Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  I nodded. “He was created to be an assistant and counselor,” I said. “It’s unprofessional to treat him as anything else.”

  “Which sahib doesn’t,” Bob noted. “Due to complete ignorance, but he doesn’t.”

  “Oh,” Butters said again. Then he asked, “How do I . . . make sure not to set him on black hat?”

  “You can’t,” Bob said. “Harry ordered me to forget that part of me and never to bring it out again. So I lopped it off.”

  It was my turn to blink. “You what?”

  “Hey,” Bob said, “you told me never to bring it out again. You said never. As long as I was with you, that wouldn’t be an issue—but the next guy could order me to do it and it would still happen. So I made sure it couldn’t happen again. No big whoop, Dresden. Oy, but you are such a little girl sometimes.”

  I blinked several more times. “Oy?”

  “My mother calls me twice a week,” Butters explained. “He listens in.”

  “She’s right, you know, sahib,” Bob said brightly. “If you’d just do something with your hair and wear nicer clothes, you’d find a woman. You’re a doctor, after all. What woman doesn’t want to marry a doctor?”

  “Did he just get a little Yiddish accent?” I asked Butters.

  “I get it twice a week already, Bob,” Butters growled. “I don’t need it from you, too.”

  “Well, you need it from somewhere,” Bob said. “I mean, look at your hair.”

  Butters ground his teeth.

  “Anyway, Harry,” Bob began.

  “I know,” I said. “The thing I saw with the Grey Ghost must be the piece that you cut off.”

  “Right,” he said. “Got it in one.”

  “Your offspring, one might say.”

  The skull shuddered, which added a lot of motion to the bobblehead thing. “If one was coming from a dementedly limited mortal viewpoint, I guess.”

  “So it’s a part of you, but not all of you. It’s less powerful.”

  Bob’s eyelights narrowed in thought. “Maybe, but . . . the whole of any given being is not always equal to the sum of its parts. Case in point: you. You aren’t working with a lot of horsepower in the brains department, yet you manage to get to the bottom of things sooner than most.”

  I gave the skull a flat look. “Is it stronger than you or not?”

  “I don’t know,” Bob said. “I don’t know what it knows. I don’t know what it can do. That was sort of the whole point in amputating it. There’s a big hole where it used to be.”

  I grunted. “How big?”

  Bob rolled his eyes. “Do you want me to tell you in archaic measurements or metric?”

  “Ballpark it.”

  “Um. A hundred years’ worth of knowledge, maybe?”

  “Damn,” I said quietly. I knew that Bob had once been owned by a necromancer named Kemmler. Kemmler had fought the entire White Council in an all-out war. Twice. They killed him seven times over the course of both wars, but it didn’t take until number seven. Generally remembered as the most powerful renegade wizard of the second millennium, Kemmler had at some point acquired a skull inhabited by a spirit of intellect, which had served as his assistant.

  Eventually, when Kemmler was finally thrown down, the skull had been smuggled away from the scene by a Warden named Justin DuMorne—the same Justin who had adopted me and trained me to grow up into a monster, and who had eventually decided I wasn’t tractable enough and attempted to kill me. It didn’t go as he planned. I killed him and burned down his house around his smoldering corpse instead. And I’d taken the same skull, hidden it away from the Wardens and company, and named it Bob.

  “Is that bad?” Butters asked.

  “A bad guy had the skull for a while,” I said. “Big-time dark mojo. So those memories Bob lost are probably everything he learned serving as the assistant to a guy who was almost certainly the strongest wizard on the planet—strong enough to openly defy the White Council for decades.”

  “Meaning . . . he learned a lot there,” Butters said.

  “Probably,” Bob said cheerfully. “But it’s probably limited to pretty much destructive, poisonous, dangerous stuff. Nothing important.”

  “That’s not important?” Butters squeaked.

  “Destroying things is easy,” Bob said. “Hell, all you really have to do to destroy something is wait. Creation, now. That’s hard.”

  “Bob, would you be willing to take on Evil Bob?”

  Bob’s eyes darted nervously. “I’d . . . prefer not to. I’d really, really prefer not to. You have no idea. That me was crazy. And buff. He worked out.”

  I sighed. “One more thing to worry about, then. And meanwhile, I still don’t know a damned thing about my murder.”

  Butters brought the Road Runner to a stop and set the parking break. “You don’t,” he said. “But we do. We’re here. Come on.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  I gritted my teeth and got out of Butters’s car, then paused to look at my surroundings. The piled snow was deep, and the mounds on either side of the street were like giant-sized versions of the snow ramparts that appeared every year in the Carpenters’ backyard. They changed the outlines of everything—but something was familiar.

  I stopped and took at least half a minute to turn in a slow circle. As I did, I noticed a pair of fleeting shadows moving easily over the snow—wolves. Murphy’s comment about sending shadows to escort Butters home made more sense in context. I watched one of the wolves vanish into the darkness between a pair of half-familiar pines, and only then did I recognize where we stood. By then, Butters had taken Bob from his holder in the car and was carrying him in the handheld spotlight case again. He shone the light around for a moment until he spotted me, then asked, “Harry?”

  “This is my house,” I said after a moment. “I mean . . . where my house was.”

  Things had changed.

  A new building had been put up where my old boardinghouse—my home—had been. The new place was four stories tall and oddly cubical in appearance. The walls fell even farther out onto the lawn than those in the old building had, encasing it in a strip of yard only slightly wider than my stride.

  I moved close enough to touch the wall and pushed my hand inside. It hurt, but the hurt never varied as I pushed in farther. This was no facade. It was made of stone. I’m not kidding. Freaking stone. Basalt, maybe? I’m no stonemason. It was dark grey with veins and threads of green and silver running through it, but I could only see them from up close.

  The windows were narrow—maybe nine inches wide—and deep. There were bars on the outside. I could see more bars on the inside, and there was at least a foot between them. The roof was lined with a staggered row of blocks—real by-God crenellation. As the pièce de résistance, gargoyles crouched at the corners and at the midpoint of each wall, starting up at the second floor and moving in three rows of increasingly ugly statuary toward the roof.

  Someone had turned the ruin of my home into a freaking fortress.

  A plaque hung over what had to be the main entrance. It read, simply, BRIGHTER FUTURE SOCIETY.

  Butters followed my gaze to the plaque. “Ah,” he said. “Yeah. We named it that because if we didn’t do something, there wasn’t going to be much of a future for this town. I wanted Brighter Future Group, actually, for the initialism, but I got voted down.”

  “Hell’s bells,” I said. I did some math. To build on the ruins of the boardinghouse, construction would have had to start practically the same day that I died. Actual stone is expensive to build with because it’s difficult and time-consuming. This place was as big as a small castle. It should have taken months and months and months to build. It had gone up in six. Probably significantly less, given the weather. “This place cost a damned fortune.”

  “Meh,” Butters said, and walked to the front door. “Hang around a bit and you’ll take it for granted like the rest of us.” He entered a sequence of numbers on the keypad beside the door. They made a l
ittle mechanical clicking sound that reminded me of a manual typewriter. He put his hands back into his pockets and waited.

  A moment later, a heavily accented basso voice emerged from a crackling speaker box. “Who goes there?”

  “Butters,” he said. “With Dresden’s shade. Hi, Sven.”

  The speaker made a rumbling sound. “Waldo,” it said, pronouncing it Valdo. “The night is dangerous. One day you will stumble across a fox and it will eat you.”

  Roars of laughter erupted from the speakers—evidently, several other men were with the door guard.

  Butters didn’t laugh, but he did grin. “I’ll just get stuck in his throat until you can haul your walrus ass over to him and save me, Sven.”

  Louder laughter erupted from the speaker, and a voice half-choked with it said something in a language that had come from somewhere in northern Europe. There was a click, and Butters opened the door. I started to follow him in—and remembered, in time, to put my hand out and check the doorway first. My hand moved smoothly past the twelve inches of stone, but then hit something as solid as a brick wall where the doorway opened up into the entry hall.

  “Uh, Butters,” I said.

  He smacked the heel of his hand against his forehead. “Right, sorry. Please come in.”

  The invisible wall vanished, and I shook my head. “It’s got a threshold. People live here?”

  “Bunch of ’em,” Butters confirmed, and we went inside. “Lot of Paranetters come through for a little while when they don’t have a safe place to sleep. Uh, visiting Netters who are passing through town. Venatori, when they meet with us. That kind of thing.”

  I felt anger stirring in me, irrational but no less real. “My home . . . is a supernatural flophouse?”

  “And armory! And jail!” Bob said enthusiastically.

  Ghosts can sputter in outrage. “Jail?”

  “And day care!” Bob continued.

  I stopped in my tracks and threw my hands up. “Day care? Day care?!”

  “People have kids, man. And they have jobs,” Butters said in a gentle voice. “The Fomor aren’t above using children to get what they want. High-risk kids come here on workdays. Now, shut up, Bob. And get off your high horse, Harry. People need this place.”

  I turned my gaze to Butters and studied him for a minute. The little guy had come a long way from the somewhat timid, insecure man I’d first met years before. That Butters would never have said anything like that to me.

  Or maybe he was the same guy. Butters went right to the wall for the sake of the truth, even when it cost him his job and got him locked up in a nuthouse. He was a man of principles.

  And he was probably right. This wasn’t my home anymore.

  We passed the guard station after we got buzzed through a security gate. Four of the biggest, toughest-looking men I’d ever seen were stationed there. They wore biker leathers—and swords. Their muscles swelled tight against their skin, their beards bristled, and their uniformly pale eyes watched us pass with calm attention.

  “Einherjaren,” Butters said quietly. “Soldiers of Valhalla, if they’re telling the truth.”

  “They are,” I replied just as quietly. “Where did we get them?”

  “Marcone. They aren’t cheap.”

  “Him again.”

  Butters shrugged. “I don’t like the guy, either, Harry. But he’s smart enough to realize that if the Fomor take control of the streets, they’re going to get rid of him as a matter of course.”

  “Too simple,” I said. “Too easy. He’s running some kind of game on you.”

  We went through another door and then up some stairs, which opened onto the second floor.

  The place was one enormous chamber almost entirely free of interior walls. There was a small gym, complete with shower rooms and a boxing ring. Inside the ring, Murphy, wearing her street clothes, stood facing a man who had inherited a portion of his DNA from a rhinoceros—and not many generations ago. He was huge and heavily muscled, his dark hair and beard in long braids. He wore an old pair of jeans and nothing else. His upper body was coated with more dark hair.

  (Not like a werewolf or circus freak or anything. Just at the top end of the hirsute bell curve. A real hair ball.)

  Butters froze in place, waiting.

  Murphy stared steadily at the big man for several moments, her body relaxed, her eyes never blinking. He returned a blank stare of his own. Then they both moved.

  I couldn’t tell who went first, but Murphy’s fist streaked toward the big guy’s groin. He twisted his hip, deflecting the blow, and when he returned it to balance, his leg scythed up in an arc that clipped the tip of Murphy’s chin. She spun away and went down.

  Hair Ball did not hesitate for so much as a second. He moved toward her, fast for someone so large, and stomped his heel down toward her head.

  Murphy rolled and dodged the blow, but he followed up and she had to keep rolling to stay ahead of his sledgehammer heels. She hit the edge of the boxing ring, then abruptly reversed her roll, moving toward him instead of away.

  She slipped the next stomp, scissored his knee with her legs, twisted her whole body, and brought him down. Hair Ball fell like a tree, huge and slow. The boxing ring ropes shook when he landed.

  Murphy came up onto all fours, scrambled a bit to one side, and then swept her foot at Hair Ball’s head. He dodged, but her kick shifted direction, her leg moving up, then straight down, bringing her heel down like a hatchet onto the hand Hair Ball was using to support his weight. Bones snapped.

  Hair Ball howled, scrambled to his feet, and started swinging wildly at her. Murphy dodged and slipped one blow after another, and at one point abruptly turned and drove her heel into Hair Ball’s solar plexus.

  The blow rocked him back a step, but Murphy followed it too closely, too recklessly. Hair Ball recovered from the kick almost instantly, slapped a blow aside, and seized her arm. He turned and flung her, one-handed, over the top rope of the ring and into the nearest wall. She hit it with a yell and bounced off onto the floor.

  “Dead,” I snarled, my fists clenched. I started forward and took three or four whole steps before I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to hit the guy. Or blow him up. Or send him on a vacation to another reality. Hell, I couldn’t even sneak up on him and shout, “Boo!”

  “Harry, wait,” Butters hissed. “It’s okay.”

  Murphy picked herself up from the floor, moving slowly. As she did, the giant Hair Ball came over to the nearest side of the ring, holding his right hand in his left. Murphy brushed some dust from her clothing and turned to face him. Her blue eyes were steady and cold, her mouth set in a small smile. Her teeth were white, and rich red blood quivered on her lower lip where the impact had split it open. She wiped the blood off on her sleeve without looking away from Hair Ball. “Three?” she asked.

  “Broke all four,” he said, moving his right hand a little by way of demonstration. “Took out my best sword hand. Good. If you hadn’t gotten greedy for the kill, maybe you’d have taken this round.”

  Murphy snorted. “You’ve been drinking bad mead, Skaldi Skjeldson.”

  That made Hair Ball smile. “Sword tomorrow?”

  Murphy nodded. The two of them stared at each other for a moment, as if each expected the other to suddenly charge the second the other turned his back. Then, with no detectable signal passing between them, they simultaneously nodded again and turned away from each other, relaxing.

  “Butters,” rumbled Skaldi Hair Ball. If he really had broken fingers, it didn’t look like they were bothering him much. “When are you going to get in this ring and train like a man?”

  “About five minutes after I get a functional lightsaber,” Butters replied easily, much to Hair Ball’s amusement. Then the little medical examiner nodded to Murphy and said, “Can we talk in the conference room?”

  “Sure,” she said. She walked by the ring and bumped (left) fists with Skaldi. Then she led Butters and me out of the gym, down an
other hallway, and into a long, narrow conference room. She shut the door behind us, and Butters popped Bob’s flashlight onto the table. His eyelights winked on again, and I saw Murphy react visibly when that light revealed my presence.

  She stiffened a little, looking at me, and her eyes showed a sudden weariness and pain. She took a deep breath through her nose and closed her eyes for a second. Then she took off her jacket, moving gingerly, and said, “Hi, Harry.”

  Butters put the radio on the table and I said, “Hi, Murph.”

  She was wearing thin, light padding under the jacket—like the stuff I’d seen on stuntmen on a case I’d done not long after I’d gone into business. So her full-contact practice hadn’t been as vicious as it had looked. She’d be covered in bruises, but the impact with the wall hadn’t actually been likely to break her back. Her skull, maybe, but not her back.

  “You okay?”

  She rolled one shoulder with a grimace of discomfort. “I will be.”

  “Big guy like that going to town on you,” I growled. “Someone needs to push his face in.”

  Her eyes glittered as she gave me a sharp look. “Dresden . . . when, exactly, am I going to fight someone my size and strength?”

  “Um.”

  “If you want to wrestle hostile mooses—”

  “Moose,” Butters corrected absently. “Singular and plural, same word.”

  “Gorillas,” Murphy continued, hardly breaking stride, “then the best way to train for it is by wrestling slightly less hostile gorillas. Skaldi’s two hundred pounds heavier than me, almost two feet taller, and he has going on two millennium—”

  “Millennia,” Butters said. “Millennium is the singular.”

  Murphy pushed a breath out through her nose and said, “Millennia of experience in breaking the backs of annoying little doctors with annoying little grammar fetishes.”

  Butters grinned.

  “I’m not going to beat him, Harry. Ever. That isn’t the point.” She looked away and her voice became quiet. “The point is that the world isn’t getting any kinder. A girl’s got to take care of herself.”

  The expression on her face? It hurt. Hearing the words that went with it felt like a knife peeling back layers of skin. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t let it show. Murphy would have been offended at the notion that she needed my protection, and if she thought I felt guilty for not being there to protect her, to help her, she’d be downright angry.