Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

She pursed her lips briefly and then shook her head. “One of us will.”

  “He’s a good man,” I said. “I won’t let you hurt him.”

  The angel’s eyebrows went up again. “Is that why you think I’m here?”

  “Hello,” I said, “angel of death. Grim Reaper. Ring any bells?”

  The angel shook her head again, smiling a little more naturally. “You misunderstand my purpose.”

  “Educate me,” I said.

  “It is not within my purview to choose when a life will end. I am only an escort, a guardian, sent to convey a new-freed soul to safety.”

  I scowled. “You think Forthill is so lost that he needs a guide?”

  She blinked at me once. “No. He needs . . .” She seemed to search for the proper word. “His soul needs a bodyguard. To that purpose, I am here.”

  “A bodyguard?” I blurted. “What the hell has the father done that he needs a bodyguard in the afterlife?”

  She blinked at me again, gentle surprise on her face. It made her look very young—younger than Molly. “He . . . he spent a lifetime fighting darkness,” she said, speaking gently and a bit slowly, as if she were stating something perfectly obvious to a small child. “There are forces that would want to take vengeance upon him while his soul is vulnerable, during the transition.”

  I stared hard at the angel for several seconds, but I didn’t detect anything like a lie in her. I looked down at the fire in my hand and suddenly felt a little bit silly. “And you . . . You’re going to be the one to fight for him?”

  She stared at me with those silver eyes, and I felt my legs turn a little rubbery. It wasn’t fear . . . exactly. It was something deeper, something more awe-inspiring—the feeling I had when I’d once seen a tornado from less than a quarter of a mile away, seen it tearing up trees by their roots and throwing them around like matchsticks. Staring out of those silver eyes was not a spirit or a being or a personality. It was a force of freaking nature—impersonal, implacable, and utterly beyond any control that I could exert.

  Prickles of sweat popped out on my forehead, and I broke the gaze, quickly looking down.

  A dark, cool hand touched my cheek, something of both benediction and gentle rebuke contained within it. “If this is Anthony’s time,” she said quietly, “I will see him safely to the next world. The Prince of Darkness himself will not wrest him from me.” Her fingertips moved to my chin and lifted my face to look at her again. She gave me a small smile as she lowered her hand. “Neither will you, Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, noble though your intentions may be.”

  I didn’t look away from her. The angel knew my Name, down to the last inflection. Holy crap. Any fight against her would be very, very brief, and I was glad I hadn’t simply allowed my instincts to take over. “Okay, then,” I said a little weakly. “If you aren’t here to kill him, why don’t you help him? He’s a part of your organization.”

  “As I have already told you, it is not given me to choose when a life will end—or not end.”

  “Why not? I mean, why the hell not? Hasn’t Forthill earned a break from you people?”

  “It isn’t a question of what he deserves,” the angel said quietly. “It is a question of choice.”

  “So choose to help him. It isn’t hard.”

  Her face hadn’t shifted from its serene expression for more than a few seconds during the entirety of the conversation. But now it did change. It went flat and hard. Her silver eyes blazed. “Not for a mortal. No. Not hard at all. But such a thing is beyond me.”

  I took a slow breath, thinking. Then I said, “Free will.”

  She inclined her head in a micro-nod, her eyes still all but openly hostile. “Something given to you yet denied to me. I may not take any action that abrogates the choices of a mortal.”

  “Forthill chose to die? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Nothing so linear,” she said. “This singularity is an amalgamation of many, many choices. Fitz chose to place what little precious trust he had in you. You chose to involve Anthony in the young man’s existence. Anthony chose to come here, despite the danger. Aristedes chose to assault him. Waldo and Daniel chose to involve themselves in his rescue. Beyond that, every single one of the people known to each individual I have mentioned have made choices that impacted the life of those involved. Together, all of you have determined this reality.” She spread her hands. “Who am I to unmake such a thing?”

  “Fine,” I said, “be that way.”

  “I will,” the angel responded serenely.

  I took one more look at Forthill and vanished, heading back toward Butters and company. If the angel wasn’t going to help the good father, I’d damn well do it myself.

  It was only a couple of jumps back to the far end of the factory floor, and it took me only a few seconds to get there.

  “Fitz,” I said, “I found the father. He’s—”

  “That seems reasonable,” Aristedes was saying to Butters. “May I ask one question?”

  “Why not?” Butters answered.

  Fitz was squirming in Daniel’s grip, leaning away from Aristedes. One look at his face told me why: He’d recognized something in his old teacher’s words or manner. I’d seen the faces of abused wives while they watched their husbands drink, sickly certain that the cycle of abuse would renew itself in the coming hours. Fitz knew what Aristedes looked like when he was about to dispense violence.

  “Wardens,” Aristedes said. “Why do you not carry swords?”

  Crap.

  The question caught Butters off guard. He could have smoothed over the question with a good answer, or maybe even ignored it altogether convincingly—but he did the one thing he absolutely could not do if he was going to sell his false identity to Aristedes.

  He hesitated.

  Couldn’t blame him, I guess. He’d come lickety-split after Forthill, moving as fast as possible. We’d spent all of maybe ninety seconds on putting our plan together, which had only been possible thanks to Butters’s foresight in packing those cloaks—apparently, he’d thought it might be useful to have them on hand to create a Warden sighting or two, if it seemed like the city’s supernatural scene could use some reassurance. In our hurry to retrieve the good father, I hadn’t thought about the whole sword angle—for good reason. The hell of it was that Aristedes was reaching an accurate conclusion based on an erroneous assumption.

  The swords of the Wardens were fairly famous in supernatural circles. Bright silver, supernaturally sharp blades, perfect for chopping off the heads of warlocks, and wrought with spells to deflect or disrupt magical attacks or enchantments. When you saw Wardens, you saw their swords.

  Or, at least, that had been the status quo until recently. The enchantress who had made them, Warden Luccio, had lost her capacity to create them when Corpsetaker had swapped her into the body of a young woman with very little natural inclination toward magic. As a result, most of the new Wardens, starting with me, didn’t have a groovy sword. Which meant that most of the Wardens didn’t carry swords any longer.

  But that impression, apparently, hadn’t trickled down to street level yet.

  Things started happening very quickly.

  Aristedes produced his knife, a wicked-looking number with a lot of extraneous points on it—an interpretation of a bowie knife, as done by H. R. Giger.

  Daniel Carpenter had evidently noticed Fitz’s behavior and deduced its meaning. He dragged both Fitz and Butters behind him with a sweep of his brawny arms and positioned himself between them and the sorcerer, his hands up in a defensive martial arts stance.

  Butters let out a yelp as his ass hit the cold concrete floor.

  Fitz took the fall and rolled, his eyes wide with terror as he regained his feet and started to run.

  “You are all dead men,” Aristedes snarled.

  And then he blurred forward, almost too quickly to be seen, the knife gleaming in his hand.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Aristedes was noth
ing more than a streak in the air as he closed on Daniel, slamming into him, knocking him back. As Daniel fell, that wicked knife gleamed and whipsawed back and forth half a dozen times in the space of a second, striking Daniel in the chest and belly on every blow.

  Anyone other than Michael and Charity Carpenter’s son would have been gutted like a fish.

  The kid had gotten some serious training—maybe from Murphy, maybe from the Einherjaren, maybe from his father. Probably from all of them. I’m not a professional when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, of the supernatural variety or otherwise, but I know enough to know how little I know. And one of the things I know is that you don’t just decide to time your moves a second in advance to compensate for a lack of supernatural speed. You have to learn that stuff, to build it into your reflexes with weeks or months of painstaking practice.

  Daniel had.

  He started rolling with the slashes of the knife before Aristedes had fully closed the distance, even as he stumbled backward from the force of the sorcerer’s initial impact. The knife bit into his chest and belly—and found armor waiting for it.

  Beneath his winter coat, Daniel was wearing a garment I recognized as Charity’s handiwork: a double-thick Kevlar vest with a coat of thick titanium rings sandwiched in between the layers of ballistic cloth. Kevlar could stop bullets, but it didn’t do squat for blades. That was what the titanium mail was for.

  Sparks flew up in rapid succession as the knife struck armor. The impact sounded like someone hitting a side of beef with a baseball bat, but Daniel’s body was in motion, giving in with each of the blows, robbing them of the most savage portion of their power. The knife never touched his skin.

  Aristedes came to a stop after that blinding-fast combination of attacks and crouched, his arm out to one side, parallel to the ground, the knife gripped hard in it. He looked like an extra in a martial arts movie—the goober.

  Daniel turned his backward momentum into a roll and came up on his feet. It didn’t look very graceful, but he was obviously in control of the motion, and he dropped into a fighting crouch about twenty feet from the sorcerer. One hand went into his hip pocket and came out with a simple folding lock knife with a black plastic handle. With his thumb he snapped out a blade maybe four inches long and held the weapon tucked in close to his body, point toward Aristedes. He jerked the cloak off his back, and with a few flicks of his arm wrapped the heavy material around his left forearm. Then he held his left hand a little in front of him, palm down, fingers loose—ready to block or grab.

  Aristedes had a good poker face, but for the moment, I didn’t have anything to do except watch what was going on, and I knew his type. The sorcerer hadn’t been psychologically prepared for Daniel’s reaction. The stupid bruiser was supposed to be bleeding on the floor, maybe begging for his life. At the very least, he should have been running, terrified, but instead, the very large young man had apparently shrugged off the deadly attacks and meant to fight.

  “Nice knife,” Daniel said. Scorn dripped from the words. “Get it out of a magazine?”

  “From the last fool who tried a blade against me.”

  Daniel bared his teeth. “Come here. I’ll give you this one.”

  Aristedes flicked his knife through a little series of spins, making it dance nimbly through his fingers. It was a stupid thing to do in a real situation, but the guy clearly knew how to use the weapon. Then his body tightened as he hissed a word and once more he flashed toward Daniel.

  The body language before the spell that granted him speed had given him away. The kid was ready again. He sidestepped and swept his arms in a pair of half circles as Aristedes flashed by. There was the sound of shearing cloth, and then the sorcerer was past him.

  Daniel turned to face Aristedes with a hiss of pain. His left arm, wrapped in the grey cloak, was bleeding, red spreading through the grey in a slow but growing stain.

  “No armor there,” Aristedes murmured with a smile.

  Daniel said nothing. He just took position again, holding his bloodied knife level, its point toward the sorcerer.

  Aristedes looked down and saw the long, shallow cut across his right pectoral. A fine sheet of blood had mixed with the sweat that had broken out on his skin.

  Heads were popping out of the debris and refuse now. Zero and his compatriots—maybe a dozen kids, all told—were emerging from their hiding spots to watch the fight. From the looks on their faces, it was the first time they’d ever seen their fearless leader get hurt. Hell, if they’d been anything like me when I was young, they probably had believed that he couldn’t be hurt.

  Daniel Carpenter had just shown them differently—and the sorcerer knew it.

  Aristedes’ face set into a grimace of undiluted hate as he stared at Daniel. Then he did something unexpected—he simply walked forward and pounced into knife range.

  The exchange was brief. Most knife fights are. Daniel, the taller of the two, had the advantage of reach, somewhat negated by the length of the sorcerer’s blade. He wore armor over his torso and was stronger, but Aristedes was the faster of the two, even without magic—and he had a lot more experience.

  Hands and knives flashed, all whip-crack speed and whispering violence as they parted the air. I couldn’t keep track of the individual cuts. There were just too many of them. I saw Daniel’s mail shirt turn aside another pair of strikes, one of them hard enough to send a titanium ring tinkling across the floor. A flicker of red fanned through the air, where one of the fighters lost a splash of blood.

  Daniel let out a short grunt. Then another. Aristedes barked out a sound of both pain and satisfaction. The two parted, both breathing heavily. Combat taxes a body’s reserves like nothing else on earth. Seconds of it can leave you exhausted, even if you’re in great shape.

  Daniel staggered and went down on one knee, letting out a grunt of surprise.

  There were wounds on both of his legs—punctures, deep stabs. Neither wound had hit one of the big arteries, or he’d already be unconscious, but they were right through the quadriceps muscles, and had to have been agonizing.

  He snarled and attempted to rise. Halfway there, he faltered and went down again. Training, courage, and fortitude get you only so far. A deep enough wound on either leg could have taken Daniel out of the fight. He had them on both.

  Aristedes hadn’t come away clean from the exchange, though. There was a deep cut on his right arm, where Daniel’s knife had caught him hard. Flesh hung from a flap of skin. Blood flowed, but his arm still seemed to work. If Aristedes lived long enough and if he kept the arm, he was going to have one hell of a scar to show off later.

  But that wasn’t going to matter much to Daniel.

  The sorcerer switched his knife to his left hand and stared at Daniel with flat eyes. “Kids like you. Haven’t learned the price of doing business. When to trade pain for victory.”

  He blurred into motion again, and Daniel lifted his knife. Then the younger man cried out and fell to his side, clutching at his right arm with his left hand. His knife landed on the floor and spun away from him, eventually coming to rest against Aristedes’ feet.

  The sorcerer took his time transferring his own knife to his left hand and picking up Daniel’s. He tested the blade’s balance and edge and said, “Serviceable.” He carefully wiped the blood from Daniel’s blade against the leg of his trousers, closed it, and slipped it into the pocket of his bathrobe. Then he fixed the young man with a nasty smile, raised his own blade over his head, so that Daniel’s blood dripped down it and fell on his upraised arm.

  And he started to chant.

  I felt the magic gathering at once. It wasn’t particularly powerful, but that was by my own standards. Magic doesn’t absolutely require a ton of horsepower to be dangerous. It took Aristedes maybe ten seconds to summon enough will and focus for whatever he was doing, and I stood there clenching my fists and my jaw in impotent fury. Daniel saw what was happening and found an old can in the detritus on the floor beside him. He th
rew it at Aristedes in an awkward, left-handed motion, but came nowhere close to striking the sorcerer.

  Aristedes pointed the knife at Daniel, his eyes reptilian, hissed a word, and released the spell.

  Michael’s eldest son arched his back and let out a strangled scream of agony. Aristedes repeated the word and Daniel contorted in pain again, his back bowing more than I would have thought possible.

  I stifled a furious scream of my own and looked away as the sorcerer bent and twisted the energy of Creation itself into a means of torment. Looking away was almost worse: Aristedes’ young followers were watching with a sick fascination. Daniel screamed until he was out of breath, and then began to strangle himself as he tried to keep it up. One of the kids bent suddenly and began retching onto the floor.

  “This is my house,” Aristedes said, his expression never changing. “I am the master here, and my will is—”

  Butters appeared behind Aristedes, from around an upended vat of some kind, and swung three feet of lead pipe into the side of the sorcerer’s knee.

  There was a sharp, clear crack as bone and cartilage snapped, and Aristedes screamed and went down.

  “That sound you just heard,” Butters said, his voice tight with fear and adrenaline, “was your lateral collateral ligament and anterior cruciate ligament tearing free of the joint. It’s also possible that your patella or tibia was fractured.”

  Aristedes just lay there in pain, gasping through clenched teeth. A line of spittle drooled out of his mouth.

  Butters hefted the lead pipe like a batter at the plate. “Get rid of the knife, or I start on your cranium.”

  Aristedes kept on gasping but didn’t look up. He tossed the creepy knife away.

  “The one in your pocket, too,” Butters said.

  The sorcerer gave him a look of pure hatred. Then he tossed away the knife he’d appropriated from Daniel.

  “Sit tight, Daniel,” Butters called. “I’ll be with you in just a second.”

  “ ’M fine,” Daniel groaned from the ground. He didn’t sound fine. But as I watched, I saw him winding pieces of the slashed cloak around the wound in his right arm, binding them closed and slowing the bleeding. Tough kid, and thinking under pressure.