by Jim Butcher
His face spread into a wide grin. “Well, I admit, my crib is pretty sweet. But a gold cage is still a cage, Harry.”
“A gold fallout shelter, more like.”
“Either way, you get stir-crazy every few decades,” he said, and flopped down onto a chaise. “You get that this isn’t literally what the inside of the skull is like, right?”
“It’s my head interpreting what I see into familiar things, yeah,” I said. “It’s getting to be kind of common.”
“Welcome to the world of spirit,” Bob said.
“What’s with the food?”
“Butters’s mom is some kind of food goddess,” Bob said, his eyes widening. “That’s the spread she’s put out over the last few holidays. Or, um, Butters’s sensory memories of it, anyway—he let me do a ride-along, and then I made this facsimile of what we experienced.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “He let you do a ride-along? In his head?” Bob . . . was not well-known for his restraint, in my experience, when he got to go on one of his excursions.
“There was a contract first,” Bob said. “A limiting document about twenty pages long. He covered his bases.”
“Huh,” I said. I nodded at the food. “And you just . . . remade it?”
“Oh, sure,” Bob said. “I can remake whatever in here.” He waggled his eyebrows. “You want to see a replay of that time Molly got the acid all over her clothes in the lab and had to strip?”
“Um. Pass,” I said. I sat down gingerly on a chair, making sure I wasn’t going to sink through it or something. It seemed to behave like a normal chair. “TV and stuff, too?”
“I am kinda made out of energy, man,” Bob said. He pointed at the wall of media equipment. “You remember me broadcasting to your spirit radio, right? I’m, like, totally tapped in now. Television, satellite imagery, broadband Internet—you name it; I can do it. How do you think I know so much?”
“Hundreds of years of assisting wizards,” I said.
He waved a hand. “That, too. But I got this whole huge Internet thing to play on now. Butters showed me.” His grin turned into a leer. “And it’s, like, ninety percent porn!”
“There’s the Bob I know and love,” I said.
“Love, ick,” he replied. “And I am and I’m not. I mean, you get that I change based on who possesses the skull, right?”
“Sure,” I said.
“So I’m a lot like I was with you, even though I’m with Butters, because he met me back then. First impression and whatnot, highly important.”
I grunted. “How long do we have to talk?”
“Not as simple to answer as you’d think,” Bob said. “But . . . you’re still pretty cherry, so let’s keep it simple. A few minutes, speaking linearly—but I can stretch it out for a while, subjectively.”
“Huh,” I said. “Neat.”
“Nah, just sort of the way we roll on this side of the street,” he said. “What do you want to know?”
“Who killed me?” I replied.
“Oooh, sorry. Can’t help you with that, except as a sounding board.”
“Okay,” I said. “Lemme catch you up on what I know.”
I filled Bob in on everything since the train tunnel. I didn’t hold back much of anything. Bob was smart enough to fill in the vast majority of gaps if I left anything out anyway, and he could compile information and deduce coherent facts as well as any mind I had ever known.
And besides . . . he was my oldest friend.
He listened, his gold brown eyes intent, completely focused on me.
“Wow,” he said when I’d finished. “You are so completely fucked.”
I arched an eyebrow at him and said, “How do you figure?”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, where do I start? How about with the obvious? Uriel.”
“Uriel,” I said. “What?”
“A wizard tied in with a bunch of really elemental sources of power dies, right after signing off on some deals that guarantee he’s about to become a whole Hell of a lot darker—capital letter intended—and there’s this sudden”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“ ‘irregularity’ about his death. He gets sent back to the mortal coil to get involved again. And you think an angel isn’t involved somewhere? Remember. Uriel is the black-ops guy of the archangels. He’s conned the Father of Lies, for crying out loud. You think he wouldn’t scam you?”
“Uh,” I said.
I felt a little thick.
“See?” Bob said. “Your first tiny piece of flesh-free existence, and already you’re lost without me.”
I shook my head. “Look, man, I’m just . . . just a spirit now. This is just, like, paperwork I’m getting filled out before I catch the train to Wherever.”
Bob rolled his eyes again and snorted. “Oh, sure it is. You get sent back here just as the freaking Corpsetaker is setting herself up as Queen of Chicago, getting ready to wipe out the defenders of humanity—such as they are—here in town, and it’s just a coincidence, business as usual.” He sniffed. “They’re totally playing you.”
“They?” I said.
“Think about it,” Bob said. “I mean, stop for a minute and actually think. I know it’s been a while.”
“Winter,” I said. “Snow a foot deep at the end of spring. Queen Mab.”
“Obviously,” Bob said. “She’s here. In Chicago. Somewhere. And because, duh, she’s the Winter Queen, she brought winter with her.” He pursed his lips. “For a few more days anyway.”
Bob was right. Mab might flaunt her power in the face of the oncoming season, but if she didn’t back down, her opposite number, Titania, would come for her—at the height of summer’s power, the solstice, if previous patterns held true.
“Harry, I don’t want to comment about your new girlfriend, but she’s still here six months after you got shot? Seems kind of clingy.”
“Wait,” I said. “You’re saying that Mab and Uriel are in on something. Together. The Queen of Air and Darkness, and a flipping archangel.”
“We live in strange times,” Bob said philosophically. “They’re peers, of a sort, Harry. Hey, word is that even the Almighty and Lucifer worked a deal on Job. Spider-Man has teamed up with the Sandman before. Luke and Vader did the Emperor. It happens.”
“Spider-Man is pretend and doesn’t count,” I said.
“You start drawing distinctions like this now?” Bob asked. “Besides, he’s real. Like, somewhere.”
I blinked. “Um. What?”
“You think your universe is the only universe? Harry, come on. Creation, totally freaking huge. Room enough for you and Spider-Man both.” He spread his hands. “Look, I’m not a faith guy. I don’t know what happens on the other side, or if you wind up going to a Heaven or Hell or something reasonably close to them. That isn’t my bag. But I know a shell game when I see one.”
I swallowed and pushed a hand back through my hair. “The Fomor’s servitors. Corpsetaker and her gang. Even Aristedes and his little crew. They’re pieces on the board.”
“Just like you,” Bob agreed cheerfully. “Notice anyone else who pushed you a space or two recently? By which I mean that you only recently noticed.”
I scowled. “Other than everyone around me?”
“I was sort of thinking about the one behind you,” Bob said. His expression grew suddenly serious. “The Walker.”
I took a slow breath. He Who Walks Behind.
It was only now, looking back at my crystalline memories and applying what I’d learned during my adult lifetime since they happened, that I could really appreciate what had gone on that night.
The Walker had never been trying to kill me. If it had wanted to do that, it didn’t need to play with me. It could simply have appeared and executed me, the way it had poor Stan at the gas station. It had been trying to push me, to shape me into something dangerous—like maybe a weapon.
Like maybe the same way Justin had.
I had always assumed that Justin had controlled He Who Walks Behind, t
hat my old master had sent him after me when I fled. But what if I’d been a flipping idiot? What if their relationship had worked the other way around? What if Justin, who had betrayed me, had similarly been backstabbed by his own inhuman mentor, when the creature had, in essence, prepared me to destroy Justin?
“Lotta really scary symmetry there,” I whispered.
“Yeah,” Bob said, still serious. “You are in a scary place, Harry.” He took a deep breath. “And . . . it gets worse.”
“Worse? How?”
“It’s just a theory,” he said, “because this isn’t my bag. But look. There’s flesh and there’s spirit, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Mortals have both, right there together, along with the soul.”
“I thought it was the same thing. Soul, spirit.”
“Um,” Bob said. “Complicated. Think of your spirit-self as a seed. Your soul is the earth it grows in. You need both when you die. The way I’ve heard it . . . they sort of blend together to become something new. It’s a caterpillar-butterfly thing.”
“Okay,” I said. “How does that make it worse?”
“You, here, now, aren’t a spirit,” Bob said. “You aren’t a real ghost. You . . . You’re just running around in your freaking soul, man. I mean, for practical purposes, it’s the same thing, but . . .”
“But what?”
“But if something happens to you here, now . . . it’s for keeps. I mean . . . forever. You could capital-E End, man. Spin right off the wheel altogether. Or worse.”
I swallowed. I mean, I realized that I’d been in a serious situation all the way down the line, but not one that could potentially be described using words like eternal. Joy.
Bob shook his head. “I didn’t think it was possible for them to do that to you. According to what I’ve heard, your soul’s your own. I’d have thought you would have to walk into something like this willingly, but . . .”
I held up the heel of my hand and butted my forehead against it in steady rhythm.
“Oh, Harry,” Bob said, his voice profoundly disappointed. “You didn’t.”
“They didn’t explain it exactly the way you did,” I said. “Not in so many words.”
“But they gave you a choice?”
Captain Murphy had done exactly that. It had been phrased in such a way that I hadn’t really had much of a choice, but I’d had a choice. “Yeah.”
“And you chose to hazard your eternal soul? Even though you get all worked up about that sort of thing.”
“It . . . wasn’t phrased quite like that . . .” I began. Only it really had been. Jack had warned me that I might be trapped forever, hadn’t he? “Or . . . well. Um. Yeah. I guess technically I did.”
“Well,” Bob said. He cleared his throat. “You idiot.”
“Argh,” I said. “My head hurts.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Bob said scornfully. “You just think it should.”
I paused and reflected and saw that Bob was right. And I decided that my head hurt anyway, dammit. Just because I was a spirit or a naked soul or whatever didn’t mean I needed to start ignoring who I had been.
“Bob,” I said, lifting my head suddenly. “What does this mean? I mean, why not just let me die and move along like normal?”
Bob pursed his lips. “Um. Yeah. No clue.”
“What if . . . ?” I felt short of breath. I hardly wanted to say it. “What if I’m not . . . ?”
Bob’s eyes widened. “Oh. Oooooohhhhhhhh. Uriel’s people—Murphy’s dad and so on—did they say anything about your body?”
“That it wasn’t available,” I said.
“But not that it was gone?” Bob pressed.
“No,” I said. “They . . . they didn’t say that.”
“Wow,” Bob said, eyes wide.
Mine probably were, too. “What do I do?”
“How the hell should I know, man?” Bob asked. “I’ve never had a soul or a body. What did they tell you to do?”
“Find my killer,” I said. “But . . . that means I’m dead, right?”
Bob waved a hand. “Harry. Dead isn’t . . . Look, even by terms of the nonsupernatural, dead is a really fuzzy area. Even mortal medicine regards death as a kind of process more than a state of being—a reversible process, in some circumstances.”
“What are you getting at?” I asked.
“There’s a difference between dead and . . . and gone.”
I swallowed. “So . . . what do I do?”
Bob lunged to his feet. “What do you do?” He pointed at the table of Mother Butters’s feast food. “You’ve got that to maybe get back to, and you’re asking me what to do? You find your freaking killer! We’ll both do it! I’ll totally help!”
The light in the room suddenly turned red. A red-alert sound I remembered from old episodes of Star Trek buzzed through the air.
“Uh,” I said, “what the hell is that?”
“Butters calling me,” Bob said, leaping to his feet. The form of the young man, who I now realized must have looked a lot like Butters when he was a kid, only taller, started coming apart into the sparks of a wood fire. “Come on,” Bob said. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Thirty-six
I didn’t actually will myself out of the skull, the way I had gone in. Bob’s passage just sort of swept me along in his wake, like a leaf being tugged after a passing tractor-trailer. It was a forcible reminder that, the way things stood now, Bob was the heavyweight. I was just the skinny newbie.
I hated that feeling. That feeling sucked.
I reintegrated standing in a dusty room. Afternoon sunlight slanted through it, its danger abated by the thick coating of grime over the windows. The place looked like an industrial building’s entryway. There was what had been a heavy-duty desk, maybe for a receptionist or security guard. An alcove housed rows of small personal lockers. Several rectangles of less-faded, commercial-grade taupe paint on the walls had probably been where a time clock and time-card holders had gone. Butters stood nearby, holding Bob’s flashlight, and the eyes of the skull were glowing brightly with Bob’s presence in the physical world, now that he had left his “apartment.” The little ME looked tense, focused, but not afraid.
It wasn’t much of a mystery how they’d gotten into the room: Fitz stood there with a set of bolt cutters with three-feet-long handles held over his shoulder. Fitz looked scared enough for everyone there. The kid was back in the lair of his erstwhile mentor and terrified of his wrath.
Yeah.
I knew that feeling.
Butters fumbled his little spirit radio out of his pocket and asked, in a hushed voice, “Dresden, you here?”
“To your left,” I said quietly.
He shone Bob’s eyelights my way and evidently saw me illuminated by them. “Oh,” he said, looking relieved. “Right. Good.”
I had no clue why he looked relieved. It wasn’t like I could do anything, unless some random ghost came by, in which case my memorybased magic could cook another being incapable of affecting the material world.
But I guess he looked up to me, or at least to my memory, and I owed it to him to help however I could. So I gave him a calm nod and an encouraging clench of my fist. Solid.
“I take it we’ve come in through a blind spot?” I asked Fitz quietly.
Fitz nodded. “The chains on the doors were enough. And he couldn’t extend his guard spells any farther than the main room.”
I grunted. “That’s good.”
“Why?” Butters asked.
“Means Aristedes doesn’t have enough power to just burn you to cinders on the spot.”
Butters swallowed. “Oh. Good.”
“Doesn’t mean he can’t kill you,” I said. “Just that he won’t have a high FX budget when he does.”
“He’s fast,” Fitz said. His voice shook. “He’s really, really fast.”
“Like, how fast?” Butters asked. “Fast like Jackie Chan or fast like the Flash?”
�
��Little of both,” I said. “He can cover ground fast. And he can hit like a truck.”
Fitz nodded tightly.
“Oh,” Butters said. “Super. We probably shouldn’t fight him, then.” He set the flashlight aside and rummaged in the duffel bag. “Give me just a second.”
A shadow flickered by one of the grime-filmed windows. Fitz let out a hiss and clutched the bolt cutters with both hands, ready to use them like a club. Butters let out an odd little chirping sound and pulled a big, old, cop-issue flashlight–slash-club from his bag.
The shadow passed over another window. Someone outside was moving toward the door, coming in behind us.
I took a quick look at the flashlight and made sure I was standing in the light of Bob’s eyes and out of the path of any direct sunlight that might come through the door. I couldn’t do anything, but if I was visibly standing there when the door opened, maybe I could distract Aristedes, if it was him coming through. Maybe he’d speed-rush right through me and into a wall and knock himself out like a cartoon villain. That would make me look cool upon cool.
More likely, I wouldn’t accomplish anything. But when your friends are in danger, you try anyway.
The door opened and I raised my arms into a dramatic stagemagician’s pose. It felt ridiculous, but body postures draw reactions from human beings on an almost atavistic level. We aren’t that terribly far removed from our primal roots, where body language was more important than anything we said. My stance declared me the ruler of the local space, a man who was in control of everything happening around him, one who others would follow, a mix of maestro and madman that would identify me, to instinct, as the most dangerous thing in the room.
Butters and Fitz hit the wall on either side of the door and raised their improvised weapons as it swung open. The door squealed dramatically on its hinges, and a large, menacing figure entered the building. It hesitated, lifting a hand to shield its eyes, apparently staring at me.
Butters let out a shout and swung his flashlight at the figure. Fitz, by contrast, swept the heavy set of bolt cutters down in silence. Even in that flash of time, I had to admire Butters. The little guy couldn’t fight and he knew it, but he was smart enough to shout and draw the attention of the intruder toward the smaller, weaker, and lighter-armed of the two of them. He had intentionally thrown himself at a larger opponent to force the man to turn so that Fitz could swing at his back.
