Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  I closed my eyes and said nothing.

  My little girl was going to die.

  My little girl was going to die.

  And there was nothing I could do about it.

  Oh, I’d been defeated before. People had even died because I failed. But those people had never been my own flesh and blood. They hadn’t been my child. I’d lost. I was beaten.

  This was all over.

  And it was all your fault, Harry.

  If I’d been faster. If I’d been smarter. If I’d been strong enough of mind to make the hard choices, to focus on saving Maggie first and everyone else second . . .

  But I hadn’t been. I’d been insufficient to the challenge, and she was going to die because of it.

  I broke, right there. I just broke. The task given to me had been more than I could bear. And what followed would be nothing but torturous regret. I’d failed my own child.

  My chest convulsed, I made a sound, and my eyes filled until I couldn’t see.

  Molly sat beside me, patiently cleaning my face and neck with her wipes. I must have had soot on my face. When I could see again, there were large patches of grey and black on the wipes and my face felt cold and tingled slightly.

  “I’ve got to help her,” I said quietly.

  “Harry, don’t . . . don’t twist the knife in your own wound,” Molly replied. “Right now you need to stay calm and quiet, until Butters can look at you.”

  “I wish you hadn’t gotten him involved,” I said.

  “I didn’t even ask him,” she said. “I got halfway through the first sentence and he asked where you were. Then said he’d come see you.”

  I shook my head. “No, I mean . . .” I drew a deep breath. “Kid. I’ve got to cross a line.”

  Molly froze, one hand still extended.

  “I’m not getting up off this bed alone,” I said quietly. “It’s my only option.”

  You run in the circles I do, you get more than a few offers of power. It always comes with a price, usually a hidden one, but you get the offers. I’d had more than a few chances to advance myself, provided I was willing to set aside anything like integrity to do so. I hadn’t been.

  Not until today.

  “Who?” Molly asked simply.

  My mouth twitched at one corner. “One is a lot like another,” I said.

  She shook her head. “But . . . but if you go over to one of them . . .”

  “They’ll make me into a monster,” I said quietly. “Sooner or later.”

  She wouldn’t look at me.

  “I can’t let that happen,” I said. “For all I know, I could turn into something that would hurt Maggie myself. But maybe I can use them to get her out of danger.”

  She inhaled sharply and looked up at me.

  “It’s got to be Mab,” I said. “She’s wicked smart, but she isn’t omniscient or infallible. I’ve swindled faeries before. I can do it again.”

  She inhaled sharply. “You’re going to be the Winter Knight?” She shook her head. “What if she doesn’t? I mean, what if she won’t?”

  I let out a low chuckle. “Oh, she’ll do it. If I go to her, she’ll do it. She’s been after me long enough.”

  “I don’t understand,” Molly said. “She’ll . . . she’ll twist you. Change you. It’s what they do.”

  I fumbled and put one of my hands on hers. “Molls . . . Whatever happens . . . I’m not going to make it out of this one.”

  She stared at me for a minute. Then she shook her head. She shook her head and silent tears fell from her eyes.

  “Molly,” I said again, patting her hand. “Kid . . . For everything there is a season.”

  “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t you dare quote the Bible at me. Not to justify this.”

  “Bible?” I said. “I was quoting the Byrds.”

  She burst out in a huffing sound that was both a laugh and sob.

  “Look, Molls. Nothing lasts forever. Nothing. And if I’ve got to choose between myself and my daughter? That’s not even a choice. You know that.”

  She bowed her head and wept harder. But I saw her nod. Just a little.

  “I need your help,” I said.

  She looked up at me, bloodshot eyes a mess.

  “I’m going to arrange things. But Mab’s going to be wary of me. She knows my history, and if I know what’s going on, she’ll be able to tell I’m lying to her. I don’t have enough of a poker face for that.”

  “No,” Molly said, sniffing and briskly swiping at her eyes. “You don’t. You still suck at lying, boss.”

  “To the people who know me, maybe,” I said, smiling. “Do you understand what I’m asking you to do?”

  She bit her lip and said, “Do you? Have you thought what it’s going to mean for me once . . . once you’re . . .”

  “Dead,” I said quietly. “I think Ebenezar or Injun Joe will take over for me, continue your training. They both know how strongly I felt about sheltering you from the Council’s judgment.”

  She looked suddenly exhausted. She shook her head slightly. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  Molly had crushed on me since she was a teenager. I hadn’t really thought anything of it. I mean, it had been going on for years and . . .

  . . . and crushes probably didn’t last for years. Did they? They faded. Molly’s feelings hadn’t, but I didn’t reciprocate them. I loved her to pieces, but I was never going to be in love with her.

  Especially not if I was dead, I guess.

  If our positions had been reversed, that might have been kind of hard for me to accept, too.

  I patted her hand again awkwardly and said, “I’m sorry. That I wasn’t here longer. That it couldn’t be more than it was.”

  “You never did anything wrong by me, Harry,” she said. She lifted her chin and met my eyes again. “This isn’t about me, though, is it? It’s about Maggie.” She nodded, and I saw steel enter her spine. “So of course I’ll help you.”

  I lifted her fingers to my mouth and put a gentle kiss on them. “You’re one hell of a woman, Molly,” I said. “Thank you.”

  She shivered. Then she said, “How do you want to do it?”

  “Bring me a phone,” I said. “Need to make a call. You stay out of it. It’ll be better if you don’t know.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Then?”

  “Then you come back in here. You put me to sleep. You take the memory of this conversation and the phone call out of my head.”

  “How?” she asked. “If I leave any obvious holes, it could hurt you—and it might be visible to something as powerful as Mab.”

  I thought about it for a moment and said, “I nodded off in the van on the way here. Set it up so that I was never awake once I was here, until I wake up after.”

  She thought about it and said, “It could work. If I do it slowly enough, it might not leave a ripple.”

  “Do it like that, then.”

  She stood up. She walked over to a battered old wooden cabinet on the wall and opened it. Among other things, there was an old, freestanding rotary phone inside it, attached to a long extension cord, a makeshift line that Forthill had run through the drywall from the next room. She brought the phone to me and set it carefully on my chest. Then she walked to the similarly battered old wooden door.

  “You realize,” she said, “that I could change this, Harry. Could find out who you were using to kill yourself. I could take it right out of your head and call them off. You’d never know.”

  “You could do that,” I said, quietly. “And I feel like an utter bastard for asking this of you, grasshopper. But I don’t have anyone else to ask.”

  “You should call Thomas,” she said. “He deserves the truth.”

  Thomas. My brother. My family. He’d be one of little Maggie’s only blood relations once I was gone. And Molly was right. He did deserve the truth.

  “No,” I said, barely louder than a whisper. “Tell him later, if you want. After. I
f you tell him before that, he won’t stand for it. He’ll try to stop it.”

  “And maybe he’d be right to do it.”

  “No,” I said quietly. “He wouldn’t. But he’d do it anyway. This is my choice, Molls.”

  She turned to go and paused. “You’ve never called me Molls before today.”

  “Was saving it,” I said. “For when you weren’t my apprentice anymore. Wanted to try it out.”

  She smiled at me. She shed one more tear.

  Then she left.

  It took me a moment to gather myself. Then I dialed an international number on the rotary phone.

  “Kincaid,” answered a flat voice.

  “It’s Dresden,” I said.

  The voice warmed very slightly. “Harry. What’s up?”

  I took a deep breath. “You owe me a favor,” I said quietly. “For that thing with Ivy on the island.”

  “Damn right,” he said.

  “I’m calling it in.”

  “Okay,” he said. “You want some backup on something?”

  “I have a target for you.”

  There was a silence from the other end of the phone. Then he said, “Tell me.”

  “The new Winter Knight,” I said.

  “There’s a new one?”

  “There’s going to be,” I said.

  “How do you . . .” More silence. Then he said, “It’s like that.”

  “There’s a good reason,” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s a little girl.”

  More silence. “You’ll know it’s coming.”

  “No,” I said. “I won’t. I’ll see to it.”

  “Okay,” he said. “When?”

  They were going to kill my daughter sometime before the next sunrise. I figured it might take me some time to get her home, assuming I didn’t die trying.

  “Anytime after noon tomorrow,” I said. “The sooner, the better.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can find me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Be sure,” I said.

  “I pay my debts.”

  I sighed again. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  He let out a soft chuckle. “Thanking me,” he said. “That’s new.”

  He hung up. I did the same. Then I called for Molly.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

  Molly took the phone and put it back in the cabinet. Then she picked up a slender, new white candle in a holder and a small box of matches. She came over and set the candle on a folding table nearby, where I could see it without moving my head. She struck a match and lit it.

  “All right,” she said. “Harry, this has to be a smooth, gentle job. So focus on the candle. I need you to still your mind so that I can work.”

  It felt odd, letting the grasshopper take the lead—but I guess that was what I’d been training her to do. I focused on the candle and began to quiet my thoughts.

  “Good,” Molly said quietly after a moment, her voice soft velvet. “Relax. Take a nice, slow, deep breath. Good . . . Listen to my voice and let me guide you. Another deep breath now . . .”

  And together with my accomplice, I finished arranging my murder.

  Chapter Fifty

  I surfaced from the memory, shivering, and looked around in confusion. I was still in Molly’s mindscape, on the cheesy bridge. It was silent. Completely silent. Nothing moved. The images on the screen and the various Mollys were all frozen in place like mannequins. Everything that had been happening in the battle had been happening at the speed of thought—lightning fast. There was only one reason that everything here would be stopped still like this, right in the middle of the action.

  “So much for that linear-time nonsense, eh?” My voice came out sounding harsh and rough.

  Footsteps sounded behind me, and the room began to grow brighter and brighter. After a moment, there was nothing but white light, and I had to hold up a hand to shield my eyes against it.

  Then the light faded somewhat. I lifted my eyes again and found myself in a featureless expanse of white. I wasn’t even sure what I was standing on, or if I was standing on anything at all. There was simply nothing but white . . .

  . . . and a young man with hair of dark gold that hung messily down over silver blue eyes. His cheekbones could have sliced bread. He wore jeans, old boots, a white shirt, and a denim jacket, and no youth born had ever been able to stand with such utter, tranquil stillness as he.

  “You’re used to linear time,” he said. His voice was resonant, deep, mellow, with the almost musical timbre you hear from radio personalities. “It was the easiest way to help you understand.”

  “Aren’t you a little short for an archangel?” I asked him.

  Uriel smiled at me. It was the sort of expression that would make flowers spontaneously blossom and babies start to giggle. “Appropriate. I must confess to being more of a Star Wars fan than a Star Trek fan, personally. The simple division of good and evil, the clarity of perfect right and perfect wrong—it’s relaxing. It makes me feel young.”

  I just stared at him for a moment and tried to gather my thoughts. The memory, now that I had it again, was painfully vivid. God, that poor kid. Molly. I’d never wanted to cause her pain. She’d been a willing accomplice, and she’d done it with her eyes open—but, God, I wished it hadn’t had to happen to her. She was hurting so much, and now I could see why—and I could see why the madness she was feigning might be a great deal more genuine than she realized.

  That had to have been why Murphy distrusted her so strongly. Murph had excellent instincts for people. She must have sensed something in Molly, sensed the pain and the desperation that drove her, and it must have sent up a warning flag in Murphy’s head. Which would have hurt Molly badly, to be faced with suspicion and distrust, however polite Karrin might have been about it. That pain would, in turn, have driven her further away, made her act stranger, which would earn more suspicion, in an agonizing cycle.

  I’d never wanted that for her.

  What had I done?

  I’d saved Maggie—but had I destroyed my apprentice in doing so? The fact that I’d gotten myself killed had no relative bearing on the morality of my actions, if I had. You can’t just walk around picking and choosing which lives to save and which to destroy. The inherent arrogance and the underlying evil of such a thing runs too deep to be avoided—no matter how good your intentions might be.

  I knew why Molly had tried to get me to tell Thomas. She’d known, just as I had, that Thomas would try to stop me from killing myself, regardless of my motivations. But she’d been right about something else, too: He was my brother. He’d deserved more than I’d given him. That was why I hadn’t thought of him, not once since returning to Chicago. How could I possibly have remembered my brother without remembering the shame I felt at excluding him from my trust? How could I think of Thomas without thinking of the truth of what I had done?

  Normally, I would never have believed that I was the sort of man who could make himself forget and overlook something rather than facing a harsh reality, no matter how painful it might be.

  I guess I’m not perfect.

  The young man facing me waited patiently, apparently giving me time to gather my thoughts, saying nothing.

  Uriel. I should have known from the outset. Uriel is the archangel who most people know little about. Most don’t even know his name—and apparently he likes it that way. If Gabriel is an ambassador, if Michael is a general, if Rafael is a healer and spiritual champion, then Uriel is a spymaster—Heaven’s spook. Uriel covered all kinds of covert work for the Almighty. When mysterious angels showed up to wrestle with biblical patriarchs without revealing their identities, when death was visited upon the firstborn of Egypt, when an angel was sent into cities of corruption to guide the innocent clear of inbound wrath, Uriel’s hand was at work.

  He was the quietest of the archangels. To my way of thinking, that probably indicated that he was also the most dangerous.
r />   He’d taken notice of me a few years back and had bestowed a measure of power known as soulfire on me. I’d done a job or three for him since then. He’d dropped by with annoying, cryptic advice once in a while. I sort of liked him, but he was also aggravating—and scary, in a way that I had never known before. There was the sense of something . . . hideously absolute about him. Something that would not yield or change even if the universe itself was unmade. Standing in his presence, I always felt that I had somehow become so fragile that I might fly to dust if the archangel sneezed or accidentally twitched the wrong muscle.

  Which, given the kind of power such a being possessed, was probably more or less accurate.

  “All of this?” I asked, waving a hand generally, “was to lead me there? To that memory?”

  “You had to understand.”

  I eyed him and said wearily, “Epic. Fail. Because I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  Uriel tilted back his head and laughed. “This is one of those things that was about the journey, not the destination.”

  I shook my head. “You . . . you lost me.”

  “On the contrary, Harry: You found yourself.”

  I eyed him. Then tore at my hair and said, “Arrrgh! Can’t you give me a straight answer? Is there some law of the universe that compels you to be so freaking mysterious?”

  “Several, actually,” Uriel said, still clearly amused. “All designed for your protection, but there are still some things I can tell you.”

  “Then tell me why,” I said. “Why do all this? Why sucker me into going back to Chicago? Why?”

  “Jack told you,” Uriel said. “They cheated. The scale had to be balanced.”

  I shook my head. “That office, in Chicago Between. It was yours.”

  “One of them,” he said, nodding. “I have a great deal of work to do. I recruit those willing to help me.”

  “What work?” I asked.

  “The same work as I ever have done,” Uriel said. “I and my colleagues labor to ensure freedom.”

  “Freedom of what?” I asked.

  “Of will. Of choice. The distinction between good and evil is meaningless if one does not have the freedom to choose between them. It is my duty, my purpose in Creation, to protect and nourish that meaning.”