by Jim Butcher
Michael shrugged into his jacket and slung the sword belt over his shoulder. “They’re already asleep. Do you mind?”
Father Forthill stepped in. “Never.” He made the Cross over each of us again and murmured, “God go with you.”
We started out of the house and to Michael’s truck. “You see, Harry?”
I scowled. “Handy fringe benefit.”
Michael drove, the big white truck rumbling down the local streets toward a corner grocery on Byron Street, within a long sprint of the famous Graceland Cemetery. The lowering clouds rumbled and started dumping a steady, heavy rain down onto the city, giving all the lights golden halos and casting ghostly reflections on the wet streets.
“This time of night,” Michael said, “Walsham’s is the only place open. She’ll be there.” Thunder rumbled again in growling punctuation to the statement. I drummed my fingers on my scorched staff, and made sure that my blasting rod was hanging loosely by its thong around my wrist.
“There’s her van,” Michael said. He pulled the truck up into the row of parking spots in front of the grocery, next to the white Suburban troop transport. He barely took the time to take his keys with him—instead just snatching out Amoracchius and loosening the great blade in its sheath as he strode toward the store’s front doors, his eyes narrowed, his jaw set. The rain pasted his hair down to his head after a few steps, soaking his Levi’s jacket dark blue. I followed him, wincing at the damage to my leather duster, and reflecting that the old canvas job would have fared better in this weather.
Michael slammed the heel of his hand into the door, and it swept open with a jangling of tinny bells. He strode into the store, swept his eyes around the visible displays and the cash registers, and then bellowed, “Charity! Where are you?”
A couple of teenage cashiers blinked at him, and an elderly woman perusing the vitamins turned to gawk at him through her spectacles. I sighed, then nodded to the nearest cashier, a too-skinny, too-blonde girl who looked as though she were impatient for her cigarette break. “Uh, hi,” I said. “Did you see me come in here a minute ago?”
“Or a pregnant woman,” Michael said. “About this high.” He stuck his hand out flat about at the level of his own ear.
The female cashier traded a look with her counterpart. “Seen you, mister?”
I nodded. “Another guy, like me. Tall, skinny, all in black—jacket like mine, but all black clothes underneath.”
The girl licked her lips and gave us a calculating look. “Maybe I have,” she said. “What’s in it for me?”
Michael rolled forward a step, a growl bubbling up out of his throat. I grabbed at his shoulder and leaned back. “Whoah, whoah, Michael,” I yelped. “Slow down, man.”
“There isn’t time to slow down,” Michael muttered. “You detect. I’m looking.” With that, he turned and strode off deeper into the store, casually carrying the sword in his left hand, his right upon the weapon’s grip. “Charity!”
I muttered something unflattering under my breath, then turned back to the cashier. I fumbled in my pockets for my billfold, and managed to produce a sorry trio of wrinkled fives. I held them up and said, “Okay. My evil twin or else a pregnant woman. You seen either one?”
The girl looked at the bills and then back at me and rolled her eyes. Then she leaned out from her counter and plucked them from my hands. “Yeah,” she said. “She went down aisle five a few minutes ago. Back toward the freezer section.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “Then what?”
She smiled. “What? Is this your brother or something, running around with your woman? Am I going to see this on Larry Fowler tomorrow?”
I narrowed my eyes. “It’s complicated,” I said. “What else did you see?”
She shrugged. “She paid for some stuff, and went to that van out there. It wouldn’t start. I saw you—or the guy that looks like you, come up to her and start talking to her. She looked pretty pissed at him, but she walked off with him. I didn’t think anything of it.”
My stomach gave a little lurch. “Walked off?” I said. “Which way?”
The cashier shrugged. “Look, mister, she just looked like she was getting a ride somewhere. She wasn’t fighting or nothing.”
“Which way!” I thundered. The cashier blinked, and her jaded exterior wobbled for a moment. She pointed down the street—toward Graceland.
“Michael!” I shouted. “Come on!” Then I turned around and banged my way back outside and into the rain and the dark. I stopped at Charity’s van for a second, and tapped at the hood. It wobbled up without resistance, to reveal a mess of torn wires and shredded belts and broken pieces of metal. I winced, and shielded my eyes from the rain, trying to scan down the street toward the cemetery.
In the far distance, just barely, I saw two figures—one ungainly, with long hair. The other stood tall over her, slender, walking toward the cemetery holding her firmly by the hair.
They vanished into the shadows at the base of the stone wall around Graceland. I gulped, and looked around. “Michael!” I shouted again. I peered through the grocery’s windows, but I couldn’t see him anywhere.
“Dammit!” I said, and kicked at the front bumper of the van. I was in no shape to go after the Nightmare on my own. It was full of power it had stolen from me. It had the booga booga factor going for it. And it had my friend’s wife and unborn child as hostages.
Hell’s bells, all I had was a headache, an hourglass quickly running out of sand, and a case of the shakes. Chicago’s biggest cemetery, on a dark, rainy night, when the border between here and the spirit world was leaking like a sieve. It would be full of spooks and crawlies, and I would be alone.
“Yeah,” I muttered. “That figures.”
I sprinted for the darkness into which I had seen the Nightmare disappear with Charity.
Chapter Twenty-one
I’ve done smarter things in my life. Once, for example, I threw myself out of a moving car in order to take on a truckload of lycanthropes single-handedly. That had been nominally smarter. At least I had been fairly certain that I could kill them, if I had to, at the time.
Which put me one step ahead of where I was, now. I had already killed the Nightmare—or helped to kill it, at least. Something about that just didn’t seem fair. There should be some kind of rule against needing to kill anything more than once.
Rain fell in sheets rather than drops, sluicing down into my eyes. I had to keep on wiping my brow, sweeping water away, only to have it fill my vision again. I started to give serious thought to what it might be like to drown, right there on the sidewalk.
I cut across the street toward the cemetery fence. Seven feet of red brick, the fence rose in a jagged stair-step fashion every hundred feet or so, keeping up with the slow slope of the street along its southern perimeter as it moved west. At one point, a gaping slash of darkness marred the fence’s exterior, and I slowed as I approached it. The bricks had been torn like paper, and lay in rubble two feet deep around the hole in the wall. I tried to peer beyond it, and saw only more rain, green grass, the shadows of trees cast over the carefully tended grounds.
I paused, outside the graveyard. A dull, restless energy pressed against me, like when weariness and caffeine mix around three-thirty in the morning. It rolled against my skin, and I heard, actually heard whispering voices, through the rain, dozens, hundreds of whispers, ghostly sussurance. I put my hand on the wall, and felt the tension there. There are always fences around cemeteries. Always, whether stone or brick or chain-link. It’s one of those unwritten things that people don’t really notice, they just do it by reflex. Any kind of wall is a barrier in more than merely a physical sense. Lots of things are more than what they seem in a purely physical sense.
Walls keep things out. Walls around cemeteries keep things in.
I looked back, hoping that Michael had followed me, but I didn’t or couldn’t see him in the rain. I still felt weak, shaken. The voices whispered, clustering around the weak point in
the wall, where the Nightmare had torn its way in. Even if only one death in a thousand had produced a ghost (and more than that did) there might be dozens of restless spirits wandering the grounds, some even strong enough for non-practitioners of the Art to experience.
Tonight, there weren’t dozens. Dozens would have been a happy number. I closed my eyes and could feel the power they stirred up, the way the air wavered and shook with the presence of hundreds of spirits, easily crossed over from the turbulent Nevernever. It made my knees shake, my belly quiver—both from the wounds that had been inflicted on me by the Nightmare and from simple, primitive fear of darkness, the rain, and a place of the dead.
The inmates of Graceland felt my fear. They pressed close to the break in the wall, and I began to hear actual, physical moans.
“I should wait here,” I muttered to myself, shaking in the rain. “I should wait for Michael. That would be the smart thing to do.”
Somewhere, in the darkness of the cemetery, a woman screamed. Charity.
What I wouldn’t have given to have my Dead Man’s talisman back, now. Son of a bitch.
I gripped my staff, knuckles white, and got out my blasting rod. Then I clambered through the break in the wall and headed into the darkness.
I felt them the moment I crossed into the cemetery, the second my shoes hit the ground. Ghosts. Shades. Haunts. Whatever you want to call them, they were dead as hell and they weren’t going to take it anymore. They were weak spirits, each of them, something that would barely have given me a passing shiver on a normal night—but tonight wasn’t.
A chill fell over me, abrupt as winter’s first wind. I took a step forward and felt a resistance, but not as though someone was trying to keep me out. It felt more like those movies I’ve seen with tourists struggling through crowds of beggars in dusty Middle Eastern cities. That’s what I experienced, in a chilling and spectral kind of way—people pushing against me, struggling to get something from me, something that I wasn’t sure I had and that I didn’t think would do any good even if I gave it to them.
I gathered in my will and slipped my mother’s amulet from around my neck. I held it aloft in the smothering, clammy darkness, and fed power into it.
The blue wizard light began to glow, to cast out a dim radiance, not so bright as usual. The silver pentagram within the circle was the symbol of my faith, if that’s what you wanted to call it, in magic. In the concept of power being controlled, ordered, used for constructive purpose. I wondered, for a minute, if the dimness was a reflection of my injuries or if it said something about my faith. I tried to think of how often I’d had to set something on fire, the past few years, how many times I’d had to blow something up. Or smash a building. Or otherwise wreak havoc.
I ran out of fingers and shivered. Maybe I’d better start being a little more careful.
The spirits fell back from that light, but for a few who still clustered close, whispering things into my ears. I didn’t pay them any attention, or stop to listen. That way lay madness. I shoved forward, more an effort of the heart than of the body, and started searching.
“Charity!” I shouted. “Charity, where are you?”
I heard a short sound, a call, off to my right, but it cut off swiftly. I turned toward it and began moving forward at a cautious lope, glowing pentacle held aloft like Diogenes’s lamp. Thunder rumbled again. The rain had already soaked the grass, made the dirt beneath my feet soft and yielding. A brief, disturbing image of the dead tearing their way up through the softened earth brought me a brief chill and a dozen spirits clustering close as though to feed from it. I shoved both fear and clutching, unseen fingers aside, and pressed forward.
I found Charity lying upon a bier within a marble edifice that looked like nothing so much as a Greek temple, the roof open to the sky. Michael’s wife lay upon her back, her hands clutched over her swollen belly, her teeth bared in a snarl.
The Nightmare stood over her, with my dark hair plastered to its head, my dark eyes reflecting the gleam of my pentacle. It held one hand in the air over Charity’s belly, its other over her throat. It tilted its head and watched me approach. In the edges of my wizard’s light, shapes moved, flitted, spirits swirling around like moths.
“Wizard,” the Nightmare said.
“Demon,” I responded. I wasn’t feeling much like any snapper patter.
It smiled, teeth showing. “Is that what I am,” it said. “Interesting. I wasn’t sure.” It lifted its hand from Charity’s throat, pointed a finger toward me, and murmured, “Goodbye, wizard. Fuego.”
I felt the surge of power before any fire rose up and swept toward me through the rain. I lifted my staff in my left hand in front of me, horizontally, and slammed power recklessly into a shield. “Riflettum!”
Fire and rain met in a furious hiss and a cloud of steam a foot in front of my outstretched staff. The rain helped, I think. I would never have been stupid enough to try for a gout of flame in a downpour like this. It was too easily defeated.
Charity moved, the instant the Nightmare’s attention was distracted. She spun her feet toward it and, with a furious cry, planted both her heels high in the thing’s chest with a vicious shove.
Charity wasn’t a weak woman. The thing grunted and flew back, away from her, and at the same time the motion pushed Charity’s body off the bier. She fell to the other side, crying out, curling her body around her unborn child to protect it.
I sprinted forward. “Charity,” I shouted. “Get out! Run!”
She turned her head toward me and I saw how furious she was. She bared her teeth at me for a moment, but her face clouded with confusion. “Dresden?” she said.
“No time!” I shouted. On the other side of the bier, the Nightmare rose to its feet again, dark eyes gone now, instead blazing with scarlet fury. I didn’t have time to think about it, running forward. “Run, Charity!”
I knew it would be suicide to wrestle with something that had torn down a brick wall a few minutes ago—but I had a sinking feeling that I was outclassed in the magic department. If he got another spell off, I didn’t think I could counter it. I held my staff in both hands, planted it at the base of the bier and vaulted up, swinging my feet toward the Nightmare’s face.
I had speed and surprise on my side. I hit it hard and it staggered back. My staff spun out of my hands and my hip struck painfully on the edge of the bier and scraped along my ribs as I continued forward, riding the thing into the marble flooring. My concentration gone, the blue wizard light died out and I fell in darkness.
I hit the ground with a wheeze, and scrambled back. If the Nightmare got hold of me, that would be it. I had just reached the edge of the bier when something seized my leg, right below the knee, a grip like an iron band around me. I struggled to draw myself back, but there was nothing to grab onto but rain-slicked marble.
The Nightmare stood up, and a flash of lightning somewhere overhead showed me its dark eyes, its face like mine. It was smiling. “And so it ends, wizard,” it said. “I am rid of thee at last.”
I tried to get away, but the Nightmare simply whirled me by one leg, whipping me into a circle in the air. Then I flew upwards and saw one of the columns coming toward me.
Then there was a flash of light and a sharp pain in the center of my forehead. The impact with the ground came as a secondary sensation, relatively pleasant compared with the first.
Unconsciousness would have been a mercy. Cold rain instead kept me awake enough to experience every agonizing second of expanding pain in my skull. I tried to move my limbs and couldn’t, and for a second I thought that my neck must have broken. Then, in the corner of my vision, I saw my fingers twitch, and thought with a flash of depression that I wasn’t out of the fight yet.
A major effort got my hand down onto the ground. Another major effort pushed me up and made my head spin, my stomach heave. I leaned back against the column, gasping for breath through the rain, and tried to gather my strength.
It didn’t take long
—there just wasn’t all that much strength left to gather. I opened my eyes, slowly focused them. I felt a sharp tang in my mouth. I touched my hand to my mouth, my cheek, and my fingers came away stained with something warm and dark. Blood.
I tried to rise up and couldn’t. Just couldn’t. Everything spun too much. Water coursed down over me, chilling me, pooling at the base of the little hill the Greek temple-cum-mausoleum stood upon, running a stream down toward another creek.
“So much water,” purred a female voice beside me. “So many things flowing down, away. I wonder if some of them are not being wasted.”
I rolled my head enough to see my godmother standing beside me in her green dress. Lea’s skin had evidently recovered from the ghost dust I’d dumped upon her in Agatha Hagglethorn’s demesne. Her golden cat-eyes studied me with their old, familiar warmth, her hair spilling around her in a mane that seemed unaffected by the rain. She didn’t seem to mind it soaking her dress, though. It clung to the curves of her body, showed the perfection of her breasts, their tips clearly showing through the silken fabric as she knelt down beside me.
“What are you doing here?” I muttered.
She smiled, reached out a finger, and ran it over my forehead, then drew it back to her mouth and slipped it between her lips and suckled, gently, upon it. Her eyes closed, and she let out a long and shivering sigh. “Such a sweet boy. You always were such a sweet boy.”
I tried to push myself to my feet and couldn’t. Something in my head seemed broken.
She watched me with that same, benign smile. “Thy strength is fading, my sweet. Here in the place of the dead, it may fail thee altogether.”
“This isn’t the Nevernever, godmother,” I rasped. “You don’t have any power here.”
She pursed her lips in what would have been a seductive pout on a human. My blood had stained them even darker. “My sweet. You know it is not true. I simply only have what I am given, here. What I have fairly traded for.”
