Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  My reasoning was based on my knowledge of human nature and of Murphy’s personality, and on my intuition—but I’d spent a lifetime trusting my instincts.

  I thought they were probably right.

  I played through the possibilities in my head. I imagined Murphy, distraught and falling to pieces on the inside, in the days after my murder. We never got to find out if we’d be anything together. We’d missed it by moments. I knew that when there had been enough time for her rage to abate, the sorrow would begin to pile up. I imagined her in the next month or so, no longer a cop, her world in shambles.

  Word of my death would have gotten around fast—not only among the wizards of the White Council, but among the remaining vampire Court, over the Paranet, and from there to the rest of the supernatural world.

  Kincaid probably heard about it within a day or two. As soon as someone filed a report about me, the Archive, the supernatural recorder of all written knowledge that dwelled within a child named Ivy, would have known. And I was probably one of the only people in the world she thought of as a friend. She was what? Twelve? Thirteen?

  News of my death would shatter Ivy.

  Kincaid would, I think, have gone to Murphy to offer what comfort he could. Not the hot-chocolate-and-fluffy-robe brand of comfort. He was more likely to bring bottles of whiskey and a sex-music CD.

  Especially if he was already right here in town, a dark, nasty part of me whispered in my head.

  I imagined Murphy taking shelter where she could and bidding him farewell when he left—and then, over the next few weeks, slowly lining up facts and reaching conclusions, all the while repeating to herself that she was probably wrong. That it couldn’t be what it looked like.

  Frustration. Pain. Denial. Yeah, that would be enough to draw rage out of anybody. Rage she would be carrying with her like a slowly growing tumor, becoming more and more of a burden. It was the sort of thing that might push someone to kill another person, even when maybe it wasn’t necessary.

  That death would cause more guilt, more frustration, which would cause more rage, which would cause more violence, which would add to guilt again; a literal vicious cycle.

  Murphy didn’t want to get shots from airport and train-station security cameras because she didn’t want to find out that the man she’d been sleeping with had killed one of her friends. When drawn close to that plausibility, she reacted in anger, pushing away the source of illumination about to fall on what she didn’t want to see.

  She probably wasn’t even aware of the clash of needs in her head. When you’re grief-stricken, all kinds of irrational stuff flies around in there.

  Detective work isn’t always about logic—not when you’re dealing with people. People are likely to do the most ridiculously illogical things for the most incomprehensible of reasons. I had no logic to aim at Kincaid. But the theory fit a whole lot of pieces together. If it was correct, it explained a lot.

  It was only a theory. But it was enough to make me want to start digging for more evidence where I might not otherwise have looked.

  But how? How was I going to start digging into Jared Kincaid, the Hellhound, the closest thing to a father Ivy had ever had—and do it without Murphy’s help? For that matter, I’d have to find some way to do it without her knowledge, and that seemed like something that would be more than a little slimy to do to a friend. Augh. Better, maybe, to focus on the immediate problems first.

  I had to find Morty, whose plight had clearly been low on Murph’s priority list.

  I had to help Fitz and the rest of his clueless, teenage pals.

  And for all of it, I needed the help of someone I could trust.

  I took a deep breath and nodded.

  Then I walked until I had passed through an exterior wall of the Bright Future house, and set off to find my apprentice before the night got any deeper.

  Chapter Twenty

  I always considered myself a loner.

  I mean, not like a poor-me, Byron-esque, I-should-have-broughta-swimming-buddy loner. I mean the sort of person who doesn’t feel too upset about the prospect of a weekend spent seeing no one, and reading good books on the couch. It wasn’t like I was a people hater or anything. I enjoyed activities and the company of friends. But they were a side dish. I always thought I would also be happy without them.

  I walked the streets of a city of nearly three million people and, for the first time, there was nothing that connected me to any of them. I couldn’t speak to them. I couldn’t touch them. I couldn’t get in an argument over a parking space, or flip the bird to a careless driver who ran a light while I was crossing. I couldn’t buy anything in one of the stores, making polite chitchat with the clerk while paying. Couldn’t pick up a newspaper. Couldn’t recommend a good book to someone browsing the shelves.

  Three million souls went about their lives around me, and I was alone.

  Now I understood Captain Murphy’s shadow Chicago. The actual town had already begun to feel like the shadow version. With enough time, would the real city look that way to me, too? Dark? Empty? Devoid of purpose and vaguely threatening? I’d been here for barely a day.

  What would I be like if I was here for a year? Ten years? A hundred years?

  I was starting to get why so many ghosts seemed to be a couple of French fries short of a Happy Meal.

  I had to wonder, too, if maybe Sir Stuart and Morty were right about me. What if I really was the deluded spirit they thought I was? Not the true Harry Dresden, just his image in death, doing what the lunatic had always done: setting out to help his friends and get the bad guy.

  I didn’t feel like a deluded spirit, but then, I wouldn’t. Would I? The mad rarely know that they are mad. It’s the rest of the world, I think, that seems insane to them. God knew it had always seemed fairly insane to me. Was there any way I could be sure I was anything other than what Sir Stuart and Mort thought?

  More to the point, Mort was the freaking expert on ghosts. I mean, I knew my way around the block, but Mort had been a specialist. Normally, on purely technical matters regarding spirits and shades, I would give his opinion significant weight, probably a little more than I would my own. Morty had never been a paragon of courage and strength, but he was smart, and clearly tough enough to survive a long career that had been a lot more dangerous than I thought.

  Hell. For all I knew, while I had been busy saving Chicago from things no one knew were there, Mort might have been saving me from things I never knew were there. Funny world, isn’t it?

  I stopped in my tracks and shook my head as if to clear water from my eyes. “Dresden, have your personal existential crisis later. The bad guys are obviously working hard. Get your ass in gear.”

  Good advice, that.

  The question was, How?

  Normally, I would have tracked Molly down with a fairly simple piece of thaumaturgy I’d done a thousand times. After her unplanned vacation to Arctis Tor, in Faerie, I had always been sure to keep a fairly recent lock of her hair handy. And more recently, I’d found I could get a fix on all the energy patterns she used to make her first few independent magical tools—like the hair, they were something specific and unique to her and her alone. A signature. I could be pretty sure to find her when I needed to do so. Hell, for that matter, I’d spent so much time around her that she had become almost like family. I could generally tell by pure intuition when she was nearby, as long as she wasn’t actively trying to hide herself.

  That, of course, had all been when I had magic. Now I didn’t.

  Which was, upon thinking about it, probably another bit of evidence in favor of Stuart and Mort’s theory, and against mine. You can’t take magic away from a person. It’s a part of who and what they are. They can abandon it, if they work at it hard enough, but you can’t strip it out of them. If my ghost had truly been me, it would have had power, just as that bastard Leonid Kravos’s ghost had.

  Right?

  Or . . . maybe not. Maybe I’d been making more assumptions
without ever questioning them. I had already assumed that matter was solid when it wasn’t; that I could get cold, which I couldn’t; and that I was still beholden to the laws of gravity, which I wasn’t.

  Maybe I’d made the same assumptions about magic. I mean, after all, I had thrown a solid shield spell during the first attack on Mort’s place, when I had been sharing space with the ectomancer. That would seem to show that my talent was still there, still real.

  I just had to figure out how to access it.

  Memories are power.

  I dug into my duster’s pocket and drew out the massive pistol Sir Stuart had given me. Black-powder weaponry isn’t my thing, but I made sure there was nothing in the priming pan before turning it barrel down and shaking it. I had to give it several hard thumps with the heel of my hand to get the ball, wad, and powder to spill out into my palm.

  The ball, the bullet, gleamed as if newly molded. Upon closer look, fine swirls on the surface of the metal took on the shapes of a simple, pastoral scene: a colonial-style home in the middle of a little green valley surrounded by apple trees; clean, neat cropland; and a pasture dotted with white sheep. Just looking at it seemed to give the scene life. Wind stirred the crops. Apples stood out like specks of bright green against the darker leaves. Lambs gamboled among adult members of the flock, playing for the pure joy of it. The door to the house opened, and a tall, straightbacked woman with hair blacker than a raven’s wing emerged from the house, trailing a small cloud of children, clearly giving calm instructions.

  With the sight, a flood of emotions coursed through me. A fierce and jealous pride of possession—not pride that I owned such a beautiful home, but that the home was beautiful because I owned it, because I had made it so. Mixed with that was an ocean-deep surge of love for the woman and her children, raw happiness at seeing them—and a heavy, entirely pleasurable surge of desire for the woman, whom I had not held in far too long—

  I suddenly felt that I had intruded upon something personal and intimate. I closed my eyes and looked away from the scene.

  Memories, I realized. These were all things from Sir Stuart’s mortal memories. This memory was what he had cast forth against that wraith the first time I met him. He hadn’t used memories of destruction as his weapon, but those of identity, of the reasons he was willing to fight.

  That was why as a ghost he still used that ax, this pistol. Far more modern weapons were available to copy, but his memories were of himself using those weapons, and so they were the source of his power, the embodiment of his will to change what was around him.

  They were Sir Stuart’s identity. They were also his magic.

  Memories equaled power.

  For a moment, I thought it couldn’t be that simple. But a lot of magic is actually disgustingly simple—which is not to be confused with easy.

  There was only one way to find out.

  The first spell I’d ever done had been during that long-ago class Olympics—but that was spontaneous, accidental magic, hardly worthy of the term. The first conscious spell I’d knowingly worked, fully planned, fully visualized, fully realized, had been calling forth a burst of fire.

  Justin DuMorne had shown me how it worked.

  I plunged into the memory.

  “I don’t understand,” I complained, rubbing at my aching temples. “It didn’t work the first fifty times. It isn’t going to work now.”

  “Forty-six times,” Justin corrected me, his voice very precise, like always. He had an accent, but I couldn’t figure out which kind it was. I hadn’t heard one like it on TV. Not that Justin had a TV. I had to sneak out on Friday nights to watch it in the store at the mall, or else face the real risk that I’d miss Knight Rider altogether.

  “Harry,” Justin said.

  “Okay,” I sighed. “My head hurts.”

  “It’s natural. You’re blazing new trails in your mind. Once more, please.”

  “Couldn’t I blaze the trails somewhere else?”

  Justin looked up at me from where he sat at his desk. We were in his office, which was what he called the spare bedroom in the little house about twenty miles outside Des Moines. He was dressed in black pants and a dark grey shirt, like on most days. His beard was short, precisely trimmed. He had very long, slender fingers, but his hands could make fists that were hard as rocks. He was taller than me, which most grownups were, and he never called me anything mean when he got mad, which most of the foster parents I’d been with did.

  If I angered Justin, he just went from saying please to using his fists. He never swung at me while screaming or shook me, which other caretakers had done. When he hit me, it was really quick and precise, and then it was over. Like when Bruce Lee hit a guy. Only Justin never made the silly noises.

  I ducked my head, looking away from him, and then stared at the empty fireplace. I was sitting in front of it with my legs crossed. There were logs and tinder ready to go. There was a faint smell of smoke, and a bit of wadded-up newspaper had turned black at one corner, but otherwise there was no evidence of a fire.

  In my peripheral vision, I saw Justin turn back to his book. “Once more, if you please.”

  I sighed. Then I closed my eyes and started focusing again. You started with steadying your breathing. Then once you were relaxed and ready, you gathered energy. Justin had told me to picture it as a ball of light at the center of my chest, slowly growing brighter and brighter, but that was a load of crap. When the Silver Surfer did it, energy gathered around his hands and his eyes. Green Lantern gathered it around his ring. Iron Fist had glowing fists, which was pretty much as cool as you could get. I guess Iron Man had the glowing thing in the middle of his chest, but he was, like, the only one, and he didn’t really have superpowers anyway.

  I pictured gathering my energy together around my right hand. So there.

  I pictured it glowing brighter and brighter, surrounded by a red aura like Iron Fist’s. I felt the power making tingling sensations up and down my arms, making my hairs stand up on end. And when I was ready, I leaned forward, thrusting my hand into the fireplace, released the energy, and said clearly, “Sedjet.”

  And as I spoke, I flicked the starter on the Bic lighter I had palmed in my right hand. The little lighter immediately set the newspaper alight.

  From right next to me, Justin said, “Put it out.”

  I twitched and dropped the lighter in pure surprise. My heart started beating about a zillion times a minute.

  His fingers closed into a fist. “I don’t like to repeat myself.”

  I swallowed and reached into the fireplace to drag the burning paper out from under the wood. It singed me a little, but not enough to cry about or anything. I slapped the fire out with my hands, my cheeks turning bright red as I did.

  “Give me the lighter,” Justin said, his voice calm.

  I bit my lip and did.

  He took the lighter and bounced it a couple of times in his palm. A faint smile was on his lips. “Harry, I believe you will find that such ingenuity may be of great service to you as an adult.” The smile vanished. “But you are not an adult, boy. You are a student. This sort of underhanded behavior will not do. At all.”

  He closed his fist and hissed, “Sedjet.”

  His hand exploded into a sphere of scarlet-and-blue flame—which pretty much made Iron Fist’s powers look a little bit pastel. I stared and swallowed. My heart beat even faster.

  Justin rotated his hand a few times, contemplating it, and making sure that I saw his whole fist and arm—that I could see it wasn’t sleight of hand. It was completely surrounded in fire.

  And it wasn’t burning.

  Justin held his fist right next to my face, until the heat was beginning to make me uncomfortable, but he never flinched and his flesh remained unharmed.

  “If you choose it, this is what you may one day manage,” he said calmly. “Mastery of the elements. And, more important, mastery of yourself.”

  “Um,” I said. “What?”

  �
��Humans are inherently weak, boy,” he continued in that same steady voice. “That weakness expresses itself in a great many ways. For instance, right now you wish to stop practicing and go outside. Even though you know that what you learn here is absolutely critical, still your impulse is to put play first, study later.” He opened his hand suddenly and dropped the lighter in my lap.

  I flinched away as it struck my leg, and let out a little yell. But the red plastic lighter simply lay on the floor, unmarked by any heat. I touched it with a nervous fingertip, but the lighter was quite cool.

  “Right now,” Justin said, “you are making a choice. It may not seem like a large and terrible choice, but in the long term, it may well be. You are choosing whether you will be the master of your own fate, with the power to create what you will from the world—or whether you will simply flick your Bic and get by. Unremarkable. Complacent.” His mouth twisted and his voice turned bitter. “Mediocre. Mediocrity is a terrible fate, Harry.”

  My hand hovered over the lighter, but I didn’t pick it up. I thought about what he had said. Then I said, “What you mean is that if I can’t do it . . . you’ll send me back.”

  “Success or failure of the spell is not the issue,” he said. “What matters is the success or failure of your will. Your will to overcome human weakness. Your will to work. To learn. I will have no shirkers here, boy.” He settled down onto the floor next to me and nodded toward the fireplace. “Again, if you please.”

  I stared at him for a moment, then down at my hand, at the discarded lighter.

  No one had ever told me I was special before. But Justin had. No one had ever taken so much time to do anything with me. Ever. Justin had.

  I thought of going back into the state system—to the homes, the shelters, the orphanages. And suddenly, I truly wanted to succeed. I wanted it more than I wanted dinner, more even than I wanted to watch Knight Rider. I wanted Justin to be proud of me.