by Jim Butcher
You know. Life.
Then I did something fairly nutty, as I gathered the memory for what I was to attempt. I just uttered the spell in plain, old English. The energy seared through my thoughts in a way that would have been damaging to a living wizard, maybe fatal. It seemed appropriate to use it here, and I released whatever power I had left, clothing it in garments of memory, as I murmured the most basic of ideas, the foundation of words and of reality.
“Be.”
My universe shook. There was a vast rushing sound, rising to a crescendo that would have made a sane person flinch and crouch down to find shelter. And in a sudden burst of silence, I stood firmly in cold, dank dimness. The cold raised gooseflesh on my skin.
Shadows had swollen to cover almost all the details around me, and no wonder they had.
All the candles and lamps that lit the chamber had burned down to little pinpoints.
I tapped Boz on the shoulder and said, “Hey, gorgeous.”
His face twisted in complete surprise, turning to stare in blank incomprehension at mine.
I winked at him, and whispered, “Boo.”
And then I slugged him with my quarterstaff.
It hurt. I mean, more than the shock of impact that lanced up through my wrists. I was solid again, at least for a moment. I was myself again, and with my remembered body came a fountain of remembered pain. My legs and knees creaked and ached, something that was a natural progression for a big guy, a kind of background pain that I never noticed until it was gone and then back again. I hadn’t exactly stretched out, and I’d socked Boz with everything I had. I’d torn a muscle in my back doing it. My head wasn’t clear, suddenly riddled with a catalog of muscle twitches, physically painful hunger, and old injuries I’d just learned to ignore, now suddenly screaming in fresh agony.
I’ve said before that only the dead feel no pain, but I’d never spoken from experience before. Pain used as a weapon is one thing. Personal pain, the kind that comes from just living our lives, is something else.
Pain isn’t a lot of fun, at least not for most folks, but it is utterly unique to life. Pain—physical, emotional, and otherwise—is the shadow cast by everything you want out of life, the alternative to the result you were hoping for, and the inevitable creator of strength. From the pain of our failures we learn to be better, stronger, greater than what we were before. Pain is there to tell us when we’ve done something badly—it’s a teacher, a guide, one that is always there to both warn us of our limitations and challenge us to overcome them.
For something no one likes, pain does us a whole hell of a lot of good.
Stepping back into my old self and moving instantly into violent motion hurt like hell.
It.
Was.
Amazing.
I let out a whoop of sheer adrenaline and mad joy as Boz tumbled back over Mort’s recumbent form.
“Oof!” Mort shouted. “Dresden!”
A howl of excitement came rolling out of Sir Stuart’s throat and he clenched his fist in vicious satisfaction, flashing briefly into full color. “Aye, set boot to arse, boy!”
Boz came up into a crouch pretty smoothly for someone of his bulk and stayed there, low and on all fours, an animal that saw no advantage in learning to stand erect. Absolutely no sign of discomfort showed on his face, even though I’d split open his cheek with the blow from my staff and blood joined the other substances encrusting his face.
Hell’s bells. My staff wasn’t exactly a toothpick. It was as heavy as three baseball bats. I wasn’t a toothpick, either. I wasn’t sure of my weight in baseball bats, but I could look down at a lot of guys in the NBA, and I wasn’t a scrawny kid anymore. The point being that the blow, delivered with all the power of my shoulders, hips, and legs as well as my arms, should have knocked Boz out—or killed him outright. I’d been aiming for his temple. He’d jerked his head back so that the end of my staff hit his left cheekbone instead. Hell, I might have broken it.
But instead of collapsing in pain, he just crouched there, silent, stony eyes looking right through me as he faced me without flinching. I began to gather my will and staggered, nearly falling on my face. I had nothing left. It was only that burning flash of irrational certainty that had driven me to attempt to manifest that was keeping me on my feet at all—and I realized with a cold little chill that I might not be able to stop Boz from killing Morty.
“Good Lord, I’m regretting this now,” I muttered. “I have never—ever—smelled BO this bad in my life. And I once had s’mores with a Sasquatch.”
“Hang out with him for a while,” Mort gasped. “Eventually it’s not so bad.”
“Wow. Really?”
“No. Not really.”
I kept my eyes on Boz, but did my best to grin at Mort. He’d been strung up and tortured by lunatics for almost twenty-four hours, and his executioner was still trying to finish the job, but he still had the guts to engage in badinage. Anyone with that kind of spirit in the face of horror is okay in my book.
Boz came at me like a predator—a smooth, swift motion that moved his whole body at once, unfettered by any kind of reluctance or hesitation. He never rose to do it, either. He flung himself forward as much with his arms as his legs, and his body’s center of mass never came much higher than my knees.
I gave him a boot to the head. I literally kicked him in the head with my hiking boot, and it was like stubbing my toe on a large rock. He just plowed on through the kick and hit me at the knees. Boz had a lot of mass. We went down, me on my ass, him lying on my lower legs. He started trying to claw his way up my body to my throat. I declined to allow him such liberties, and communicated that desire to him by thrusting the end of my staff at his neck.
He slapped at the staff with one paw and caught it in an iron grip. I tried to roll away. He got his other hand on the weapon. We wrenched and wrestled for control of it. He was stronger than me. He was heavier than me. I had slightly more leverage, but not enough to make the difference.
Then Boz surged forward, driving with tree-trunk legs, and I went down on my back. All his weight came down on the staff and he drove it toward my throat.
Temporary body or not, it still worked the same way as the one I was used to. If Boz crushed my windpipe, the body would die. If that happened, I assumed I would be left behind, immaterial again, while the false flesh collapsed into ectoplasm—the way ghosts and demons were driven back to their spirit forms when their temporary bodies were destroyed. But we were getting pretty far out of my comfort zone when it came to ghostly lore.
Boz bore down, and it was all I could do to keep him from choking me with my own staff. I couldn’t even dream of moving him. He had seventy-five or eighty pounds on me, all of them solid, stinking mass, and he was coming at me with a silently psychotic determination.
But he hadn’t realized where we had fallen.
I released the staff with my right hand, and his shoulders bunched, his back rounding out in a massive hump of trapezius muscles. My one hand wasn’t able to do much to hold him back, and I felt the harsh pain of blood trying to hammer through the arteries Boz was compressing.
With my right hand, I seized the ends of the jumper cables still attached to the heavy-duty automobile battery, the one Morty had been tortured with—and jammed the metal ends of them both against the freshly blood-soaked side of Boz’s face.
It wasn’t exactly a surgical strike. I was holding both clamps in the same hand and only a couple of seconds from being choked unconscious, after all, but it worked. The clamps touched each other and wet skin, and sparks flew. Boz convulsed and jerked away from the sudden source of agony, a reflex action as immutable as pulling your arm away from a searing-hot pan handle. He shifted his weight and I pushed up, adding every ounce of muscle I had to aid the movement. He pitched off me, rolling, and I followed him, letting go of the staff and looping the main body of the jumper cable around his neck. He thrashed and tried to get away, but I had gotten onto his back and locked my le
gs around his hips. I grabbed the cable in both hands and hauled back on it with everything I had.
It was over pretty quick, though it didn’t feel like it at the time. Boz thrashed and struggled, but as heavily muscled as he was, he wasn’t flexible enough to get his arms back and up to reach where I was on his back, so he couldn’t pull me off. He tried to break away, but between the cable and the grip of my legs, he wasn’t able to shake me off. He tried to get his fingers in beneath the jumper cable, but though he managed to get in a couple of digits, I was pulling too hard and was more than strong enough to outmuscle one of his fingers.
I don’t care how crazy you are; when your brain doesn’t get oxygen, you go down. Boz did, too. I held the choke for another ten seconds to make sure he wasn’t playing possum on me, and then for fifteen. Then twenty. Someone was snarling a string of curses and I hadn’t realized it was me. The simple sensation of straining power, of primal victory, surged through me like a drug, and only the coup de grace remained.
I ground my teeth. I’d killed men and women before but never when I’d had an alternative. I might be a fighter, but I wasn’t a killer, not when there was a choice. I forced myself to let go of the cables, and Boz flopped to the ground, entirely limp but alive. I had to roll him off one of my legs, pushing with my other heel, but he finally went, and I shambled upright, breathing hard. Then I turned to Mort and started untying knots.
He watched me with wary eyes. “Dresden. What you’re doing . . . being in the flesh like that. It isn’t right.”
“I know,” I said. “But no one else was going to do it.”
He shook his head. “I’m just saying . . . it isn’t good for you. Those spirits, the ones I’d been sheltering—they weren’t any different from any other ghost when they got started. Doing this . . . It does things to you long-term. You’ll change.” He leaned a little toward me. “Right now, you’re still you. But what you felt there, at the end—it grows. Keep doing this and you won’t be you anymore.”
“I’m almost done,” I told him, jerking the ropes clear as fast as I could. It took a bit. They’d strung him up pretty carefully, distributing his weight across a lot of rope. I guess Corpsetaker hadn’t wanted to spend several hours getting her limbs back under control once Mort cracked.
He groaned and tried to sit up. It took him a couple of attempts, but when I tried to help him, he waved my offer away.
“Can you walk?” I asked him.
He shuddered. “I can damned well walk out of here. Just give me a minute.”
“I don’t have it,” I said. “I’ve got to move.”
“Why?”
“Because my friends are up there somewhere.”
He sucked in a breath.
“I know,” I said with a grimace. Then I rose, grabbed my staff, and started walking toward the stairs.
“Stu,” I heard Mort say. “You know knots, right?”
I glanced back and saw Sir Stuart nod. Mort nodded back and started gathering up the coils of rope I’d pulled off him. He beckoned to Sir Stuart. “Come in. I don’t want the man mountain there getting up and finishing what he started.”
I almost hesitated, to make sure Mort was all right, but I’d spent too much time down here already, and I could feel the hectic buzz of my fatigue growing by the moment. I had to get upstairs.
There was only one reason Corpsetaker would have taken down her own wards as she had. She wasn’t limited to such a small sampling of humanity now, when it came to seizing a new body. She’d wanted people to come inside her lair.
It would give her more variety to choose from.
I rushed up the stairs, praying that I would be in time to stop Kemmler’s protégé from taking one of my friends—for keeps.
Chapter Forty-eight
I pounded up the stairs and found that it was getting dark. Dammit. I’d gotten way too used to the upside of ghostliness. I reached up to my neck to find my mother’s pentacle amulet and . . .
. . . and it wasn’t there. Which it should have been. I mean, my actual duster had been destroyed, but the one I was wearing was an exact duplicate. There was no reason my mother’s amulet shouldn’t have been there, but it wasn’t. That was possibly something significant.
But I didn’t have time to worry about it at the moment. Instead, I sent a whisper of will into my staff, and the runes carved in it began to glow with blue-white wizard light, casting their shapes in pure light on the moldy stone walls and floor of the hallway, showing me the way. I didn’t have much magic left in me, but a simple light spell was much, much easier than any kind of violent spell, requiring far less energy.
I ran down the hall, past the filthy sleeping rooms with curtains for doors, and through the break in the wall, to the old electrical-junction room.
A flashlight lay on the floor, spilling light onto a patch of wolf fur from a couple of inches away and otherwise doing nothing to illuminate the scene. I had to brighten the light from my staff to see that Murphy and the wolves were lying in a heap on the floor, next to the unconscious Big Hoods.
The Corpsetaker was nowhere to be seen.
Neither was Molly.
I turned in a slow circle, looking for any sign of what had happened, and found nothing.
Feet scraped on rock and I turned swiftly, bringing up my staff, ready to unleash whatever power I had left in me—and found Butters standing halfway down the stairs, looking like a rabbit about to bolt. His face was pale as a sheet behind his glasses, and his dark hair was a wild mess.
“My God,” he breathed. “Dresden?”
“Back for a limited engagement,” I breathed, lowering the staff. “Butters, what happened?”
“I . . . I don’t know. They started shouting something and then they just . . . just collapsed.”
“And you didn’t?” I asked.
“I was out there,” he said, pointing behind him. “You know. Looking out for the police or whatever.”
“Being Eyes, huh?” I said. I turned back to Murphy and the wolves.
“Yeah, pretty much,” he said. He moved quietly down the stairs. “Are they all right?”
I crouched down over Murphy and felt her neck. Her pulse was strong and steady. Ditto for the nearest of the wolves. “Yeah,” I said, my heart slowing down a little. “I think s—”
Something cold and hard pressed against the back of my head. I looked down.
Murphy’s SIG was missing from its holster.
“Everyone trusts a doctor,” purred Butters, in a tone of voice that Butters would never have used. “Even wizards, Dresden.”
I felt myself tensing. “Corpsetaker.”
“You were able to manifest after all? Intriguing. You’ve a natural gift for darker magic, I think. My master would have snapped you up in an instant.”
I’d spent an afternoon with Murphy working on gun disarms, at Dough Joe’s Hurricane Gym. I tried to remember which way I had to spin to attempt to take the gun away. It depended on how it was being held—and I had no idea how Corpsetaker was holding the weapon on me. I was pretty sure Butters was a lefty, but I didn’t think that would matter to the Corpsetaker once she set up shop. “Oh, boy. I could have hung out with people like you? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have worked out.”
“Possibly not,” Corpsetaker said. “I accorded you far more respect than you merited, as an opponent. How much of you is left behind that body you’ve cobbled together? Scarcely more than one of those pathetic wraiths, I think. You could have made a viable move in time, but clearly you’ve no patience, no head for strategy.”
“Yeah. I guess I’ve still got a soul and a conscience where you installed that stuff.”
“Soul? Conscience?” Corpsetaker said, almost laughing. “Those are nothing but words. They aren’t even true limits—just the figments of them. Useless.”
“Just because something isn’t solid doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” I said. “If you had a brain in your head, you’d know that.”
“Y
ou’re obsessed with the fantasies of the young,” she replied with my friend’s breath. “Though I must admit that that the ironic reversal of our current state is simply delicious.”
And without a hesitation or any change in the tone of her voice, she put a bullet into the back of my head.
The pain was infinitely brief and indescribable, a massive spike of agony that felt as if it should have sent me flying. I saw a cloud of something fly forward and then splatter all over one of the wolves and the nearest Big Hood. Ectoplasm, I realized dully. My physical body had been destroyed. It had fallen back into the spirit matter from which I’d formed it.
The pain faded, and then I was back in the still, neutral absence of sensation of the ghost state. I reached for the splattered matter with an instinctive, unspoken yearning to return to it.
I could barely see my hand.
I tried to turn around, but it felt like I was submerged in something thicker and more viscous than water, and it took forever.
I stared into the Corpsetaker’s eyes within Butters’s face and watched the body-jumping lunatic smirk at me. “Not much of you now, is there?” she murmured. “You’ll be a wraith within days. I think that balances our account. Enjoy eternity, Dresden.”
I tried to snarl a curse, but I was just so tired. I couldn’t get the sound to come out of me. And by the time I had tried, Corpsetaker had taken Butters’s body back to the bottom of the stairs. She was moving so fast.
Or . . . or maybe I was just that slow.
I tried to follow, and all I could manage was to drift in the Corpsetaker’s wake, moving with grace, but slowly. So slowly.
Corpsetaker made a gesture and a veil fell away from another shade at the top of the stairs. It was Butters. He stood there dressed not in his winter gear, but in the scrubs I was far more used to seeing him wear. He was completely motionless except for his eyes, which rolled around frantically. A rapidly evaporating puddle of ectoplasm spread at his feet. An expression of pure confusion was locked onto his face.
