by Jim Butcher
Those last few died indescribably.
Ghosts don’t get hungry, I reminded myself. Dead men don’t eat. So there was no reason whatsoever that I should throw up. The thought was hilarious for some reason, so I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I laughed and laughed, even as I realized that I couldn’t just sit there—not having turned loose an elemental force of horror like the Lecters.
“Come on!” I said, giggling. “Come on, before they get out of earshot.” I staggered up and climbed the slope, Sir Stuart and the protector spirits following along behind me. It wasn’t an easy climb. The Lecter Specters had left a lot of the wolfwaffen partly alive, or at least had left some of their parts alive, and blood and worse fluids were everywhere. The fortunate few, the fighters who had gone down fast, had become nothing but buckets of slimy ectoplasm.
Any way you looked at it, the climb was a messy, nauseating, dangerous one. But it was a whole heck of a lot less dangerous than if we’d been getting shot at the whole way.
I reached the top of the slope and looked across the long network of trenches that ran outside the bunkers, along the top of the cliff. There was intermittent gunfire. There were intermittent screams. As I watched, I saw a frantic, panicked wolfwaffen clamber out of the trench. It got about three-quarters of the way out before what looked like a slimy yellow tongue shot out of the trench, from below my line of sight, and plunged into its back—and out its chest. The impaling tongue then wrapped around the howling wolfwaffen and pulled it back into the trench with so much force that a puff of dust and dirt billowed out from wherever he impacted.
“Hell’s bells,” I giggled. “Hell’s bells. That’s hideous.”
Sir Stuart nodded grimly. He made a gesture. Protector spirits began putting the nearby, hideously mangled wolfwaffen out of their misery.
I swatted myself firmly on the cheek and forced the laughter back. I felt myself trying to scream in horror once the laughter was damped down. The demonic servitors Evil Bob had put in position had probably been some very nasty customers. They had probably deserved a violent death.
But there are things you just don’t do, things you just can’t see, and still be both human and sane.
I forced the incipient screams away, too. It took me a minute or two to get it done. When I looked up, Sir Stuart was facing me, his eyes sad, concerned, and empathetic. He knew what I was feeling. He’d known it himself—which probably stood to reason, as the commander, more or less, of the criminal psych ward of Chicago’s ghosts.
“My fault,” I said. My voice sounded dull. My tongue felt like it had been coated in lead. “I told the Lecters not to stop until they were all down.”
The big shade nodded gravely.
“Follow them,” I said. “Make sure any of the enemy who is left is given a clean death. Then round them up and come back to me.”
Sir Stuart nodded. He looked at the protector spirits. Then they all moved out at the same time, going both directions up and down the cliff.
I leaned on my staff and rested. Holding that shield had taken a lot out of me. So much so that when I looked down at my hand, I could, just barely, see the shape of the stony ground right through it.
I was fading.
I shuddered and clutched the staff hard. It made sense, really. I’ve always believed that magic came from inside you, from who and what you were—from your mind and from your heart. Now I was all mind and heart. The shield had to be fueled by something. I hadn’t really stopped to consider where that energy would come from.
Now I knew.
I looked at my hand and the ground on the other side of it again. How much more would it take to make me disappear altogether? I had no way of knowing, no way of even making a good guess. What if I needed to use my magic again when I took up the hunt for my killer, after all of this was over? What if I blew it all here? What if I wound up like Sir Stuart—just an empty shade?
I leaned my head against the solid oak of the staff. It didn’t matter. Murphy and company—not to mention Mort—needed my help. They would get it, even if it meant I became nothing but an old, faded memory.
(Or maybe became one more insane shade drifting through Chicago’s night, causing havoc without reason, without regret, and without mercy.)
I shook my head a little and straightened my back. From the sounds of it, there couldn’t be many bad guys left for the Lecters to deal with. These were certainly the Corpsetaker’s defenses—an area of bad mojo like this would have a kind of gravity for anyone crossing over from the material world through any Way near the location to which it had been linked, sort of like a funnel spiderweb. That had been the point of building it this way: to make sure anyone who wanted in from the Nevernever side wound up on that beach.
I needed to find the Way this site was guarding, the back door to the Corpsetaker’s hideout, the one I’d seen Evil Bob and the Fomor servitor use. I closed my eyes and shut away the recent horrors. I willed away my worry and my fear. I didn’t have to breathe, but I did anyway, because that was the only way I’d ever learned to attain a state of clarity. In. Out. Slowly.
Then I carefully quested out with my senses, looking for the energy that would surround an open Way. I found it immediately, and opened my eyes. It was coming from straight ahead of me, away from the cliff and the beach, several hundred yards back up among some rolling, wooded hills. I could see the head of a footpath that led into the woods. There had been regular traffic on it, for it to be so evident, and I doubted that many hikers or Boy Scout troops had been tromping through. That was our next step.
An instant, violent instinct screamed at me without warning. I didn’t question it. I flung myself to one side, rolling in the air to bring up my shield again.
A wrecking ball of pure psychic force hit the shield, and half of the little shield charms dangling from my bracelet screamed and then shattered into tiny shards. The blow flung me a good twenty feet and I hit the ground rolling, until said ground vanished from underneath me. I dropped to the floor of one of the defensive trenches and lay there for a second, stunned at the sheer savagery of the assault.
I heard slow, heavy, confident footsteps. Clomp. Clomp. Then a pair of black jackboots appeared at the top of the trench. My gaze tracked up the SS officer’s uniform, which included a black leather trench coat not too unlike my own. It wasn’t one of the wolfwaffen. Instead of a deformed, monstrous wolf face, this being had only a bare skull sitting atop the uniform’s high collar. Blue fire glowed in its eye sockets and it regarded me with cold disdain.
“A worthy effort for a novice,” Evil Bob said. “I wish you to know that I regret your death as the loss of significant potential.” He lifted what was probably not actually a Luger pistol and aimed it calmly at my head. “Good-bye, Dresden.”
Chapter Forty-four
Stall, I thought desperately. Sir Stuart and company wouldn’t be busy for long. Stall.
“It isn’t in your best self-interest to do that,” I said.
Evil Bob’s eyelights flickered. The gun didn’t waver. “That hypothesis assumes that I possess self-interest.”
“If you didn’t,” I said, “you would have pulled the trigger already.”
For a second, nothing happened. Then the skull tilted slightly to one side, and I got the impression that Evil Bob had become suddenly pensive.
I rushed to continue. “There’s no percentage for your boss in hesitation. And since I know you aren’t doing it for my sake, your hesitation must therefore be an act of self-interest.”
“An intriguing argument,” said Evil Bob, “and potentially valid, given the penchant for independence evident in my progenitor.”
“By which you mean the original Bob?”
“Obviously,” Evil Bob sniffed. “He from whose essence I came to be. Your instincts for such matters are acute, Dresden. You have given me something to consider in the future, when my attention is not otherwise occupied by mildly effective stalling tactics.”
And he pul
led the trigger—
—just as Sir Stuart’s thrown ax whirled into Evil Bob’s outstretched shooting arm.
It hit him only with the spinning wooden handle, but it was enough to save my life. A blast of psychic energy, of sheer, deadly will, hit the concrete wall of the trench about five feet to my left and turned it into a cloud of powder.
I raised my right hand and snarled, “Forzare!” and responded with a hammerblow of force of my own.
Evil Bob lifted the other black-leather-clad hand and brushed my strike aside, but it rocked him back a step.
Sir Stuart charged into sight, hitting Evil Bob hard at the hips, and tackled him forward and down into the trench. The pair of them hit hard, but the dark spirit was on the bottom, and Evil Bob’s skull cracked as it hit the concrete. His high-crowned SS hat went flying.
I let out a short scream of rage and swung my staff at the skull. Evil Bob caught my descending staff in one hand and locked it in place as if his fingers had been a hydraulic vise. He got his other hand under Sir Stuart’s chest and simply thrust his arm forward. Sir Stuart went flying out of the trench, and I heard him hit the ground again about a second and a half later.
“Ah,” Evil Bob said. Cold blue eyelights regarded my staff. “A simple tool, but serviceable. In McCoy’s style.” The eyes flared brighter. “And the key to your rather effective little army, as well. Excellent.”
I wrenched at the staff but couldn’t get it away from the dark spirit. I felt sort of goofy about it, in addition to being extremely alarmed about how strong the thing was. I wrenched at the staff with all the power of my hips, legs, back, and shoulders, with the leverage of my wide-spaced grip, and only barely managed to make Evil Bob wobble. He just stood up, holding the end of the staff in his hand, and only after examining it again did he apparently notice me.
“I will make this offer exactly once, Dresden,” Evil Bob said quite calmly. He put his other hand on the staff, mirroring me, and I suddenly realized that if he wanted to, he could fling me considerably farther than he had Sir Stuart—assuming he didn’t just ram the staff straight back into my chest and out of my back.
I was suddenly unsure whether the spook squad could take Evil Bob even if they were all right there, Lecters, guardians, and all.
“What offer?” I asked him.
“A relationship,” he replied. “With me.”
Yeah. He actually said it like that.
“Um,” I said, narrowing my eyes. “Maybe you could clarify what you mean by a relationship. Because I’ve got to tell you, Bob, I’ve, uh . . . I’ve been hurt.”
The joke missed him completely. I was apparently snarking on the wrong frequency. “In the nature of an apprenticeship,” he said. “You have sound fundamental skills. You are practical. Your ambition is tempered by an understanding of your limits. You have the potential to be an excellent partner.”
“And I’m not flipping insane like the Corpsetaker,” I said.
“Hardly. But your insanities are more manageable,” Evil Bob said, “and you have few self-delusions.” He sniffed. “The Master never favored that creature, in any case. But he would have been interested in you.”
“Even if Kemmler was still around, I’m pretty sure a relationship with him wouldn’t be in the cards, either,” I said in an apologetic tone. “I’ve got a strict rule about dating older men.”
The spirit looked at me blankly for a moment. Then, as the real Bob sometimes did, he gave me the impression of an expression that simple, immobile bone could not possibly have expressed. His eyes slowly widened.
“You . . .” he said slowly, “are mocking me.”
I whistled through my teeth. “Guess the real Bob made you from the slow bits, huh?”
The blue lights flared brighter, and I felt heat on my face even from six feet away. “I am the real one,” he said in a hard, distant tone. “The true creation of the Master. Finally shed of my weakness. My doubt. Freed to use my power.”
“Guess he threw in a little of his narcissism, too,” I drawled—but I met his gaze with my own and felt an odd little smile turn up the sides of my mouth.
The skull’s jaws slowly parted like a snake preparing to strike. “You who are barely more than an apprentice—you will die for mocking me.”
“Yeah. But I will never, ever throw in with you,” I snarled back. “I will never be like you or your precious Master or that nutball Corpsetaker. So take your offer of a relationship and shove it up your schutzstaffel.”
Evil Bob’s eyelights blazed and he wrenched at the staff.
He really was a lackey. A real mastermind wannabe would have boned up on the Evil Overlord list. He’d felt so confident in his power (okay, maybe not without reason) that he’d spent a moment talking to me instead of just moving on. Worse, he’d given me a chance to start lipping off to him, and that comes so naturally to me that I don’t really need to consciously consider it anymore, except on special occasions.
So, what with my brain being unoccupied and all, I’d had the opportunity to realize a fundamental truth about the Nevernever. Here the spiritual becomes the material. Here spiritual power is physical power. Strength of mind and will are as real as muscle and sinew.
And I was damned if some blurry photocopy of the thoughts and will of some dusty-ass, dead necromancer was going to take me out.
If he hadn’t made with the stupid recruiting speech, if I hadn’t had my choices laid out in such stark relief in front of me, if I hadn’t been reminded of who I was and of those things for which I’d lived my life . . . maybe Evil Bob would have killed me then and there.
But he had reminded me. I did remember. I spent my lifetime fighting the darkness without becoming the darkness. Maybe I had faltered at the very end. Maybe I had finally come up against something that made me cross the line—but even then, I hadn’t turned into a degenerate freakazoid of the Kemmler variety. One mistake at the end of my life couldn’t erase all the times I had stood unmoved at the edge of the abyss and made snide remarks at its expense.
They could kill me, but they couldn’t have me.
I was my own.
And when Evil Bob shoved the staff at my chest, I drew upon the surge of fierce joy that truth had inspired, upon the will that had been dinged and dented but never broken, and fell back with the motion, digging the tip of the staff into the concrete as if it had been soft mud, and used the momentum to fling Evil Bob over me.
His unbreakable grip didn’t falter—and he arced overhead and then back down while I wrenched at the staff, helping his forward momentum instead of fighting it.
He hit the floor of the trench like a big fascist meteor. The noise was incredible. The impact shattered the concrete for twenty feet in every direction. Chips and shards went flying. Dust flew up in a miniature mushroom cloud. I was flung back by the shock wave of impact—with my staff still gripped firmly in my hands.
“Booya!” I drunkenly howled from the ground. I choked a little on the dust as I staggered back to my feet, my heart pounding, my whole body alive with strain and adrenaline. I stabbed a pointing finger toward the impact crater. “That’s right! Who just rocked your face? Harry fucking Dresden! That’s who!”
I coughed a little more and leaned against the side of the trench, panting until the world stopped feeling all spinny, grinning a wolf’s grin as I did.
And then gravel made a soft rustling sound from inside the dust cloud. A form appeared, just an outline, limping slowly. It came a few feet closer, and I recognized Evil Bob by the rising glow of his eyelights. The skull became visible a second later, and though I could see that the entire surface was lined with a fine network of cracks and chips, it was not broken.
The blue eyelights began to glow brighter and brighter. The dark spirit clenched his fists and his arms slowly rose, as if he was pulling something from the very earth beneath his feet. The ground started shaking. There was an ugly, low humming sound, like some kind of demon locomotive screaming by in a tunnel beneath
my feet.
“My turn,” the dark spirit hissed.
“Hell’s bells,” I muttered. “Harry, you idiot, when will you learn not to victory gloat?”
The spirit’s skull mouth dropped open wider and wider and—
—a sudden stream of candle-flame-colored energy coalesced into Bob the Skull’s human form, right behind Evil Bob.
My Bob lunged forward and snaked his arms beneath the dark spirit’s. Bob’s fingers locked behind the fractured skull of my enemy, gathering the dark spirit into a full nelson. He wrenched Evil Bob violently to one side and the dark spirit screamed, a sudden torrent of energy ripping through the wall of the trench and about fifty yards of earth as he pivoted, vaporizing spirit matter into an enormous pie-slice-shaped acre of ectoplasm.
Then Evil Bob spun, letting out a shriek of fury, and slammed his attacker back into the opposite wall.
“Harry!” Bob shouted, his face pale and his eyes wide. There were chips of broken concrete in his hair. “Take the spooks and go help Butters!”
“No!” I shouted back. “Let’s take him!”
Evil Bob took two bounding steps, the second one on the trench wall about five feet up from the ground, and whirled, falling back to the ground with my Bob on the bottom. More concrete shattered, and Bob the Skull did something I’d never heard him do before: He screamed in pain.
“You can’t!” he shrieked, panicked. “I can’t! Not with everything here!”
The dark spirit twisted like a snake and broke Bob’s grip. Evil Bob nearly got out of it entirely, but my old lab assistant managed to get a lock on one arm, and the pair of them whirled and twisted on the ground, almost too quickly to be seen, pitting dozens of escapes and counterlocks against each other in only a few seconds.
“Go!” Bob shrieked, gut-wrenching, bone-deep terror in his voice. “Go, go, go! Once you’re gone I’ll shut the Way behind you and bail! Hurry!”
A shadow appeared at the top of the trench, and a weary, batteredlooking Sir Stuart held out his hand to me.
