Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  Butters focused on Aristedes. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “I want to help you. Your knee has been destroyed. You will never walk again if you don’t get medical attention. I’ll take you to a hospital.”

  “What do you want?” Aristedes growled.

  “The priest. Fitz. These kids.” He bounced the lead pipe against his own shoulder a couple of times. “And this really isn’t a negotiation.”

  “Yes!” I said, clenching my fist. “You go, Butters!”

  Aristedes eyed Butters for a moment more. Then he sagged and let out a soft groan of pain.

  Oh, crap.

  “You win,” the sorcerer said. “Just . . . please . . . help me.”

  “Straighten it out,” Butters said, never quite looking at the man. “Lie back and leave it straight.”

  Aristedes fumbled with his leg and let out another, higher-pitched moan of pain.

  Butters flinched at the sound and his eyes were tortured. In a sudden flash of insight, I realized why he cut up corpses for a living instead of treating live patients.

  Butters couldn’t handle seeing people in pain.

  That was what he’d always meant when he said that he wasn’t a real doctor, when he said that treating living patients was messy and disturbing compared to extracting individual organs and cataloging them in autopsies. Dead people were just a pile of meat and bones. They were beyond all suffering.

  A physician needs a certain level of professional detachment if he is going to best serve his patients, and Butters just . . . didn’t have it. The little guy couldn’t bring himself not to feel something for the people he worked with. So he had sought a career where he practiced medicine without trying to heal anyone—without involving himself with actual patients.

  Aristedes had seen it, too. He probably didn’t understand it, but he saw the soft spot, and he went for it ruthlessly.

  “Don’t,” I breathed. “Butters, don’t.”

  “Dammit,” Butters said finally, gritting his teeth. He bent to help the man. “Hold still. You’re just making it worse. Here.” He tried to keep a wary distance as he lent the man a hand, but it just wasn’t possible to help him and stay out of reach. I saw it on his face as he realized it and began to withdraw. Then, as the man continued his low moans of pain, Butters gave his head a little shake and moved to help Aristedes straighten his leg.

  I saw the sorcerer’s eyes narrow to slits, an almost sensual pleasure contained in them.

  “Dammit!” I said. “Butters, move!” I vanished and appeared beside Butters, shoving my hands into his chest, willing myself to push him away.

  I didn’t move him—my hands just passed into him, insubstantial—but a sudden frisson seemed to run through him, and he began to pull away.

  Too late.

  Aristedes’ left arm blurred and struck Butters squarely on the chin. If he hadn’t been drawing back, the blow would have caught him just under the ear, and the sorcerer’s hand was moving fast enough that it might have broken Butters’s neck. Even so, the sharp thump of impact snapped Butters’s head to one side, hard enough to rebound when it had reached maximum torsion. He did a brief bobblehead impersonation on the way to the floor and landed in a boneless heap.

  I wanted to scream in frustration. Instead, I poked at my brain, demanding it to come up with something.

  To my considerable surprise, it did.

  I vanished straight up to the ceiling and spun in a quick circle. There. I spotted Fitz, moving in a low crawl toward one of the exits from the factory floor, keeping a modest pile of junk between himself and Aristedes.

  “Fitz!” I bellowed. I vanished and reappeared right over him. “Fitz, you’ve got to turn around!”

  “Quiet,” he hissed in a frantic whisper. His eyes were white around the edges. “Quiet. No, I can’t! Leave me alone!”

  “You’ve got to do it,” I said. “Forthill’s here in the camp, hurt bad. There’s a freaking angel of death standing over him. He needs help.”

  Fitz didn’t answer me. He kept on crawling off the factory floor and into one of the hallways outside it. He was making desperate, small sounds as he reached the door and got out of any possible line of sight to Aristedes.

  “Fitz,” I said. “Fitz, you have got to do something. You’re the only one who can.”

  “Cops,” he panted. “I’ll call the cops. They can handle it.” He got up and started padding down the hall, toward what I presumed was the nearest exit from the building.

  “Butters and Daniel don’t have that kind of time,” I answered. “The cops get tipped off by a runaway, we’ll be lucky if a prowl car cruises by half an hour from now. All three of them could be dead by then. Your boss can’t allow witnesses.”

  “You’re the wizard,” Fitz said. “Why can’t you do it? I mean, ghosts can possess people and stuff, right? Just zap into Aristedes and make him jump off the roof.”

  I was quiet for a moment. Then I said, “Look, I’m new at this ghost thing. But it doesn’t work like that. Even the badass ghost of a centuries-old wizard I know of can only possess a subject who is willing. So far, I’ve only been able to move into people who were sensitive to spirits—and they could have booted me out anytime they wanted. Aristedes is neither sensitive nor willing. I’d be like a bug splattering on a windshield if I tried to take him over.”

  “Christ.”

  “If you want to volunteer, I could take you over, I suppose. I don’t think you’ve got the right wiring for me to use my power, and you’d still be in danger, of course, but you wouldn’t have to make the decisions.”

  Fitz shuddered. “No.”

  “Good. It’s weird as hell.” I paused and took a breath. “And besides. It would be . . . wrong.”

  “Wrong?” Fitz asked.

  “Take away someone’s will, you take away everything they are. Their whole identity. Doing that to someone is worse than murder; if you kill them, they don’t keep on suffering.”

  “Who cares?” Fitz said. “This guy is an animal. Who cares if he gets something bad? He’s earned it.”

  “Wrong is wrong, even when you really, really want it not to be,” I said quietly. “I learned that one the hard way. It’s easy to do the right thing when it doesn’t cost you. Not as easy to do the right thing when your back is to the wall.”

  Fitz shook his head the whole time I spoke that last, and his pace quickened. “There’s nothing I can do. I’m running for my life.”

  I fought down a snarl to keep my voice level. Time to change tactics. “Kid, you aren’t thinking it through,” I said. “You know Aristedes. You know him.”

  “Which part of running for my life didn’t come across?”

  I grunted. “The part where you leave your friends to die.”

  “What?”

  “He’s busted up pretty bad right now. Weak. How long do you think it will take him to replace all your crew?”

  Fitz’s steps dragged to a stop.

  “They’ve seen him weak now. Hell, he’s hurt bad enough that he might be crippled for life. What do you think he’ll do with the kids who saw him beaten? Who saw him get bloodied and smashed to the floor?”

  Fitz bowed his head.

  “Stars and stones, kid. You started showing signs of independent thought, and he was so threatened by it that he set you up to get killed. What do you think he’ll do to Zero?”

  Fitz didn’t answer.

  “You run now,” I said quietly, “and you’re going to spend your whole life running. This is a crossroads. This is where your life takes form. Here. Now. This moment.”

  His face twisted up as if he was in physical pain. Still, he didn’t respond.

  I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder, to give him the reassurance of a human touch. The best I could do was to soften my voice as much as I could.

  “I know what I’m talking about, kid. Every time you’re alone in the dark, every time you go by a mirror, you’re going to remember this moment. You’re going to se
e who you’ve become. And you’ll either be the man who ran away while his own crew and three good men died, or you’ll be the man who stood tall and did something about it.”

  Fitz swallowed and whispered, “He’s too strong.”

  “Not right now, he isn’t,” I said. “He’s on the ground. He can’t walk. He’s got one arm. If I didn’t think you had a chance, I’d be telling you to run.”

  “I can’t,” he whispered. “I can’t. This isn’t fair.”

  “Life hardly ever is,” I said.

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “Heh. No one does. But everyone does it anyway.”

  “That supposed to be funny?”

  “Maybe a little ironic, given the source. Look, kid. All that matters is the answer to the question: Which of those men do you want to be?”

  Slowly he lifted his head. I realized that he could see his own reflection in the glass of an office door.

  I stood behind him, looking down at him and remembering, with a faint sense of irrational disbelief, that I had once been no taller than the boy.

  “Which man, Fitz?” I asked quietly.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  When I faced my old master, I did it with newly made staff and blasting rod in hand, with the ancient forces of the universe at my call, and with words of power upon my tongue.

  Fitz had more courage than I had as a child.

  He went to face his demons with no weapon at all.

  As his footsteps rapped steadily on the concrete floor, I worried about the kid. He was doing this on my say-so. What if Aristedes wasn’t hurt as badly as I thought? What if he knew some kind of restorative magic? Fitz wouldn’t have a chance—and I would never forgive myself.

  I gritted my teeth and told myself not to borrow trouble. Things were bad enough without adding in a bunch of my own worries. That wouldn’t help anybody.

  Fitz stepped into sight of Aristedes and stopped in his tracks.

  “Easy,” I said quietly. “Calm. Don’t show him any weakness. You can do it.”

  Fitz took a deep breath and walked forward.

  “Fitz,” Aristedes spat. He was sitting up now, his leg straight out in front of him. Butters’s unconscious body had been dumped next to Daniel, who sat on the ground in a small puddle of his own blood, grimacing in pain and obviously disoriented. He’d bound the wounds closed, more or less, but it was clear that he still needed real medical attention. Zero and the other kids, several obviously detailed to watch Daniel and Butters, were standing around with pipes and old knives. “What do you think you’re doing here, traitor?”

  Fitz faced him in silence.

  “You led those men to us. You’ve endangered the lives of everyone here.”

  Fitz almost seemed to dwindle, as if a cloud had passed between him and the wan light spilling in the windows. Dark, hostile eyes glared at Fitz from all around.

  A quick check with my senses confirmed that the sorcerer was using power. “He’s pushing them,” I said quietly, “making them feel hostility toward you. It isn’t real. You’ve got to shake him, break his focus.”

  Fitz gave a barely perceptible nod of his head. “I didn’t lead them here. They caught me while I was trying to recover the weapons. They forced me to come with them.”

  “That’s not what the priest said,” Aristedes shot back.

  “The father thought he was helping me,” Fitz replied. “There was no reason to hurt him.”

  “No reason?” Aristedes asked. His voice was dangerous, deadly, and smooth. “That he should trespass here is reason enough. But he wanted to destroy this family. That is something I will not permit.”

  “Family, right,” Fitz said. “We’re like the Simpsons around here.”

  Personally, I would have gone with the Waltons, but I liked the cut of the kid’s jib.

  Aristedes stared at Fitz with reptilian eyes and said, “Give me one reason why I should not kill you, here and now.”

  “Because you can’t,” Fitz said in a bored tone. “You aren’t going anywhere under your own power. You’re fucked. You need help.”

  The sorcerer’s voice dropped to a bare whisper. “Do I?”

  “Yep,” Fitz said. “Wasn’t like it wasn’t going to happen eventually anyway, right? Sooner or later, you were gonna wind up eating applesauce with a rubber spoon somewhere. You think a bunch of kids you terrified into following you are gonna take care of Grandpa Aristedes? Come on.”

  “I’ll give you one chance,” Aristedes said. “Leave. Now.”

  Fitz tapped a finger on his chin thoughtfully. Then he said, “Nah. Don’t think so.”

  Aristedes blinked. “What?”

  “Here’s how it’s going to work,” Fitz said. “I’m going to take the priest, those two guys, and the crew away from you. I’m going to get them some help. I’m going to call an ambulance and get you some help, too. After that, we never cross paths again.”

  “Are you insane?”

  “I was,” Fitz said, nodding. “I think I’m coming out of it now. I know you aren’t coming back from Loopyland, though. So I’m taking the crew away from you.”

  Aristedes clenched his fists and his eyes blazed—and though he probably didn’t realize it, his concentration faltered. The influence magic he held over the children wavered. “Kill him.”

  The flat-eyed children looked at Fitz. Zero started taking a step toward him.

  Fitz’s voice was a whip crack, sharp and loud in the echoing chamber. “Stop.”

  And they did. No magic was involved. Fitz had something more powerful than that. He’d cared for those other kids. He’d thought about them, encouraged them, and led them. That was something every bit as real as mystic power and dark enchantment—and it carries a hell of a lot more weight.

  Love always does.

  “Zero,” Fitz said quietly. “We’re done staying with this idiot. Put down the knife and come with me.”

  “Zero!” Aristedes said sharply.

  I could all but see the strain in the air as the sorcerer doubled down on his influence-working, struggling to force the boy to do his will. He shouldn’t have bothered. It was over. It had been over ever since Fitz chose to walk back into that room.

  Fitz walked over to Zero and put a hand on the other boy’s shoulder. “Z,” he said quietly. “I can’t make you do anything. So you tell me. Who do you want looking out for you? Me? Or him?”

  Zero looked searchingly at Fitz. Then at Aristedes.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Aristedes said through clenched teeth, spraying spittle. “Without me, you won’t last a day on these streets. The Fomor will take you all.”

  “No, Z,” Fitz said quietly. “They won’t. It’s okay. We’ve got help.”

  Zero blinked his eyes several times. He bowed his head.

  The old knife in his fingers clattered to the concrete floor.

  Another dozen knives and pipes fell to the floor as the other boys released them. They all went over to Fitz and gathered around him.

  “I’ll kill you,” hissed Aristedes. “I’ll kill you.”

  Fitz faced the crippled sorcerer and shook his head. Then he did what was possibly the cruelest thing he could have done to his former mentor.

  He turned away and ignored him.

  “Zero,” Fitz said, “we need an ambulance for the father now. Call nine-one-one. Don’t move him—let the ambulance guys do that.”

  Zero nodded and pulled one of those cheap, prepaid cell phones out of the pocket of his oversized jacket. He ran for the door, presumably to get a better signal. Within the next few minutes, rough but serviceable medical supplies had been brought out, and Daniel’s wounds had been cleaned and bound tighter than he’d been able to manage on his own.

  Aristedes tried to get a couple of the kids to pay attention to him, but they were following Fitz’s lead. They ignored him. So the sorcerer just sat and watched it all in stunned silence.

  Maybe I should have felt a little bit bad for the guy.
As far as his world was concerned, he had just died. Only he was still alive to see the unthinkable—a world that existed without him. He was a living, breathing ghost. Maybe I should have felt some empathy there.

  But I really didn’t.

  Butters stirred and sat up groggily as Fitz finished up tying a second pressure bandage to Daniel’s leg. Michael’s son let out a short grunt of pain and then breathed deeply several times. He was still shaking and pale, but his eyes were steady. He met Fitz’s gaze and said, “Thank you.”

  Fitz shook his head. “I didn’t do anything. You two were the ones who beat him.”

  “The father was the one who beat him,” Daniel corrected him. “He knew what would happen to him when he came here. And he knew we’d come after him.”

  Butters grunted and spoke without opening his eyes. “Forthill wouldn’t have played it like that. He came here to give peace a chance.” He groaned and pressed a hand to his jaw. “Nnngh. Ow.”

  Daniel frowned, thinking it over. “So . . . he didn’t want us to come after him?”

  Butters snorted. “He knew we would come after him, no matter what he did. And he also knew that if the sorcerer went off on him, there would be someone to come along and do it the other way. He’s a man of peace. Doesn’t mean he’s stupid.”

  “Where is he?” Daniel asked.

  “By the fire,” Fitz said. “That way about thirty yards. The ambulance is on the way.”

  Butters groaned and slowly pushed himself up. He rubbed at his jaw again and said, “Take me to him.”

  “Wait,” Daniel said. “Fitz . . . you ran. I don’t blame you. But you came back.”

  Fitz paused, pursed his lips, and said, “Yeah. I did, didn’t I?”

  “Why?”

  Fitz shrugged. “Dresden. He told me that if I ran now, I’d run forever. And I’m sick of that.”

  “Heh,” Butters said. “Heh, heh. He totally Kenobied the day.” Dark eyes gleaming, he looked at Daniel. “Still have doubts?”

  Daniel shook his head once, smiling. Then he sank down to the floor with a satisfied groan.