Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  “Dammit,” I snarled. “Don’t make me regret this, Bob!”

  “Go!” Bob howled.

  I took Sir Stuart’s hand, and the big man pulled me out of the trench with a grunt of effort. Up on top, I found the spooks waiting for me in their typical silence.

  “Right,” I said. “Let’s go, double time.”

  I gripped my staff tight, put my head down, and sprinted for the Way into the Corpsetaker’s stronghold.

  Chapter Forty-five

  The Way hung in the air in the middle of the trail, maybe fifty yards back into the forest, an oblong mirror of silver light. Its bottom edge was maybe six feet off the ground, and a wooden staircase had been built to allow access to it. Behind us, back over toward the beach, I could hear low drumbeats of impact, the crackling scream of shattering concrete. The two Bobs were going at it hammer and tongs, and I desperately hoped that my old friend was all right.

  There was another worry, too. If Bob couldn’t stop Evil Bob from coming through the Way after us, we’d be caught with the Corpsetaker in front of us and Evil Bob behind. I didn’t imagine things would go very well for us if that happened.

  A flutter in the energies around the Way danced across my senses, and I paused to focus more intently on the Way itself, going so far as to call up my Sight for a quick peek. A glance told me everything I needed to know: The Way was unstable. Rather than being the steady, solid, steel-and-concrete bridge between here and the mortal world that I had seen before, it was instead a bridge made of frayed and straining ropes that looked like it might fall apart the instant it was used.

  “Bob, you tricky little bastard,” I murmured admiringly. My former lab assistant had been lying his socks off earlier. Bob wasn’t planning on closing the Way behind us—because he had already rigged it to collapse as soon as we went through. His verbal explanation to me had been meant for Evil Bob’s ear holes. If Evil Bob thought we were dependent on Bob to shut the door behind us, then he would have no reason to hurry after us. And if Bob had told me the real deal out loud, Evil Bob could have simply rushed to the Way ahead of us and collapsed it himself, leaving us totally shut out.

  Bob was really playing with fire. If he’d taken time to sabotage the Way before he came to back me up, it meant that he had left me to face the wolfwaffen and their boss and gambled that I’d be able to hold my own until he circled back to me. On this side of things, his ploy to keep Evil Bob’s attention meant that Evil Bob was free to focus entirely on tearing him apart, confident that he could always come charging at our backs as soon as he finished off my Bob.

  More concrete shattered, somewhere back toward the beach. Bits of small debris, most of it no larger than my fist, came raining down among the trees a moment later.

  “Okay, kids. Gather round and listen up.” I shook my head and addressed the huddled shades. “When we go through,” I said, “we’ll be right in the middle of them. Sir Stuart, I want you and your men to rush any lemurs or wraiths that are near us. Don’t hesitate; just hit them and get them out of my way.” I eyed the Lecter Specters. “The rest of you follow me. We’re going to destroy the physical representations for the wards.”

  The little girl ghost looked up at me and scowled, as if I’d just told her she had to eat a hated vegetable.

  “How can you have any pudding if you don’t eat your meat?” I told her seriously. “We’re going to destroy the wards. Once that is done, you guys can join the rest of the shades in taking down the Corpsetaker and her crew. Okay? Everyone got it?”

  Silent stares.

  “Okay, good. I guess.” I turned to the Way and took a deep breath. “This worked out reasonably well last time, right? Right. So here we go.” I hesitated. Then I said, “Hang on one second. There’s one more thing I want everyone to do . . . .”

  I went through the Way and felt it falling apart under the pressure of our collective spiritual weight. It was an odd sensation, falling against the back of my neck like ice-cold cobwebs. I didn’t let my fear push me into hurrying. I kept my steps steady until I walked onto the floor of the underground chamber where I’d seen Morty and the Corpsetaker the night before.

  I had time for a quick-flash impression. The pit had been filled with wraiths once more, swirling around in a humanoid stew. Mort hung above the pit again, in considerably worse repair than the last time I’d seen him. His shirt was gone. His torso and arms were covered in welts and bruises. He had spots of raw skin that had been burned, maybe with electricity, if the jumper cables and car battery sitting on the ground nearby were any indication. Several of them were on his bald scalp. Someone among the Big Hood lunatics was familiar with the concept of electroshock therapy? That one sure was a stretch.

  The Corpsetaker stood in the air above the pit, hissing words into Morty’s ear. Mort’s head was moving back and forth in a feeble negative. He was weeping, his body twitching and jerking in obvious agony. His lips were puffy and swollen, probably the result of getting hit in the mouth repeatedly. I don’t think he could focus his eyes—but he kept doggedly shaking his head.

  Again, the hooded lemurs were gathered around, but instead of playing cards, this time they all stood in an outward-facing circle around the pit, as if guarding against an attack.

  Pity for them that the back door from the Nevernever was inside the circle. When the spook squad and I came through, they all had their backs to us.

  Now, I’m not arrogant enough to think that I was the first guy to lead a company of ghosts into an assault. Granted, I don’t think it happens every day or anything, but it’s a big world and it’s been spinning for a long time. I’m sure someone did it long before I was born, maybe pitting the ancestral spirits of one tribe against those of another.

  I’m not the first person to assault an enemy fortress from the Nevernever side, either. It happened several times to either side in the war with the Red Court. It’s a fairly standard tactical maneuver. It requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to pull off, as Evil Bob had demonstrated with his Normandy defenses.

  But I am dead certain—ba-dump-bump-ching—that I’m the first guy to lead an army of spirits in an assault from the spirit-world side . . . and had them start off by screaming, “BOO!”

  The spooks all stood in the same space I did, which felt weird as hell—but I hadn’t wanted to take a chance with the rickety Way collapsing and leaving some of the squad behind. When I shouted, they all did, too—and I got a whole hell of a lot more than I bargained for.

  The sound that came out of all those spirit throats, including mine, seemed to feed upon itself, wavelengths building and building like seas before a rising storm. Our voices weren’t additive, bunched so closely like that, but multiplicative. When we shouted, the sound went out in a wave that was almost tangible. It hit the backs of the gathered lemurs and bumped them forward half a step. It slammed into the walls of the underground chamber and brought dust and mold cascading down.

  And Mort’s eyes snapped open in sudden, startled shock.

  “Get ’em!” I howled.

  The dead protectors of Chicago’s resident ectomancer let out a bloodcurdling chorus of battle cries and blurred toward the foe.

  You hear a lot of stories of honor and chivalry from soldiers. Most people assume that such tales apply primarily to men who lived centuries ago. But let me tell you something: People are people, no matter which century they live in. Soldiers tend to be very practical and they don’t want to die. I think you’d find military men in any century you cared to name who would be perfectly okay with the notion of shooting the enemy in the back if it meant they were more likely to go home in one piece. Sir Stuart’s guardians were, for the most part, soldiers.

  Spectral guns blazed. Immaterial knives, hatchets, and arrows flew. Ectoplasm splashed in buckets.

  Half the lemurs got torn to shreds of flickering newsreel imagery before I was finished shouting the command to attack, much less before they could recover from the stunning force of our combined
voices.

  The Corpsetaker shrieked something in a voice that scraped across my head like the tines of a rusty rake, and I twisted aside on instinct. One of the Lecters took the hit, and a gaping hole the size of a bowling ball appeared in the center of his chest.

  “With me!” I shouted. I vanished and reappeared at the bottom of the staircase that led down to the chamber. A streamer of urine yellow lightning erupted from the Corpsetaker’s outstretched hand, but I’d had my shield bracelet at the ready, and I deflected the strike into a small knot of stunned enemy lemurs. When it hit them, there was a hideous, explosive cascade of fire and havoc, and they were torn to shreds as if they’d been made of cheesecloth.

  Holy crap.

  Either one of those spells would have done the same to me if I’d been a quarter second slower. Dead or alive, Kemmler’s disciples did not play for funsies.

  The Lecter Specters appeared in a cloud around me, even as I sent a slug of pure force out of the end of my staff, forcing the Corpsetaker to employ her own magical counter, her wrists crossed in front of her body. The energy of my strike splashed off an unseen surface a few inches in front of her hands, and gobbets of pale green light splattered out from the impact.

  “Dresden!” screamed Mort. He stared at me—or, more accurately, at the Lecters all around me—with an expression of something very like terror. “What have you done? What have you done?”

  “Come on!” I shouted, and vanished from the bottom of the stairs to the top, just as the Corpsetaker appeared halfway up the stairway and sent another torrent of ruinous energy down toward the position the Lecters and I had just vacated.

  At the top of the stairs, the tunnel was like I remembered it—decorated in miniature shrines with very real sigils of power concealed within splatters of gibberish. Candles glowed at each position—ward flames that accompanied the activation of the mystic defenses.

  “The shrines!” I shouted to the Lecters. “Manifest and destroy them!”

  I brought my shield up again, an instant before Corpsetaker sent a slew of dark, gelatinous energy up the stairs. I caught the spell in time, but it instantly began wrenching at my shield as if it had been some kind of living being, chewing away at it, devouring the energy I was using to hold the shield firm.

  Crap. I was not going to fare well in a magical duel with someone who had clearly been doing this kind of thing for a long, long time—not when I had the Lecters to protect. The Corpsetaker would tear them apart if she could to stop us from bringing the wards down. She—I always thought of her as a she, for some reason, even though she could grab any kind of body she wanted, male, female, or otherwise—was far more experienced than I was, with what was probably a much broader range of nasty memories upon which to draw.

  On top of that, I was already winded, so to speak. The fight with Evil Bob had been a job of work. If I stood there trading punches, she had an excellent chance of wearing me down enough to kill me. If all I did was keep shielding the Lecters, she’d be free to throw her hardest punches, and I felt certain that anyone from Kemmler’s crew could hit like a truck.

  Time to get creative.

  I dropped the shield and simultaneously thrust my staff at the black jelly stuff, snarling, “Forzare!” Pure force tore the dark energy to shreds and continued on down the stairs to strike the Corpsetaker. My aim was bad. The strike only spun her in place and sent her sprawling back into open air.

  I took a quick look back at the Lecters and immediately wished I hadn’t. The flames of the candles in the hall had burned down to pinpoints of cold blue light. Once again, the ghosts had assumed forms from nightmares—and they were going totally ballistic on the Big Hoods’ hideout. Something that looked like a blending of a gorilla and a Venus flytrap smashed apart a wooden crate supporting one shrine. A giant caterpillar, its segmented body made of severed human heads, their faces screaming, their tongues functioning as legs, rippled up a wall and began tearing out chunks of concrete where a ledge had been worn, destroying another shrine.

  Right. It was working. I just had to keep the Corpsetaker busy until the wild rumpus got finished tearing apart the defenses.

  I called up my Sight and vanished to a point twenty feet below the Corpsetaker’s position, reappearing inside solid stone. My eyes couldn’t see a thing, but my Sight wasn’t impaired. I could see dark, violent energy swirling around where I’d last seen the Corpsetaker; nasty stuff. I felt my lips stretch into a snarl as I hefted my staff again and growled, “Fuego!”

  Ghost fire roared up through solid matter. In an instant, the dark energy had gathered to oppose my spell, but I sensed more than heard a cry of surprise and pain. The psycho hadn’t expected that one.

  Then the dark energy vanished.

  I scanned around me wildly and found it reappearing behind and above me. I vanished again, flicking out another strike at the Corpsetaker’s location—only to find that the Corpsetaker had blinked to a new one.

  The next sixty seconds or so was a nauseating blur of motion and countermotion. We exchanged spells in solid stone, parried each other hovering in open air above the wraith pit, and leapfrogged each other’s positions throughout the sleeping quarters of the Big Hoods. It was all but impossible to aim, since it required us to correctly guess the next position of the opponent and then hit it with a spell, but I clipped her once more, and she landed a strike of pure kinetic force that slammed into my hip and missed my ghostly genitals by about an inch.

  Twice she darted into the hallway to attack the Lecters, but I stayed on her, forcing her to keep moving, keep defending, allowing her only time enough to throw quick jabs of power back at me.

  I wasn’t her match in a straight-up fight, but this was more like some kind of hallucinatory variant of Whac-a-Mole. Maybe I couldn’t take her out, but I could damned well keep her from stopping the Lecters. If she turned her attention from me, I was wizard enough to take her out, and she knew it. If she went all-out on me, I could stand up to her long enough to let the Lecters finish their project—and she knew that, too.

  I could feel her rage building, lending her next near-miss a hammering edge that jolted my teeth right through my shield—and I laughed at her in reply, making no effort whatsoever to hide my scorn.

  I shrugged off another jab, letting it roll off my shield. And then Corpsetaker vanished and reappeared at the far end of the hallway, at the door to the old electrical-junction room. The very last of the ward flames burned there, at one final, unspoiled shrine. The Corpsetaker faced the Lecters, who were already moving toward her, lifted her hand, and spoke a single word filled with ringing power: “Stop.”

  And the Lecters did. Completely. I mean, like, statue-still.

  “Screw that!” I called out and raised my staff, drawing upon my own will. “Go!”

  There was a sudden strain in the air between the Corpsetaker and me, and I felt it as a physical pressure against my right hand, in which I brandished my staff. Corpsetaker’s upraised palm wavered slightly as our wills contended down the length of the hallway. I pushed hard, grinding my teeth and simply willing the Lecters to finish the job. I leaned forward a little and shoved out my staff, envisioning the Lecters tearing down the last of the little shrines.

  My will lashed down the hallway and blew the hood back from the Corpsetaker’s face. Maybe she was wearing the form of one of her victims. Maybe I was getting a look at the real Corpsetaker. Either way, she wasn’t a pretty woman. She had a face shaped like a hatchet, only less gentle and friendly. Both cheeks were marked with what looked like ritual scars in the shape of spirals. Her hair was long and white, but grew in irregular blotches on her scalp, as if portions of it had been burned and scarred. Her skin was tanned leather, covered in fine seams and wrinkles, and there was a lizardlike quality to the way it loosened around her neck.

  But her eyes were gorgeous. She had eyes a shade of vibrant jade like I had never seen this side of the Sidhe, and her eyelashes were long, thick, and dark as soot. As a young woman
, she must have been a lean stunner, dangerously pretty, like a James Bond villainess.

  Our eyes met and I braced myself for the soulgaze—but it didn’t happen. Hell’s bells, I had my Sight wide-open, enough to let me see the flow of energy straining between our outstretched hands, and it still didn’t happen. Guess the rules change when you’re all soul and nothing else.

  The Corpsetaker watched me for a moment, apparently not particularly straining to hold my will away. “Again you meddle in what is not your concern.”

  “Bad habit,” I said. “But then, it’s pretty much what wizards do.”

  “This will not end well for you, boy,” she replied. “Leave now.”

  “Heh, that’s funny,” I said. I was straining. I tried to keep it out of my voice. “For a second there, it sounded like you were telling me to go away. I mean, as if I would just go away.”

  She blinked twice at me. Then, in a tone of dawning comprehension, she murmured, “You are not brilliant. You are ignorant.”

  “Now you done it. Them’s fightin’ words,” I drawled.

  The Corpsetaker tilted her head back and let out an eerie little screech. I think that, to her, it was laughter.

  Then she turned, swiped a hand at the last shrine, and demolished it herself.

  The wards came down all around us, energy fading, dispersing, settling abruptly back down to earth. I could see the massive currents of power begin to unravel and disperse back out into the world. Within seconds, the protective wards were gone, as if they’d never existed.

  The Corpsetaker made that shrieking sound again and vanished, and in the sudden absence of her will I almost fell flat on my face. I caught myself by remembering that I could now officially scoff at gravity, stopped falling halfway to the floor, and righted myself again.

  The wards were down. Murphy and company would be crashing the party at any moment.

  And . . . for some reason, the Corpsetaker now wanted them to do it.