by Jim Butcher
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 from 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 spiri
t.
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.”
His face spread into a wide grin. “Well, I admit, my crib is pretty sweet. But a gold cage is still a cage, Harry.”
“A gold fallout shelter, more like.”
“Either way, you get stir-crazy every few decades,” he said, and flopped down onto a chaise. “You get that this isn’t literally what the inside of the skull is like, right?”
“It’s my head interpreting what I see into familiar things, yeah,” I said. “It’s getting to be kind of common.”
“Welcome to the world of spirit,” Bob said.
“What’s with the food?”
“Butters’s mom is some kind of food goddess,” Bob said, his eyes widening. “That’s the spread she’s put out over the last few holidays. Or, um, Butters’s sensory memories of it, anyway—he let me do a ride-along, and then I made this facsimile of what we experienced.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “He let you do a ride-along? In his head?” Bob . . . was not well-known for his restraint, in my experience, when he got to go on one of his excursions.
“There was a contract first,” Bob said. “A limiting document about twenty pages long. He covered his bases.”
“Huh,” I said. I nodded at the food. “And you just . . . remade it?”
“Oh, sure,” Bob said. “I can remake whatever in here.” He waggled his eyebrows. “You want to see a replay of that time Molly got the acid all over her clothes in the lab and had to strip?”
“Um. Pass,” I said. I sat down gingerly on a chair, making sure I wasn’t going to sink through it or something. It seemed to behave like a normal chair. “TV and stuff, too?”
“I am kinda made out of energy, man,” Bob said. He pointed at the wall of media equipment. “You remember me broadcasting to your spirit radio, right? I’m, like, totally tapped in now. Television, satellite imagery, broadband Internet—you name it; I can do it. How do you think I know so much?”
“Hundreds of years of assisting wizards,” I said.
He waved a hand. “That, too. But I got this whole huge Internet thing to play on now. Butters showed me.” His grin turned into a leer. “And it’s, like, ninety percent porn!”
“There’s the Bob I know and love,” I said.
“Love, ick,” he replied. “And I am and I’m not. I mean, you get that I change based on who possesses the skull, right?”
“Sure,” I said.
“So I’m a lot like I was with you, even though I’m with Butters, because he met me back then. First impression and whatnot, highly important.”
I grunted. “How long do we have to talk?”
“Not as simple to answer as you’d think,” Bob said. “But . . . you’re still pretty cherry, so let’s keep it simple. A few minutes, speaking linearly—but I can stretch it out for a while, subjectively.”
“Huh,” I said. “Neat.”
“Nah, just sort of the way we roll on this side of the street,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“Who killed me?” I replied.
“Oooh, sorry. Can’t help you with that, except as a sounding board.”
“Okay,” I said. “Lemme catch you up on what I know.”
I filled Bob in on everything since the train tunnel. I didn’t hold back much of anything. Bob was smart enough to fill in the vast majority of gaps if I left anything out anyway, and he could compile information and deduce coherent facts as well as any mind I had ever known.
And besides . . . he was my oldest friend.
He listened, his gold brown eyes intent, completely focused on me.
“Wow,” he said when I’d finished. “You are so completely fucked.”
I arched an eyebrow at him and said, “How do you figure?”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, where do I start? How about with the obvious? Uriel.”
“Uriel,” I said. “What?”
“A wizard tied in with a bunch of really elemental sources of power dies, right after signing off on some deals that guarantee he’s about to become a whole Hell of a lot darker—capital letter intended—and there’s this sudden”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“ ‘irregularity’ about his death. He gets sent back to the mortal coil to get involved again. And you think an angel isn’t involved somewhere? Remember. Uriel is the black-ops guy of the archangels. He’s conned the Father of Lies, for crying out loud. You think he wouldn’t scam you?”
“Uh,” I said.
I felt a little thick.
“See?” Bob said. “Your first tiny piece of flesh-free existence, and already you’re lost without me.”
I shook my head. “Look, man, I’m just . . . just a spirit now. This is just, like, paperwork I’m getting filled out before I catch the train to Wherever.”
Bob rolled his eyes again and snorted. “Oh, sure it is. You get sent back here just as the freaking Corpsetaker is setting herself up as Queen of Chicago, getting ready to wipe out the defenders of humanity—such as they are—here in town, and it’s just a coincidence, business as usual.” He sniffed. “They’re totally playing you.”
“They?” I said.
“Think about it,” Bob said. “I mean, stop for a minute and actually think. I know it’s been a while.”
“Winter,” I said. “Snow a foot deep at the end of spring. Queen Mab.”
“Obviously,” Bob said. “She’s here. In Chicago. Somewhere. And because, duh, she’s the Winter Queen, she brought winter with her.” He pursed his lips. “For a few more days anyway.”
Bob was right. Mab might flaunt her power in the face of the oncoming season, but if she didn’t back down, her opposite number, Titania, would come for her—at the height of summer’s power, the solstice, if previous patterns held true.
“Harry, I don’t want to comment about your new girlfriend, but she’s still here six months after you got shot? Seems kind of clingy.”
“Wait,” I said. “You’re saying that Mab and Uriel are in on something. Together. The Queen of Air and Darkness, and a flipping archangel.”
“We live in strange times,” Bob said philosophically. “They’re peers, of a sort, Harry. Hey, word is that even the Almighty and Lucifer worked a deal on Job. Spider-Man has teamed up with the Sandman before. Luke and Vader did the Emperor. It happens.”
“Spider-Man is pretend and doesn’t count,” I said.
“You start drawing distinctions like this now?” Bob asked. “Besides, he’s real. Like, somewhere.”
I blinked. “Um. What?”
“You think your universe is the only universe? Harry, come on. Creation, totally freaking huge. Room enough for you and Spider-Man both.” He spread his hands. “Look, I’m not a
faith guy. I don’t know what happens on the other side, or if you wind up going to a Heaven or Hell or something reasonably close to them. That isn’t my bag. But I know a shell game when I see one.”
I swallowed and pushed a hand back through my hair. “The Fomor’s servitors. Corpsetaker and her gang. Even Aristedes and his little crew. They’re pieces on the board.”
“Just like you,” Bob agreed cheerfully. “Notice anyone else who pushed you a space or two recently? By which I mean that you only recently noticed.”
I scowled. “Other than everyone around me?”
“I was sort of thinking about the one behind you,” Bob said. His expression grew suddenly serious. “The Walker.”
I took a slow breath. He Who Walks Behind.
It was only now, looking back at my crystalline memories and applying what I’d learned during my adult lifetime since they happened, that I could really appreciate what had gone on that night.
The Walker had never been trying to kill me. If it had wanted to do that, it didn’t need to play with me. It could simply have appeared and executed me, the way it had poor Stan at the gas station. It had been trying to push me, to shape me into something dangerous—like maybe a weapon.
Like maybe the same way Justin had.
I had always assumed that Justin had controlled He Who Walks Behind, that my old master had sent him after me when I fled. But what if I’d been a flipping idiot? What if their relationship had worked the other way around? What if Justin, who had betrayed me, had similarly been backstabbed by his own inhuman mentor, when the creature had, in essence, prepared me to destroy Justin?
“Lotta really scary symmetry there,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” Bob said, still serious. “You are in a scary place, Harry.” He took a deep breath. “And . . . it gets worse.”
“Worse? How?”
“It’s just a theory,” he said, “because this isn’t my bag. But look. There’s flesh and there’s spirit, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Mortals have both, right there together, along with the soul.”
“I thought it was the same thing. Soul, spirit.”