was any indication, Boz had to have had his sanity pureed. He was crusted over in filth so thick that I couldn’t tell where the spiritual muck left off and the physical crud began. I could see his eyes, like dull, gleaming stones underneath his hood. They were absolutely gone. This guy was only a person by legal definitions. His humanity had long since begun to fester and rot.

  Boz climbed out of the pit, radiating a physical and psychic power full of rot and corruption and rage and endless hungers. He stood there blankly for a second. And then he turned and took one slow, lumbering, Voorheesian step after another, toward the apparatus from which Mort hung.

  The ectomancer regarded Boz weakly and then said, “Great. This is all I need.”

  “What?” I said. “Mort? What does she mean?”

  “Uh, sorry. Little distracted here,” Mort said. “What?”

  “The Corpsetaker! What did she mean that she doesn’t need you anymore?”

  “You fed her enough power to fuel a couple of dozen Nightmares, Dresden,” Mort said. “She can do whatever she wants now.”

  “What? So she gobbles a bunch of killers and she gets to be a real boy again? It can’t be that easy.”

  Boz reached the basketball goal, grabbed it in his huge hands, and just turned it slowly, the hard way. Mort began to rotate toward the edge of the pit.

  “Agh! Dresden! Do something!”

  I glared at Morty, spreading empty hands, and then in pure frustration I tossed a punch at Boz. It was like slapping my fist through raw sewage. I didn’t hit anything solid, and my fist and arm came out covered in disgusting residue. I couldn’t act. Information was the only weapon I had. “Kind of limited here, Mort!”

  Morty had begun to hyperventilate, but he clearly came to some sort of decision. He started gasping out words rapidly. “She can be real again—for a little while.”

  “She can manifest,” I said.

  Boz’s fingernails were spotted with dark green mold. He reached out and grabbed the rope holding Mort. He untied the rope from its stay without letting it slide and began to haul Mort toward the edge of the pit. Arms and mouths and fingers stretched up from the bubbling wraiths, trying to reach the ectomancer.

  “Gah!” Mort gasped, trying to twist away. Wraith fingertips touched his face, and he winced in apparent pain. “Once she does that, she gets to be her old self for a while. She can walk, talk—whatever.”

  “Use her magic for real,” I breathed. The Corpsetaker wouldn’t have to limit herself to people who could contact the dead, people from whom she could try to wrest consent, as she had done to Mort.

  She could simply take someone new—and then she was back in the game, a body-switching lunatic with a hate-on for the White Council and all things decent in general. Her boss, Kemmler, had apparently slithered his way out of being dead more than once. Maybe her whole freaky-cult operation had been a page from his playbook.

  I vanished to the bottom of the stairs and screamed, “Murph! Hurry!”

  But I saw no one at the top of the stairs.

  Sir Stuart stood in front of Boz, clenching his jaw and his ax in impotent rage, as Boz lowered Mort to the ground and then leaned over him, reaching down with his huge hands to grasp Mort on either side of his head. A twist, a snap, and it would be over for the ectomancer.

  But what could I do? I had nothing more than the ghost of a decent spell in me, and then I was misty history. Morty was beat to hell, exhausted, unable to use his own magic—or he damned well would have gotten himself out of this clustergeist by now. Even if he’d let me in—which I wasn’t sure he would do in his condition, not even to save his life—I doubted the two of us had enough energy and control between us to get him free. Mort could have called Sir Stuart into him, drawn upon the marine’s experience and the memory of his strength, but the ectomancer was still tied up. And besides, Sir Stuart was in the same condition I was, only worse.

  All of us were helpless to act on the physical world.

  If I’d still had the Lecters, I could have ordered one of them to manifest and free Morty, which I maybe should have chanced a few minutes ago. Hindsight was blinding in its clarity. It was too late for that now—Corpsetaker had taken the Lecters out of the picture, and without the mad spirits’ ability to manifest in the physical world . . .

  My thoughts sped to quicksilver flickering. Frantic memory hit me like a hammer.

  “Hell’s bells. Every time I’ve run into a ghost, it’s tried to rip my lungs out! You’re telling me none of your spooks can do something?”

  “They’re sane,” Mort shouted back. “It’s crazy for a ghost to interact with the physical world. Sane ghosts don’t go around acting crazy!”

  For a ghost, manifesting in the material world was an act of madness—a memory trying to enforce its will on the living, the past struggling to steer the course of the present. It was, according to everything I had learned about magic and life, an inversion of the laws of nature, a defiance of the natural order.

  Ghosts who weren’t supermighty manifested all the time. It wasn’t a question of raw power, and it never had been—it was a matter of desire. You just had to be crazy enough to make it happen. That was what the Corpsetaker had gotten from devouring the Lecters. Not sufficient power, but sufficient insanity. She just had to be crazy enough to make it happen.

  For a wizard running around as a lost soul, expending his very essence in an attempt to rescue a guy who hadn’t even really been his friend was definitely of questionable rationality. Grabbing the leashes of several dozen maniac ghosts and leading them on a banzai charge against a far stronger foe was probably less than stable, too. Hell, even the last few major choices of my life—murdering Susan in order to save our child, giving myself to Mab so that I could save little Maggie—were not the acts of a stable, sane man. Neither had been my entire career, really, given the options that had been available to me. I mean, I don’t mean to brag, but I could have used my abilities to make money if I’d wanted to. A lot of money.

  Instead? A
little basement apartment. A job catering to clientele who hadn’t merely needed help—they’d needed a miracle. Money? Not much. The occasional good deed, sure, but you can’t eat sincere thanks. Girls don’t flock to the guy who drives the old car, reads a lot of books, and kicks down the doors of living nightmares. My own people in the White Council had persecuted me my whole life, mostly for trying to do the right thing. And I’d kept on doing it anyway.

  Hell. I was pretty much crazy already.

  That being the case . . . how hard could it be?

  It would take a certain amount of energy, I was sure. Maybe everything I had left. It wouldn’t get me any closer to the answers I wanted. It wouldn’t let me find out who had murdered me. It might destroy me altogether. Heck, for that matter, if it took too much power to pull off, it could snuff me here and now.

  But the alternative? Watching Morty die?

  Not going to happen. I’d face oblivion first.

  I gripped the wooden grain of my staff, recalling the feelings that had surged through me when I had summoned and bound the Lecters. I called on my memories one more time. I called up the ache of sore muscles after a hard workout, and the sheer physical joy of my body in motion during a run, walking down the street, sinking into a hot bath, swimming through cool water, stroking over the softness of another body beside mine. I thought of my favorite old T-shirt, a plain, black cotton one with 98% CHIMPANZEE written on the chest in white typeset letters. I thought of the creak of my old leather cowboy boots, the comfort of a good pair of jeans. The scent of a wood-smoked grill drifting into my nose when I was hungry, the way my mouth would water and my stomach would growl. I thought of my old Mickey Mouse alarm clock going off too early in the morning, and groaning out of bed to go to work. I remembered the smell of a favorite old book’s pages when I opened them again, and the smell of smoldering motor oil, a staple feature of my old Blue Beetle. I remembered the softness of Susan’s lips against mine. I remembered my daughter’s slight, warm weight in my arms, her exhausted body as limp as a rag doll’s. I remembered the way tears felt, sliding free of my eyes, the annoying blockage of congestion when I had a cold, and a thousand other things—little things, minor things, desperately important things.