by Jim Butcher
The bald man’s eyes blazed and a scream exploded from his chest. There was a horrible, rushing, bass-thrumming sound in the air, and an invisible force struck Fitz full in the chest, knocking him back ten feet before he hit the concrete floor and tumbled another ten.
“Sense?!” the bald man screamed. “Sense? You don’t have any sense! Do you know what the consequences of your idiocy could be? Do you know how many groups precisely like this one have been wiped out by the Fomor? By the Rag Lady? Idiot!”
Fitz lay on the floor, body curled defensively, and didn’t even try to lift his head. He was staying down, hoping not to provoke Baldy any further, his expression resigned to the fact that he was probably going to suffer more pain in short order—and that there was nothing he could do about it.
“It was simple!” Baldy continued, stalking toward the young man. “I gave you a task that men with their veins and noses full of drugs execute routinely. And it proved too great a challenge? Is that what you are telling me?”
Fitz’s voice was too steady to be sincere. He was used to hiding his fear, his vulnerability. “I’m sorry. The Rag Lady was there. We couldn’t have gotten any closer. She’d have taken us. We had to hit them and run.”
Baldy’s rage vanished abruptly. He stared down at the young man with no expression on his face and spoke in a gentle voice. “If there is some reason you believe you should be allowed to keep breathing, you should share it with the class now, Fitz.”
Fitz had a good poker face, but it had been a long night for him. He started breathing jerkily. “The idea wasn’t to kill them, you told me. The idea was to make sure that no one pushes us. That we push back. We showed them that. We accomplished the mission.”
Baldy stared at him and did not move.
I saw a bead of sweat on his brow. “It isn’t . . . It’s not . . . Look, I can get the guns back. I can. I marked where we buried them. I can go get them.”
Baldy glowered down at the young man and kicked him in the belly. The blow was offhand, absentminded, almost an afterthought. He seemed to reach a conclusion, and turned around to go back to the grill.
“Food’s hot, boys,” Baldy said. “Come eat up.”
The gang moved forward nervously. After a moment, Fitz began to rise, being careful to make no sound.
There was a sudden, puffing sigh of displaced air. Baldy’s shape blurred from the grill back over to Fitz, sending one of the young gunmen flying sideways. Baldy was suddenly slamming a hard right to Fitz’s head, his fist moving almost too quickly to see.
The hit sent Fitz to the ground. I was close enough to see the scar tissue around his eye break open, blood trickling rapidly down the young man’s cheek.
“Not you, Fitz,” Baldy said, his voice gentle again. “I don’t give food to dead men. Eat when you have corrected your error.”
Fitz nodded, without looking up, his hand pressed to his head. “Yes, sir.”
“Good lad,” Baldy said. He wrinkled his nose as if there were a mild stench in the air, and spat, mostly on Fitz. Then he turned to walk away.
The kid looked up at Baldy with murder in his eye.
I don’t mean that Fitz looked angry. You hear a lot about “if looks could kill” these days, but there just aren’t many people who really know what it looks like. Killing—or, more accurately, making the choice to kill—isn’t something we’re good at lately. Ending the life of another living creature used to be part of the daily routine. Chickens were beheaded by the average farm wife for dinner. Fish were likewise caught, cleaned, and prepared for a meal. Slaughtering pigs or cattle was a regular event, part of the turning of the seasons. Most people on earth—farmers—worked and lived every single day with lives they knew they were going to choose to end, eventually.
Killing’s messy. It’s frequently ugly. And if something goes wrong, it can be wretched, seeing another being in mortal agony, which means there’s a certain amount of pressure involved in the act. It isn’t easy, and that’s just considering farm animals.
Killing another human being magnifies the worry, the ugliness, and the pressure by orders of magnitude. You don’t make a choice like that lightly. There’s calculation to it, consideration of the possible outcomes. Anyone can kill in a frenzy of fear or hatred—you aren’t making the choice to kill that way. You’re simply giving your emotions control of your actions.
I watched Fitz’s eyes as he calculated, considered, and made his choice. His face went pale, but his jaw was clenched, his eyes steady.
I don’t know what motivated me, exactly, but I leaned down near him and snapped, “Don’t!”
The young man had begun to shift his weight, to get his feet beneath him. He froze in the act.
“He’s expecting it, Fitz,” I said in a harsh, forceful tone. “He spat on you to drive you to it. He’s ready. He’ll kill you before you’ve finished standing up.”
Fitz looked around him, but his gaze went right through me. He couldn’t see me, then. Huh.
“I’ve been where you are, kid. I know this bald loser’s type. Don’t be a sucker. Don’t give him what he wants.”
Fitz closed his eyes very tightly for a moment. Then he exhaled slowly, and his body relaxed.
“Wise,” Baldy said. “Make good on your claim, and we might still have a way to work together, Fitz.”
Fitz swallowed, and grimaced as if at a bitter taste in his mouth, and said, “Yes, sir. I’m going to check the perimeter.”
“An excellent idea,” Baldy said. “I’d rather not see you for a while.” Then he walked away from Fitz, leaning down to touch the shoulder of one of the young men, and muttered softly.
Fitz moved, quickly and quietly, getting off the shop floor and moving out into the hallway. There he hugged himself tightly, shivering, and began walking rapidly down a hallway.
“I’m not crazy,” he said. “I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy.”
“Well . . . kinda,” I said, keeping pace. “What are you doing working for an asshole like that?”
“You aren’t real,” Fitz said.
“The hell I’m not,” I replied. “I just can’t figure out why it is that you can hear me talking.”
“I’m not crazy,” Fitz snarled, and put his hands over his ears.
“I’m pretty sure that won’t help you,” I noted. “I mean, it’s your mind that perceives me. I think you just happen to get it as, uh . . . one of those MV4 things, instead of as a movie.”
“MP3,” Fitz corrected me automatically. Then he jerked his hands from his ears and looked around him, eyes wide. “Uh . . . are you . . . you actually there?”
“I am,” I confirmed. “Though any halfway decent hallucination would tell you that.”
Fitz blinked. “Um. I don’t want to piss you off or anything but . . . what are you?”
“I’m a guy who doesn’t like to see his friends getting shot at, Fitz,” I told him.
Fitz’s steps slowed. He seemed to put his back against a wall out of reflex more than thought. He was very still for a long moment. Then he said, “You’re . . . a, um . . . a spirit?”
“Technically,” I said.
He swallowed. “You work for the Rag Lady.”
Hell’s bells. The kid was terrified of Molly. And I’d known plenty of kids like Fitz when I was growing up in the system. I met them in foster homes, in orphanages, in schools and summer camps. Tough kids, survivors, people who knew that no one was looking out for them except themselves. Not everyone had the same experience in the system, but portions of it were positively Darwinian. It created some hard cases. Fitz was one of them.
People like that aren’t stupid, but they don’t scare easily, either.
Fitz was terrified of Molly.
My stomach quivered in an unpleasant manner.
“No,” I told him. “I don’t work for her. I’m not a servitor.”
He frowned. “Then . . . you work for the ex-cop bi . . . uh, lady?”
“Kid,” I said, “you have
no idea who you’re screwing around with. You pointed weapons at the wrong people. I know where you live now. They will, too.”
He went white. “No,” he said. “Look . . . you don’t know what it’s like here. Zero and the others, they can’t help it. He doesn’t let them do anything but what he wants.”
“Baldy, you mean?” I asked.
Fitz let out a strained, half-hysterical bark of laughter. “He calls himself Aristedes. He’s got power.”
“Power to push a bunch of kids around?”
“You don’t know,” Fitz said, speaking quietly. “He tells you to do something and . . . and you do it. It never even occurs to you to do anything else. And . . . and he moves so fast. I’m not . . . I think he might not even be human.”
“He’s human,” I said. “He’s just another asshole.”
A faint, weary spark of humor showed in Fitz’s face. Then he said, “If that’s true, then how does he do it?”
“He’s a sorcerer,” I said. “Middleweight talent with a cult to make him feel bigger. He’s got some form of kinetomancy I’m not familiar with, to move that fast. And some really minor mind mojo, if he’s got to pick kids to do his dirty work for him.”
“You make him sound like a small-time crook . . . like a car thief or something.”
“In the greater scheme, yeah,” I said. “He’s a petty crook. He’s Fagin.”
Fitz frowned. “From . . . from that Dickens book? Uh . . . Oliver Twist?”
I lifted my eyebrows. The kid had read. Serious readers weren’t common in the system. Those who did read mostly seemed to focus on, you know, kids’ books. Not many of them rolled around to Dickens unless they got unlucky in high school English. I would have been willing to bet that Fitz hadn’t made it past his freshman year of high school, at the very most.
He was someone who thought for himself, and he had at least a little bit of magical talent. That probably explained why he’d been put in charge of the other boys. Aside from his evident good sense, his company notwithstanding, the kid had some innate magical talent of his own. Fitz had probably been slowly learning to shake off whatever magic it was that Baldy—Aristedes—used on him. The bad guy operated in a cultleader mind-set. Anyone who wasn’t a slavish follower would be utilized as a handy lieutenant, until such time as they could be disposed of productively—or at least quietly.
I didn’t like Fitz’s chances at all.
“Something like that,” I said.
Fitz leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” he said. “I don’t even know any of those people. But he ordered it. And they were all going to do it. And I couldn’t let them just . . . just turn into murderers. They’re the only . . . They’re . . .”
“They’re yours,” I said quietly. “You look out for them.”
“Someone has to,” Fitz said. “Streets weren’t ever easy. About six months ago, though . . . they got hard. Real hard. Things came out. You could see them at night sometimes—shapes. Shadows.” He started shivering, and his voice became a whisper. “They’d take people. People who didn’t have someone to protect them would just vanish. So . . .”
“Baldy,” I said quietly.
“He killed one of them,” Fitz whispered. “Right in front of me. I saw it. It looked human, but when he was done with it . . . It just melted, man.” He shook his head. “Maybe I am crazy. God, it would almost be a relief.”
“You aren’t crazy,” I said. “But you’re in a bad place.”
The light went completely out of the kid’s eyes. “What else is new?”
“Oy,” I muttered. “Like I didn’t have enough to do already.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Look, kid. Go back to the guns at eleven tonight. That street will have gotten quieter by then. I’ll meet you.”
His dull eyes never flickered. “Why?”
“Because I’m going to help you.”
“Crazy, imaginary, invisible-voice hallucination guy,” Fitz said. “He’s going to help me. Yeah, I’ve lost it.”
There was the sudden, burring, metallic buzz of a bell, much like you’d hear in a high school or university hallway. It echoed through the entire building.
“Time for class?” I asked.
“No. Aristedes had us set it up on a timer. Says he needed the warning for his work. It goes off about five minutes before sunrise.”
I felt my back stiffen. “Five minutes?”
Fitz shrugged. “Or seven. Or two. It’s in there somewhere.”
“Hell’s bells,” I said, turning it into a swearword. “Stu was right. Time does get away from you. Be at the guns at eleven, Fitz.”
He grunted and said, in a tired monotone, “Sure, Harvey. Whatever.”
Old books and old movies. I had to help this kid.
I turned away from him and plunged through several walls and out the side of the building, clenching my teeth over snarls of discomfort. The sky had grown almost fully light. Red was swiftly brightening to orange on the eastern horizon out over Lake Michigan. Once yellow got here, I was history.
Five minutes. Or seven. Or two. That was how long I had to find a safe spot. I consulted my mental map of Chicago, looking for the nearest probable shelter, and found the only spot I thought I could get to in a couple of minutes, Nightcrawler impersonation and all.
Maybe I could get there. And maybe it would protect me from the sunrise.
I gritted my teeth, consulted the images in my memory, and, metaphorically speaking, ran for it.
I just had to hope that it wasn’t already too late.
Chapter
Fourteen
One of the things a lot of people don’t understand about magic is that the rules of how it works aren’t hard-and-fast; they’re fluid, changing with time, with the seasons, with location, and with the intent of a practitioner. Magic isn’t alive in the sense of a corporeal, sentient being, but it does have a kind of anima all its own. It grows, swells, wanes, and changes.
Some facets of magic are relatively steady, like the way a person with a strong magical talent fouls up technology—but even that relative constant is one that has been slowly changing over the centuries. Three hundred years ago, magical talents screwed up other things—like causing candle flames to burn in strange colors and milk to instantly sour (which had to be hell on any wizard who wanted to bake anything). A couple of hundred years before that, exposure to magic often had odd effects on a person’s skin, creating the famous blemishes that had become known as the devil’s mark.
Centuries from now, who knows? Maybe magic will have the side effect of making you really good-looking and popular with the opposite sex—but I’m not holding my breath.
I mean, you know.
I wouldn’t be. If I still had any.
Anyway, the point is that everyone thinks that the sunrise is all about abolishing evil. It’s the light coming up out of the darkness, right?
Well, yeah. Sometimes. But mostly it’s just sunrise. It’s a part of every day, a steady mark of the passing of whirling objects in the void. Granted, there isn’t much black magic associated with the sun coming over the horizon—in fact, I’ve never even heard of any. But it isn’t a cleansing force of Good and Right.
It is, however, one hell of a cleansing force, generally speaking. Therein lay my problem.
A spirit isn’t meant to be hanging around in the mortal world unless it’s got a body to live in. It’s supposed to be on Carmichael’s El train, I guess, or in Paradise or Hell or Valhalla or something. Spirits are made of energy—they’re made of 99.9 percent pure, delicious, nutritious magic. Accept no substitute.
Spirits and sunrise go together like germs and bleach, respectively. The renewing forces flowing through the world with the new day wash over the planet like a silent, invisible tsunami, a riptide of magic that will inevitably wear away at even the strongest of mortal spells, giving them an effective shelf life if they aren’t maintained.
A wandering spirit, caught out beneath the sunrise, would be dissolved. It isn’t a question of standing in a shady spot, any more than standing in your kitchen would protect you from an oncoming tsunami. You have to get to somewhere that is actually safe, that is somehow shielded, sheltered, or otherwise lifted above the renewing riptide of sunrise.
I was a ghost, after all. So I ran for the one place I thought might shelter me, and that I could reach the quickest.
I ran for my grave.
I have my own grave, headstone already in place, the darned thing all dug out and open, just ready to receive me. It was a present from an enemy who, in retrospect, didn’t seem nearly as scary as she had been at the time. She’d been making a grand gesture in front of the seamier side of the supernatural community at large, delivering me a death threat while simultaneously demonstrating her ability to get me a grave in a boneyard with very exclusive access, convincing its management that it ought to break city ordinances and leave a gaping hole in the earth at the foot of my headstone. I don’t know what she’d bribed or threatened them with, but it had stayed where it was, yawning open in Chicago’s famous Graceland Cemetery, for years.
And maybe it would finally be useful as something other than a set piece for brooding.
I pulled Sir Stuart’s vanishing trick and realized that I couldn’t jump much farther than maybe three hundred yards at a hop. Still, I could do it a lot faster than running, and it didn’t seem to wear me out the way I would expect such a thing to do. It became an exercise like running itself—repeating the same process over and over to go from Point A to Point B.
I blinked through the front gate of Graceland, took a couple more hops, trying to find the right spot by this big Greek temple–looking mausoleum, and arrived, in a baseball player’s slide, at the gaping hole in the ground. My incorporeal body slid neatly over the white snow that ran right up to the edge of the grave, and I dropped into the cool, shady trench that had been prepared for me.
Sunlight washed over the world above a few heartbeats later. I heard it, felt it, the way I had once felt a minor earthquake through the soles of my shoes in Washington State. There was a harsh, clear, silvery note that hung in the air for a moment, like the after-tone of an enormous chime. I closed my eyes and scrunched up against the side of the grave that felt most likely to let me avoid obliteration.