Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  “The father, please,” Butters said. Fitz nodded and led Butters over toward the gang’s little camp. But not before Butters looked around and said, “Thanks, Harry. Good to know you’ve still got our backs.”

  I watched them go to help Forthill quietly.

  “Sure, man,” I said, though I knew no one could hear me. “Anytime.”

  Emergency-service personnel arrived. By the time they got there, weapons had been hidden. Stories had been set. Concerned adults had come to discourage some local homeless youth from playing and living in a dangerous, old, ruined building. There had been an altercation with a possibly drunken vagrant that had gotten out of hand. Things had fallen down, injuring several.

  It wouldn’t have taken more than half a brain to see the holes in the story, but Butters knew the med techs, no one had been killed, and no one wanted to press any charges. The techs were willing to keep their mouths shut for a couple of greenbacks. Ah, Chicago.

  Forthill was in bad shape, but by the time they’d gotten him onto a stretcher and out to the ambulance, the angel of death was nowhere to be seen. Hah. Up yours, Reaper Girl. The father would live to not-fight another day.

  Daniel went with the father. Aristedes rode in his own ambulance. He was still stunned by what had happened, or else smart enough to look disoriented and keep his mouth shut. The techs, after a few quiet words from Butters, strapped his arms and legs down for the ride. He never resisted. He never did anything. The doors of the ambulance shut on a broken man.

  As for me, I couldn’t emerge from the old factory into the light. I had to stay in shadowed doorways to watch the proceedings. The afternoon must have been a warm one. The snow had visibly begun to lessen, and water ran and dripped everywhere.

  When everyone with immediate medical needs had been taken care of, I went back to where I knew Butters would be. Sure enough, he came into the business entryway to recover his duffel bag and the flashlight containing Bob’s skull.

  Butters slung the bag’s strap over his shoulder and pulled the little spirit radio out of it. He dropped that in his pocket and took out the flashlight housing. Then he held it up and said, “Okay, job’s done.”

  Orange campfire lights shot in a stream over my right shoulder and past me into the eye sockets of the skull, where they took up their familiar glow. “See? I told you so.”

  “Duly noted,” Butters said seriously.

  I blinked at him and looked behind me, then back at the skull. “Bob. You were behind me that whole time?”

  “Yeah,” Bob said. “The nerd had me shadow you. Sorry, Harry.”

  Butters could see me, and I folded my arms and scowled at him. “You didn’t trust me.”

  Butters pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Trust, but verify,” he said seriously. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Harry, but the testimony of a cat and a maybe-insane girl—wizard or not—didn’t exactly thrill all of us with its undeniable veracity.”

  “Murphy told you to do it,” I said.

  “Actually, Murphy didn’t want any of us to take any chances dealing with you,” he replied. “Things have used your appearance to get to her before.”

  I wanted to say something heated and ferocious, but all I could have rationally responded with was something like, You’re right. And that wouldn’t have sounded very rational. So I just grunted.

  Butters nodded. “And you’ve got to understand how bad the streets have been. The Fomor have no limits, Harry. They’ll use women, children, pets—anything—to get an emotional lever on you, if they can. To fight that, you’ve got to have buckets and buckets of sangfroid.”

  I grunted and scowled some more. “But you bucked her orders.”

  Butters scratched his nose with one finger. “Well. You know. It sounds cooler if I say I acted on my own initiative. I had a hunch.”

  “Listen to Quincy here,” the skull burbled, giggling. “You had me, you dope.”

  “I had you,” Butters admitted. “And I trust you.”

  “And Murphy doesn’t, much,” Bob said with cheery pride, “which is probably smart. Someone else gets hold of my skull and who knows what they’d do with me? I am a loose cannon! The Wardens would waste me in a hot second!”

  “Present company excluded,” I said.

  “You don’t count,” the skull said stoutly. “You were drafted.”

  “Granted.”

  “The point being that I am an outlaw! And chicks love that!”

  “Oy,” Butters said, rolling his eyes. “Enough, Bob.”

  “You got it, hombre,” Bob said.

  I couldn’t help laughing a little.

  “You see what I’ve got to live with,” Butters said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You, uh,” he said. He rubbed at the back of his head. “You’re missed, here, Harry. A lot. After a while, most of us . . . you know. We figured you were gone. We kind of had a wake at your grave. Pizza and beer. Called it a funeral. But Murphy wouldn’t go.”

  “Illegal gathering,” I said.

  Butters snorted out a breath through his nose. “That was her excuse, yeah.”

  “Well,” I said. “We’ll see.”

  Butters paused, body motionless for a moment. “We’ll see what?”

  “Whether or not this is permanent,” I said, gesturing at myself.

  Butters snapped up straight. “What?”

  “Bob thinks that there is hinkiness afoot with regard to my, ah, disposition.”

  “You . . . you could come back?” Butters whispered.

  “Or maybe I haven’t left,” I said. “I don’t know, man. I got suckered into this whole encore-appearance thing. I’m as in the dark as everyone else.”

  “Wow,” Butters breathed.

  I waved a hand. “Look. That will fall out where it may,” I said. “We’ve got a real problem to deal with, like, right now.”

  He nodded, one sharp gesture. “Tell me.”

  I told him about the Corpsetaker and her plan for Mort, and her deal with the point guy of the Fomor’s servitors. “So we’ve got to break that up right the hell now,” I concluded. “I want you to get Murphy and her Vikings and tell them to go stomp the Corpsetaker’s hideout.”

  Butters sucked in a breath through his teeth. “Ugh. I know there hasn’t been time for a lot of chitchat since you, uh, became departed, but they aren’t Murphy’s Vikings.”

  “Whose are they?”

  “Marcone’s.”

  “Oh.”

  “We’ll have to talk to Childs.”

  “Marcone’s new guy?”

  “Yeah. Him.” Butters shivered. “Guy gives me the creeps.”

  “Could be Will and company would be enough.”

  Butters shook his head. “Could be Will and company have done too much already, man. Seriously.”

  “Something’s got to happen. If you wait, you get a renegade wizard the White Council has nightmares about knocking on your front door. And by knocking I mean ‘converting it from matter to energy.’ ”

  Butters nodded. “I’ll talk to her. We’ll figure out something.” He squinted at me. “What are you going to be doing?”

  “Covering the ghosty side of things,” I said. “She and her wannabe Bob and her lemurs and all the wraiths she’s been calling up. Assuming things go well on the mortal coil, I don’t want her slipping out the back door and coming back to haunt us another day.”

  He frowned. “You’re going to do all that by yourself?”

  I showed him my teeth. “Not exactly. Move. There’s not much time.”

  “When?” he asked.

  “When else?” I answered. “Sundown.”

  Chapter Forty

  I vanished from inside the factory the second I felt sundown shudder through reality. The jumps were longer now, almost double what I’d managed the night before, and it took less time to orient myself between them. I guess practice makes perfect, even if you’re dead. Or whatever I was.

  It took me less than tw
o minutes to get to the burnt remains of Morty’s place.

  On the way, I could see that southern winds were blowing, and they must have brought a springtime warmth with them. All of the city’s snow was melting, and the combination of the two with the oncoming night meant that a misty fog hung in the air, cutting visibility down to maybe fifty or sixty feet. Fog in Chicago isn’t terribly unusual, but never that thick. Streetlights were ringed with blurred, luminous halos. Traffic signals were soft blurs of changing color. Cars moved slowly, cautiously, and the thick mist laid a rare hush over the city, strangling its usual voice.

  I stopped about a hundred yards away from Morty’s house. There I felt it: a trace of the summoning energy that had been built into his former home, drawing me forward with the same gentle beckoning as might the scent of a hot meal after a long day. It was like the Corpsetaker’s summons, but of a magic far less coarse, far more gentle. The necromancer’s magic was like the suction of a vacuum cleaner. Mort’s magic had been more like the gravity of the earth—less overtly powerful, but utterly pervasive.

  Hell. Mort’s magic had probably had some kind of effect on me all the way over in Chicago Between. His house was the first place I’d come to, after all, and though I had a logical reason to go there, it was entirely possible that my reasoning had been influenced. It was magic, after all, intended to attract the attention of dangerous spirits.

  At that very moment, in her moldy old lair, the Corpsetaker was torturing Morty and planning to murder my friends—so the remnants of the spell were definitely getting my attention.

  I went closer to Morty’s house and felt that same pull get a little stronger. The spell had been broken when Mort’s house had burned down, and it was fading. The morning’s sunrise had almost wiped it away. It wouldn’t survive another dawn—but with a little help, it might serve its purpose one more time.

  From the voluminous pocket of my duster, I withdrew Sir Stuart’s pistol. I fiddled with the gun until the gleaming silver sphere of the bullet rolled out into my hand, along with a sparkling cloud of flickering light. As each mote touched my skin, I heard the faint echo of a shot cracking out—the gunfire of Sir Stuart’s memory. Hundreds of shots crackled in my ears, distant and faint: the ghostly memory equivalent of gunpowder. Sir Stuart had heard a lot of it.

  But what I needed wasn’t firepower, not for this. I took up the shining silver sphere, the memory of Sir Stuart’s home and family, and regarded it with my full attention. Once again the scene of the small family farm seemed to swell in my vision, until it surrounded me in a faint, translucent landscape that quivered and throbbed with power all its own. For a second, I could hear the wind rustling through the fields of grain and smell the sharp, honest scents of animals drifting to me from the barn, mixing with the aroma of fresh-baked bread coming from the house. The shouts and cries of children playing some sort of game hung in the air.

  They weren’t my memories, but I felt something beneath their surface, something powerful and achingly familiar. I reached into my own thoughts and produced the memories of my own home, casting them up to merge with Sir Stuart’s cherished vision. I remembered the smell of wood and ink and paper, of all the shelves of secondhand books that had lined the walls of my old apartment, with their ramshackle double- and triple-stacked layers of paperbacks. I remembered the scent of woodsmoke from my fireplace, blending with the aroma of fresh coffee in a cup. I threw in the taste of Campbell’s chicken soup in a steaming mug on a cold day, when my clothes had been soaked with rain and snow and I had gotten out of them and huddled beneath a blanket near the fire, sipping soup and feeling the warmth sink into me.

  I remembered the solid warmth of my dog, Mouse, his heavy head pillowed on my leg while I read a book, and the softness of Mister’s fur as he came by and gently batted my book away with his paw until I paused to give him his due share of attention. I remembered my apprentice, Molly, diligently studying and reading, remembered us having hours and hours of conversation as I taught her the basics of magic, of how to use it responsibly and wisely—or, at least, as responsibly and wisely as I knew how. They weren’t necessarily the same thing.

  I remembered the feeling of pulling warm covers up over me as I went to bed. Of listening to thunderstorms, complete with flickering lightning, pounding rain, and howling wind, and of the simple, secure pleasure of knowing that I was safe and warm while the elements raged outside. I remembered walking with confidence in pitch darkness, because I knew every step that would take me safely through my rooms.

  Home.

  I invoked the memory of home.

  I don’t know at what point the bullet dissolved into raw potential, but its power blended with my memories, humming a powerful harmonic chord with the emotions behind those memories—emotions common to all of us, a need for a place that is our own. Security. Safety. Comfort.

  Home.

  “Home,” I breathed aloud. I found the tatters of Mort’s gathering spell, and in my thoughts began to knit the edges of the memories together with the frayed magic. “Home,” I breathed again, gathering my will, fusing it with memory, and sending it out into the nighttime air. “Come home,” I said, and my voice carried into the night, reverberating through the mist, borne by the energy of my spell into a night-shivering, encompassing music as I released that power and memory into the night. “Come home. Come home.”

  It all flowed out of me in a steady, deliberate rush, leaving me with unhurried purpose. I felt the magic rush out in a steadily growing circle. And then it was gone, except for the faintest whisper of an echo.

  Come home. Come home. Come home.

  I opened my eyes slowly.

  There had been no sound, no stirring of energies, no warning of any kind.

  I stood in a circle of silent, staring, hollow-eyed spirits.

  Now that I knew what they were—the insane, dangerous ghosts of Chicago, the ones that killed people—they looked different. Those two little kids? My goodness, spooky now, a little too much darkness in their sunken eyes, expressions that wouldn’t change if they were watching a car go by or pushing a toddler’s head under the surface of the water. A businessman, apparently from the late-nineteenth century, I recognized as the shade of Herman Webster Mudgett, an American trailblazer in the field of entrepreneurial serial murder. I spotted another shade from a century earlier who could only have been Captain William Wells, a cold and palpable fury radiating from him still.

  There were more—many more. Chicago has an intense history of violence, tragedy, and sheer weirdness that really can’t be topped this side of the Atlantic. I couldn’t put names to a third of them, but I knew now, looking at them, exactly what they were—lives that had ended in misery, in fury, in pain, or in madness. They were pure energy of destruction given human form, smoldering like coals that could still sear flesh long after they ceased to give off light.

  They were a loaded gun.

  Standing behind them, patient and calm, like sheepdogs around their flock, were the guardian spirits of Mort’s house. I had assumed them to be his spiritual soldiers, but I could see now what their main purpose had been. They, the ghosts of duty and obligation unfulfilled, had remained behind in an attempt to see their tasks to completion. They, the shades of faith, of love, of duty, had been a balancing energy with the dark power of the violent spirits. They had grounded the savagery and madness with their sheer, steady, simple existence—and the faded shade of Sir Stuart stood tall and calm among them.

  I held Sir Stuart’s weapon in my right hand and half wished I could go back in time and rap my twenty-four-hours-younger self on the head with it. The fading spirit hadn’t been trying to hand me a weapon at all. He’d been giving me something far more dangerous than that.

  I thought he’d handed me potent but limited power, a single deadly shot. I’d been thinking in mortal terms, from a mortal perspective.

  Stuart hadn’t given me a gun. He’d given me a symbol.

  He’d given me authority.

>   I held the gun in my right hand and closed my eyes for a moment, focusing on it, concentrating on not merely holding it, but taking it into me, making it my own. I opened my eyes, looked at the tall, brawny shade, and said, “Thank you, Sir Stuart.”

  As I spoke, the gun shifted and changed, elongating abruptly. The wood of its grip and stock swelled out, becoming knife-planed oak and, as it did, I reached into my memory. Runes and sigils carved themselves in a tight spiral down the length of the staff. I took a deep breath and once more felt the solid power of my wizard’s staff, six feet of oak as big around as my own circled thumb and finger, the foremost symbol of my power, gripped steadily in my hand.

  I bowed my head, focusing intently, drawing on the memories of the hundreds of spells and dozens of conflicts of my life, and as I did the symbols on the staff pulsed with opalescent energy that reminded me of Sir Stuart’s bullets in flight. Power hummed through the spectral wood so that it shook in my hand and flickered sharply, sending pulses of weirdly colored light, light I sensed would be visible even to mortal eyes, surging through the mist. There was a rushing sound, something almost like a sudden strike upon an unimaginably large and deep drum, an impact that rippled out from me and passed throughout the city and the surrounding lands. It sent a shiver of energy through me, and for an instant I felt the warmth of the southern wind, the close, muggy dampness of the air, the wet, slushy cold of the snow beneath my insubstantial feet. I smelled the stench of Morty’s burned home on the air, and for a single instant, for the first time since the tunnel, I felt the rumble of hunger in my belly.

  Then dozens of spectral gazes simultaneously shifted, focusing exclusively on me, and their weight hit me like a sudden cold wind.

  “Good evening, everyone,” I said quietly, turning to address the circle of raw fury and devotion that surrounded me. “Our friend Mortimer is in trouble. And we don’t have much time. . . .”

  Chapter Forty-one

  The Corpsetaker’s stronghold hadn’t changed.