Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  I frowned. “These mortals. They could hear the Grey Ghost?”

  “Aye,” Sir Stuart said.

  “Stars and stones,” I growled. “I could barely get two people in Chicago to hear me. This joker has half a dozen? How?”

  Sir Stuart shook his head faintly. “Would that I knew.”

  “We’ll find Morty,” I said. “Let me figure out how to get you out of there, and then we’ll go find him.”

  He opened his eyes fully and focused on me for the first time. “No,” he said in a gentle voice. “I won’t.”

  “Come on,” I said. “Don’t talk like that. We’ll get you patched up.”

  Sir Stuart let out a small laugh. “Nay, wizard. Too much of me has been lost. I’ve only held together this long so that I could speak to you.”

  “What happened to our world being mutable in time with our expectations? Isn’t that still true?”

  “To a degree,” Sir Stuart said affably, weakly. “I’ve been injured before. Small hurts are restored simply enough.” He gestured at his broken body. “But this? I’ll be like the others when I restore myself.”

  “The others?”

  “The warriors who defended Mortimer’s home,” he said. “They faded over time. Forgetting, little by little, about their mortal lives.”

  I thought about the soldiers I’d seen battling the enemy shades and wraiths—silent, severe, seemingly disconnected from the world around them. They’d fought loyally and ably enough. But I was willing to bet that they couldn’t remember why they did so or who they were fighting.

  I imagined Sir Stuart like the rest of them—a translucent outline, his empty eyes focused on something else entirely. Always faithful. Always silent.

  I shivered.

  It could happen to me, too.

  “Listen to me, boy,” Sir Stuart said. “We didn’t trust you. We assumed you were mixed up in whatever it is the Grey Ghost wanted.”

  “Like hell,” I said.

  “You don’t know that,” Sir Stuart said flatly. “For all we knew, you could have been directed by that creature without your own knowledge. For that matter, you don’t have the feel of a normal ghost. It could have created you whole from the spirit world.”

  I scowled and began to argue—and couldn’t. I’ve been faced with the odd and unusual and had drawn incorrect conclusions too many times. When people are scared, they don’t think straight. Mort had been terrified.

  “Do you still think that?” I asked.

  “No reason for you to be here if you were,” Sir Stuart said. “The worst has happened. Were you a plant, you would not have come. Though I suppose you might still be a dupe.”

  “Thanks,” I said wryly.

  He softened the words with another smile. “But dupe or not, it may be that ye can help Mortimer. And it is critical that you do so. Without his influence, this city will be in terrible danger.”

  “Yeah, you aren’t exactly increasing the tension by telling me that,” I said. “We’re already sort of playing for maximum stakes.”

  “I know not what you mean,” Sir Stuart replied. “But I tell you this: Those shades standing around the house, one and all, are murderers.”

  I blinked and looked back at the still-smoldering house and at the enormous circle of spirits around it.

  “Each and every one of them,” Sir Stuart said. “Mortimer gave them something they needed to turn aside from their madness: a home. If you do not restore him to freedom so that he may care for these poor souls, they will kill again. As sure as the sun rises, they won’t be able to help themselves.” He exhaled wearily and closed his eyes. “Fifty years of maddened shades unleashed upon the city all at once. Preying on mortals. Blood will run in buckets.”

  I stared at him for a moment. Then I said, “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “I’ve not the foggiest,” Sir Stuart replied. He fumbled at his belt and drew that monster pistol. He paused for a moment, grimacing. Then he tossed it weakly at my feet. It tumbled through the circle with a flicker of energies and landed atop the snow without sinking into it—the apparition of a weapon.

  I stared for a second. A spirit couldn’t project its power across a circle—and I was sure that power was exactly what the gun represented. So if it had crossed the circle’s barrier, it meant that it was power that no longer belonged to Sir Stuart. On several levels, what he had just done was a violent act of self-mutilation—like chopping off your own hand.

  He gestured weakly toward the gun, and said, “Take it.”

  I picked it up gingerly. It weighed a ton. “What am I going to do with this?”

  “Help Mortimer,” he replied. His shape began to flicker and fade at the edges. “I’m sorry. That I couldn’t do more. Couldn’t teach you more.” He opened his eyes again and leaned toward me, his expression intent. “Memories, Dresden. They’re power. They’re weapons. Make from your memory a weapon against them.” His voice lost its strength and his eyes sagged closed. “Three centuries of playing guardian . . . but I’ve failed my trust. Redeem my promise. Please. Help Mortimer.”

  “Yes,” I said quietly. “I will.”

  That faint smile appeared again, and Sir Stuart nodded once. Then he let out his breath in a sigh. He faded even more, and as I watched, his limbs simply renewed themselves, appearing as his shape became more translucent. The damage reversed itself before my eyes.

  A moment later, he sat up. He looked around, his gaze passing right through me. Then he paused and stared at the ruined house, his brow furrowed in puzzled concentration—an expression mirrored on the faces of most of the spirits present.

  Sir Stuart was nowhere to be seen in the shade’s hollow eyes.

  I bowed my head and clenched my teeth, cursing. I had liked the guy. Just like I had liked Morty, whatever insults I may have offered him. I was angry about what had happened to him. And I was angry about the position he had put me in. Now I was the one responsible for somehow finding and helping Morty, when I could barely communicate with anyone without him. All while the bad guy, whatever the hell it was, apparently got to chat it up with its own flunkies at will.

  I couldn’t touch anything. I couldn’t make anything happen. My magic was gone. And now not only was I to track down my own murderer, but I had to rescue Mort Lindquist, as well.

  Fabulous. Maybe I should make it my new slogan: Harry Dresden—I take responsibility for more impossible situations in the first twenty-four hours of being dead than most people do all day.

  More snow was beginning to fall. Eventually, it would break the circle that had trapped what was left of Sir Stuart. Though I didn’t know where he would go to take shelter from the sunrise. Maybe he would just know, the way I had seemed to—some kind of postdeath survival instinct. Or maybe he wouldn’t.

  Either way, it didn’t seem like there was much I could do about it, and I hated that fact with a burning passion. Sir Stuart and the other spirits needed Morty Lindquist. Before I died, I might have been Harry Dresden, wizard at large. Now I was Harry Dresden, immaterial messenger boy, persuader, and wheedler.

  I desperately wanted to blow something into tiny, tiny pieces—and then disintegrate the pieces.

  All things considered, it was probably not the best frame of mind in which to handle a confrontation in a rational, diplomatic manner.

  “Ah,” said a whispery, oily voice behind me. “She was right. The tall one returns.”

  “Look at him,” said another voice, higher-pitched and inhuman. “He will make such a meal.”

  “Our orders are—”

  “Orders,” said a third voice, filled with scorn. “She is not here. We shall share him, the three of us, and none shall be the wiser.”

  “Agreed,” said the second voice eagerly.

  After a pause, the first voice said, “Agreed.”

  I turned and saw three of the dark-robed forms from the night before during the attack on Casa Lindquist. Lemurs. Their clothing stirred with lazy, aquatic fluidity at
the touch of an immaterial wind. From this close, I could see the faint images of pale faces inside their hoods, and the sheen of gleaming, hungry eyes.

  “Take him!” said the first lemur.

  And three of the hungriest old ghosts of Chicago blurred toward the new guy.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The lemurs pounced, and I vanished, straight up.

  I stood in empty air a hundred feet above them, furious, and called down, “You mooks picked a really lousy time to start up with me!”

  Hooded heads searched upward, but I was an indistinct shape in a darkened sky already blurred by snow, while they were sharp outlines against a field of white.

  I started throwing a punch, vanished again, and reappeared right behind lemur number one. My fist drove into the base of his neck just as I shouted, “BAMF!”

  There isn’t much honor in a rabbit punch, but it’s a pretty darned good way to down an opponent. Whatever rules governed the world of spirit, there must have been some kind of analogue to a human nervous system. The lemur let out a choking gasp and fell to the ground as the other two panicked at the sudden assault and vanished. I kicked the downed guy in the head and neck a few times to help him on his way to Analogue-Concussion Land, screaming in pure and incoherent rage all the while.

  I had a fraction of a second’s warning, a cold breath on the back of my neck, a rippling wave of ethereal pressure against my back. I vanished, to reappear five feet behind my original position—and this time, I meant to be facing the same way when I arrived.

  I got there in time to see one of the other lemurs swing a freaking hatchet at the space my skull had recently vacated. He stumbled, off balance from the miss, and I kicked his ass—literally. I leaned my upper body back a bit and pretended I was using my heel to stomp an aluminum can flat. It’s a powerful kick, especially with my full body weight behind it, and the lemur flew forward and into the snow.

  “Who’s the man?!” I screamed at the sprawled lemurs, fear and anger and excitement pitching my voice about an octave higher than usual. “Who’s the man?!”

  The hood had fallen from the face of the second, and an unremarkable man of middle age goggled at me in complete incomprehension—which made sense. Who knew how many decades of pop culture the lemurs had missed out on. They’d probably never even heard of Will Smith.

  “I am completely unappreciated in my time,” I muttered.

  I am also, apparently, no wizard when it comes to simple mathematics: While I was Will Smithing, lemur number three appeared out of nowhere and smashed a baseball bat against the side of my neck.

  The pain was something incredible—more than merely the reaction of physical trauma that I would have expected from such a blow. It also encompassed an almost Olympian sense of nausea combined with a force-five storm of whirling confusion. I felt myself note idly that I guessed egos literally could be bruised. It took me another second or two after that to realize that I was floating, drifting sideways and slightly upward, my body at a forty-five-degree diagonal to the ground. There was a roaring sound in my head. An eerie cry of triumph and hunger pealed through the night.

  Then the lemurs came for me.

  I felt bitterly cold fingers seize me, clamping down like steel claws. I was hauled out to horizontal by frigid, steely hands. I was still disoriented—I was barely able to turn my head enough to see the third lemur approach.

  Her hood had fallen back. She was a young woman of unexceptional appearance, neither beautiful nor displeasing. Her eyes, though, were dark and hollow, and a hideous emptiness lay behind them. She stared intently at me for a long beat, her body quivering in some kind of dark rapture.

  Then she let out a slow hiss, sank her fingers into the flesh of my left biceps, and ripped off a handful of meat.

  Ectoplasmic blood flew. My blood. It scattered through the air in lazy globules that, once they were a few feet from me, fell like raindrops to the surface of the snow.

  It hurt. I screamed.

  All three lemurs screamed with me, as if triggered into a response by my own cries. The female lemur lifted the gobbet of flesh aloft in triumph, then held it over her open mouth and squeezed. More blood pattered out onto her lips and tongue, and she let out a gasp of unadulterated ecstasy before shoving the raw flesh into her mouth as though she hadn’t eaten in weeks.

  Her eyes rolled back into her head. She shuddered. “Oh,” she breathed. “Pain. He’s felt so much pain. And rage. And joy. Oh, this one lived.”

  “Here,” said the second lemur. “Come take his legs. My turn.”

  The female bared her bloodied teeth at him and tore another, smaller piece from my arm. She snapped it up and then leaned on my legs, pinning them. The second lemur looked me over like a man perusing a side of beef. Then he ripped a handful of flesh from my right thigh.

  It went like that for several minutes, with the three of them taking turns ripping meat from my body.

  I won’t bore you with the details. I don’t like to think about it. They were stronger than me, better than me, more experienced than me when it came to spiritual conflict.

  They got me. The monsters got me. And it hurt.

  Until footsteps crunched toward us through the snow.

  The lemurs never took notice. I was in too much agony to care very much, but I wasn’t exactly busy, either. I looked up and saw a lone figure slogging my way through the thick snow. He wasn’t very big, and he was dressed in a white parka and white ski pants, with one of those ninja capmask things, also white, covering his face. In his right hand he carried a big, old-style, heavy, portable spotlight, the kind with a plastic carrying handle on top. Its twin incandescent bulbs shone a garish orange over the snow.

  I sniggered to myself. He was a person. He sank into the snow with every step. He wouldn’t be able to see what was happening right in front of him. No wonder the lemurs paid him no mind.

  But ten feet away from me, he abruptly froze in his tracks and blurted, “Holy crap!”

  He reached up and ripped off the ninja hood, revealing the thin, fine features of a man of somewhere near forty. His hair was dark, curly, and mussed from the hood; he had glasses perched askew on his beak of a nose; and his dark eyes were wide with shock. “Harry!”

  I stared at him and said, through the blood, “Butters?”

  “Stop them,” Butters hissed. “Save him! I release you for this task!”

  “On it, sahib!” shouted another voice.

  A cloud of campfire sparks poured out of the two sources of light in the spotlight, rushing out by the millions, and congealed into a massive, manlike shape. It let out a lion’s roar and blurred toward the lemurs.

  Two of them were sharp enough to realize something dangerous was coming, and they promptly vanished. The third, the young woman, was in the middle of another bite—and she didn’t look up until it was too late.

  The light form hit the lemur and simply disintegrated it. As I watched, skin and clothing and flesh were ripped away from the evil spirit, as swiftly and savagely as if peeled off with a sandblaster. A heartbeat later, there was nothing left but a gently drifting cloud of sparks, speckled here and there with the floating shapes of somewhat larger, prismatic gemstones.

  The light being looked up and then promptly split into two parts, each one becoming a comet that hurtled into the night sky. There was an explosion almost at once—and the raining bits and pieces of a second lemur came drifting lazily down through the night air, along with more multicolored gems.

  There was a terrible howling sound in the night sky above. I heard the flap of heavy robes snapping with rapid motion. The second comet of light darted back and forth, evidently engaged in some kind of aerial combat, and then lemur and comet both came hurtling back down. They struck earth with a thunder that shook the ground while leaving the snow untouched.

  The orange lights flowed together into a manlike shape again, this time straddling the lemur’s prone form. The being of light rained blows down on the lemur’s he
ad, over and over, striking with the speed and power of a motor’s pistons. Within ten or twelve seconds, the head of the lemur had been crushed into ectoplasmic guck, and his sparkles of light—his memories—and the same odd, tiny gems began to well up from his broken form.

  The light being rose from the form of the fallen lemur and scanned the area around us, his featureless face turning in a slow, alert scan.

  “What the hell!” Butters said, his eyes wide. “I mean, what the hell was that, man?”

  “Relax, sahib,” said a young man’s voice. It was coming from the fiery figure, which nodded and made hand-dusting motions of unmistakable satisfaction. “Just taking out the trash. Scum like that are all over these old mortal cities. Part of the posthuman condition, you might say.”

  I just watched. I didn’t feel like doing anything else.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Butters said. “But he’s safe now?”

  “For now,” the being said, “and as far as I know.”

  Butters crunched through the snow and stared down at me. The little guy was one of Chicago’s small number of medical examiners, a forensic investigator who analyzed corpses and found out all sorts of details about them. A few years ago, he’d analyzed corpses of vampires that had burned to death in a big fire someone started. He’d asserted that they obviously were not human. He’d been packed off to an institution for half a year in response. Now he treaded carefully in his career—or at least he had when I was last alive.

  “Is it really him?” Butters asked.

  The being of light scanned me with unseen eyes. “I can’t spot anything that would suggest he was anything else,” he said cautiously. “Which ain’t the same as saying it’s Harry’s ghost. It has . . . more something than other ghosts I’ve encountered.”

  Butters frowned. “More what?”

  “Something,” the being said. “Meaning I’m not sure what. Something I’m not expert in, clearly.”