by Jim Butcher
I grunted. After a few moments, I asked, “You teach new spirits?”
“Of course.”
“Then can I ask you some questions?”
“By all means.”
Mort muttered, “Here we go.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m a ghost and all now. And I can go through just about anything—like I went through this car door to get inside.”
“Yes,” Sir Stuart said, a faint smile outlining his mouth.
“So how come my ass doesn’t go through the seat when I sit down on—”
I was rudely interrupted by the tingling sensation of passing through solid matter, beginning at my butt and moving rapidly up my spine. Cold snow started slamming into my rear end, and I let out a yelp of pure surprise.
Sir Stuart had evidently known what was coming. He reached over, grabbed me by the front of my leather duster, and unceremoniously dragged me back up into the car and sat me on the seat beside him, back in the passenger compartment. I clutched at the door handle and the seat in front of me for stability, only to have my hands go right through them. I pitched forward, spinning as if I were floating in water, and this time it was my face plunging toward the icy street.
Sir Stuart hauled me back again and said, in a faintly annoyed tone, “Mortimer.”
Mort didn’t say anything, but when I was once again sitting down, I didn’t fall right through the bottom of the car. He smirked at me in the rearview mirror.
“You don’t fall through the bottom of the car because on some deep, instinctual level, you regard it as a given of existence here,” Sir Stuart said. “You are entirely convinced that illusions such as gravity and solidity are real.”
“There is no spoon,” I said.
Sir Stuart looked at me blankly.
I sighed. “If I believe in an illusory reality so much, then how come I can walk through walls?” I asked.
“Because you are convinced, on the same level, that ghosts can do precisely that.”
I felt my eyebrows trying to meet as I frowned. “So . . . you’re saying I don’t fall through the ground because I don’t think I should?”
“Say instead that it is because you assume that you will not,” he replied. “Which is why, once you actively considered the notion, you did fall through the floor.”
I shook my head slowly. “How do I keep from doing it again?”
“Mortimer is preventing it, for the time being. My advice to you is not to think about too much,” Sir Stuart said, his tone serious. “Just go about your business.”
“You can’t not think about something,” I said. “Quick, don’t think about a purple elephant. I dare you.”
Sir Stuart let out a broad laugh, but stopped and clutched at his wounded flank. I could tell it hurt him, but he still wore the smile the laugh had brought on. “It usually takes them longer to recognize that fact,” he said. “You’re right, of course. And there will be times when you feel like you have no control whatsoever over such things.”
“Why?” I asked, feeling somewhat exasperated.
Sir Stuart wasn’t rattled by my tone. “It’s something every new shade goes through. It will pass.”
“Huh,” I said. I thought about it for a minute and said, “Well. It beats the hell out of acne.”
From the front seat, Mort let out an explosive little snicker.
Stars and stones, I hate being the new guy.
Chapter Eight
Murphy inherited her house from her grandmother, and it was at least a century old. Grandma Murphy had been a notorious rose gardener. Murphy didn’t have a green thumb herself. She hired a service to take care of her grandmother’s legacy. The flower garden in front would have fit a house four times as large, but it was a withered, dreary little place when covered in heavy snow. Bare, thorny branches, trimmed the previous fall, stood up from the blanket of white in skeletal silence.
The house itself was a compact colonial, single story, square, solid, and neat-looking. It had been built in a day when a ten-by-ten bedroom was considered a master suite, and when beds were routinely used by several children at a time. Murphy had upgraded it with vinyl siding, new windows, and a layer of modern insulation when she moved in, and the little house looked as if it could last another hundred years, no problem.
There was a sleek, expensive, black town car parked on the street outside Murphy’s home, its tires on the curbside resting in several inches of snow. It couldn’t have looked more out of place in the middle-class neighborhood if it had been a Saint Patrick’s Day Parade float, complete with prancing leprechauns.
Sir Stuart looked at me and then out at our surroundings, frowning. “What is it, Dresden?”
“That car shouldn’t be there,” I said.
Mort glanced at me and I pointed out the black town car. He studied it for a moment before he said, “Yeah. Kind of odd on a block like this.”
“Why?” asked Sir Stuart. “It is an automatic coach, is it not?”
“An expensive one,” I said. “You don’t park those on the street in weather like this. The salt-and-plow truck comes by, and you’re looking at damage to the finish and paint. Keep going by, Morty. Circle the block.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mort said, his tone annoyed. “I’m not an idiot.”
“Stay with him,” I told Sir Stuart.
Then I took a deep breath, remembered that I was an incorporeal spirit, and put my feet down through the floorboards of the car. I dug in my heels on the snowy street as the solid matter of the vehicle passed through me in a cloud of uncomfortable tingles. I’d meant to simply remain behind, standing, when the car had passed completely through me. I hadn’t thought about things like momentum and velocity, and instead I went into a tumble that ended with me making a whump sound as I hit a soft snowbank beside the home next to Murphy’s. It hurt, and I pushed myself out of the snowbank, my teeth chattering, my body blanketed in cold.
“N-n-no, H-Harry,” I told myself firmly, squeezing my eyes shut. “Th-that’s an illusion. Your mind created it to match what it knows. But you didn’t hit the snowbank. You can’t. And you can’t be covered in snow. And therefore you can’t be wet and cold.”
I focused on the words, putting my will behind them, in the same way I would have to attract the attention of a ghost or spirit. I opened my eyes.
The snow clinging to my body and clothes was gone. I was standing, dry and wrapped in my leather duster, beside the snowbank.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s bordering on cool.”
I stuck my hands in my pockets, ignored the snow and the steady, gentle northern wind, and trudged across Grandma Murphy’s rose garden to Murphy’s door. I raised my hand and knocked as I’d done so often before.
A couple of things happened.
First, my hand stopped above the door, close enough that you could have slid one or two pieces of paper between my knuckles and the wood, but definitely not three. There was a dull, low thud of solid impact, even though I hadn’t touched the door itself. Second, light flashed, and something like a current of electricity swarmed up my arm and down my spine, throwing my body into a convulsion that left me lying on the ground, stunned.
I just lay there on the snow for a moment. I tried the whole “there is no spoon” thing again, but apparently there was perception of reality and then there was hard-core, undeniable, real reality. It took me several seconds to recover and sit up again, and several more seconds to realize that I had been hit by something specifically engineered to stop intruding spirits.
Murphy’s house had been warded, its natural defensive threshold used as a foundation for further, more aggressive defenses. And while I was only a shade of my former self, I was still wizard enough to recognize my own damned wards—or at least wards that were virtually identical to my own.
The door opened and Murphy appeared in it. She was a woman of well below average height, but built of spring steel. Her golden hair had been cut into a short brush over her scalp, and the stark styl
e showed off the lines of muscles and tendons in her neck, and the pugnacious, stubborn set of her jawline. She wore jeans and a plaid shirt over a blue tee, and held her SIG in her right hand.
Something stabbed me in the guts and twisted upon seeing her.
A rush of memories flooded over me, starting with our first meeting, on a missing-persons case years ago, when I’d still been doing my time as an apprentice PI and Murphy had been a uniform cop working a beat. Every argument, every bit of banter and repartee, every moment of revelation and trust that had been built up between us, came hammering into me like a thousand major-league fastballs. The last memory, and the sharpest, was of facing each other in the hold of my brother’s boat, trembling on the edge of a line we hadn’t ever allowed ourselves to cross before.
“Karrin,” I tried to say. It came out a whisper.
Murphy’s brow furrowed and she stood still in the doorway, despite the cold wind and falling snow, her eyes scanning left and right.
Her eyes moved over me, past me, through me, without stopping. She didn’t see me. She couldn’t hear me. We weren’t a part of the same world anymore.
It was a surprisingly painful moment of realization.
Before I could get my thoughts clear of it, Murphy, still frowning, closed the door. I heard her close several locks.
“Easy, lad,” said Sir Stuart in a gentle, quiet voice. He hunkered down to put a hand on my shoulder. “There is no need to rush regaining your feet. It hurts. I know.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. I swallowed and blinked away tears that couldn’t really be real. “Why?”
“As I told you, lad. Memories are life here. Life and power. Seeing the people you care for most again is going to trigger memories much more strongly than they would in a mere mortal. It can take time to grow accustomed to it.”
I wrapped my arms around my knees and rested my chin on my kneecap. “How long?”
“Generally,” Sir Stuart said very softly, “until those loved ones pass on themselves.”
I shuddered. “Yeah,” I said. “Well. I don’t have time for that.”
“You have nothing but time, Dresden.”
“But three of my people don’t,” I said, my voice harsh. “They’re going to get hurt if I don’t make things right. If I don’t find my killer.” I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths. I wasn’t actually breathing air. I didn’t need to breathe. Habit. “Where’s Mort?”
“Waiting around the corner,” Sir Stuart said. “He’ll come in once we’ve given him the all clear.”
“What? I’m the little chicken’s personal Secret Service now?” I grumbled. I pushed myself up to my feet and eyed Murphy’s house. “Do you see anything threatening around here?”
“Not at the moment,” Sir Stuart said, “other than the allegedly suspicious auto coach.”
“Well, the house is warded. I’m not sure if the defenses are purely against insubstantial intruders or if they might also attack a living intruder. Tell him not to touch the house with anything he wants to keep.”
Sir Stuart nodded and said, “I’m going to circle the place. I’ll return with Mortimer.”
I grunted absently, reaching out a hand to feel the wards around the place again. They were powerful, but . . . flawed, somehow. My wards were all built into the same, solid barrier of energy. These wards had solidity, but it was a piecemeal thing. I felt like I was looking at a twelvefoot wall built from LEGO blocks. If someone with enough mystic muscle hit it right, the ward would shatter at its weakest seams.
Of course, that would probably punch a hole in the barrier, but not a catastrophic one. If one portion of my wards lost integrity, the whole thing would come down and whatever remained of the energy that had broken it would come through. If someone knocked out a bit of these wards, it would send a bunch of LEGOs flying—probably soaking up all of the energy by dividing it among lots of little pieces—but the rest of the barrier would stand.
That might offer several advantages on the minor-league end of the power scale. The modular wards would be easy to repair, compared to classic integral wards, so that even if something smashed through, the wards could be closed again in a brief time. God knows, the ingredients for the spell were probably a lot cheaper—and you wouldn’t need a big-time White Council wizard to put them up.
But they had a downside, too. There were a lot of things that could smash through—and if you got killed after they came inside, the ease of repair wouldn’t matter much to your cooling corpse.
Still. It was a hell of a lot better than nothing. The basic profile was my design, just implemented differently. Who the hell would have done this to Murphy’s place? And why?
I turned and stepped off the porch to peer in a window, feeling vaguely voyeuristic as I did so. But I wasn’t sure what else I was going to do until Mort got here to do some speaking for me.
“Are you quite all right?” asked a man’s voice, from inside the house.
I blinked, scowled in concentration, and managed to stand up on some of the wispy shrubbery under the window, until I could see over the chair back that blocked my view from where I was standing.
There was a man sitting on the couch of Murphy’s living room. He was wearing a black suit with a crisp white shirt and a black tie with a single stripe of maroon. His skin was dark—more Mediterranean than African—but his short, neat sweep of hair was dyed peroxide blond. His eyes were an unsettling color, somewhere between dark honey and poison ivy, and the sharp angularity of his nose made me think of a bird of prey.
“Fine,” said Murphy. She was on her feet, her gun tucked into the waist of her jeans in front. SIG made a fine, compact 9mm, but it looked big, dangerous, and clumsy on Murphy’s scale. She folded her arms and stared at the man as if he’d been found at the side of the highway, gobbling up raw roadkill. “I told you not to show up early anymore, Childs.”
“A lifetime of habit,” Childs said in reply. “Honestly, it isn’t something to which I give any thought.”
“You know how things are out there,” Murphy said, jerking her chin toward the front of the house. “Start thinking about it. You catch me on a nervous evening, and maybe I shoot you through the door.”
Childs folded his fingers on one knee. He didn’t look like a big guy. He wasn’t heavy with muscle. Neither are cobras. There was plenty of room for a gun under that expensive suit jacket. “My relationship with my employer is relatively new. But I have a sense that, should such a tragedy occur, the personal repercussions to you would be quite severe.”
Murphy shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe. On the other hand, maybe we start killing his people until the price of doing business with us is too high and he breaks it off.” She smiled. It was almost gleefully wintry. “I don’t have a badge anymore, Childs. But I do have friends. Special, special friends.”
Between them there was a low charge of tension in the room, the silent promise of violence. Murphy’s fingers were dangling casually less than two inches from her gun. Childs’s hands were still folded on his knee. He abruptly smiled and dropped back into a more relaxed pose on the sofa. “We’ve coexisted well enough for the past six months. I see no sense in letting frayed tempers put an end to that now.”
Murphy’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Marcone’s top murderer—”
Childs lifted a hand. “Please. Troubleshooter.”
Murphy continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “—doesn’t back down that quickly, regardless of how survival oriented he is. That’s why you’re here early, despite my request. You want something.”
“So nice to know you eventually take note of the obvious,” Childs replied. “Yes. My employer sent me with a question.”
Murphy frowned. “He didn’t want the others to hear it being asked.”
Childs nodded. “He feared it might generate unintended negative consequences.”
Murphy stared at him for a moment, then rolled her eyes. “Well?”
Childs showed his teeth in a smile for
the first time. It made me think of skulls. “He wishes to know if you trust the Ragged Lady.”
Murphy straightened at the question, her back going rigid. She waited to take a deep breath and exhale before responding. “What do you mean?”
“Odd things have begun happening near some of the locations she haunts. Things that no one can quite explain.” Childs shrugged, leaving his hands in plain sight, resting comfortably on the sofa. “Which part of the question is too difficult for you?”
Murphy’s shoulder twitched, as if her hand had been thinking about grabbing the gun from her waistband. But she took another breath before she spoke. “What’s he offering for the answer?”
“Northerly Island. And before you ask, yes, including the beach.”
I blinked at that. The island over by Burnham Park Harbor wasn’t exactly prime criminal territory, being mostly parks, fields, and a beach a lot of families visited—but “Gentleman” John Marcone, kingpin of Chicago’s rackets and the only plain-vanilla mortal to become a signatory of the Unseelie Accords, simply did not surrender territory. Not for anything.
Murphy’s eyes widened, too, and I watched her going through the same line of thought I had. Though, to be perfectly fair, I think she got to the end of that line before I did.
“If I do agree to this,” she said, her tone cautious, “it will have to pass our standard verification by Monday.”
Childs’s face was a bland mask. “Done.”
Murphy nodded and looked down at the floor for a moment, evidently marshaling her thoughts. Then she said, “There isn’t a simple answer.”
“There rarely is,” Childs noted.
Murphy passed a hand back over her brush cut and studied Childs. Then she said, “When she was working with Dresden, I’d have said yes, in a heartbeat, without reservation.”
Childs nodded. “And now?”
“Now . . . Dresden’s gone. And she came back from Chichén Itzá changed,” Murphy said. “Maybe post-traumatic stress. Maybe something more than that. She’s different.”
