Ghost Story df-13

by Jim Butcher

  I narrowed my eyes. “So . . . if you’re involved in my death . . .” I tilted my head at him. “It’s because someone forced me to do it?”

  Uriel waggled a hand in a so-so gesture and turned to pace a few steps away. “Force implies another will overriding your own,” he said over his shoulder. “But there is more than one way for your will to be compromised.”

  I frowned at him, then said, with dawning comprehension, “Lies.”

  The archangel turned, his eyebrows lifted, as though I were a somewhat dim student who had surprised his teacher with an insightful answer. “Yes. Precisely. When a lie is believed, it compromises the freedom of your will.”

  “So, what?” I asked. “Captain Jack and the Purgatory Crew ride to the rescue every time someone tells a lie?”

  Uriel laughed. “No, of course not. Mortals are free to lie if they choose to do so. If they could not, they would not be free.” His eyes hardened. “But others are held to a higher standard. Their lies are far deadlier, far more potent.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Imagine a being who was there when the first mortal drew the first breath,” Uriel said. Hard, angry flickers of light danced around us, notable even against formless white. “One who has watched humanity rise from the dust to spread across and to change the very face of the world. One who has seen, quite literally, tens of thousands of mortal lives begin, wax, wane, and end.”

  “Someone like an angel,” I said quietly.

  “Someone like that,” he said, showing his teeth briefly. “A being who could know a mortal’s entire life. Could know his dreams. His fears. His very thoughts. Such a being, so versed in human nature, in mortal patterns of thought, could reliably predict precisely how a given mortal would react to almost anything.” Uriel gestured at me. “For example, how he might react to a simple lie delivered at precisely the right moment.”

  Uriel waved his hand and suddenly we were back in the utility room at St. Mary’s. Only I wasn’t lying on the backboard on a cot. Or, rather, I was doing exactly that—but I was also standing beside Uriel, at the door, looking in at myself.

  “Do you remember what you were thinking?” Uriel asked me.

  I did remember. I remembered with perfect clarity, in fact.

  “I thought that I’d been defeated before. That people had even died because I failed. But those people had never been my own flesh and blood. They hadn’t been my child. I’d lost. I was beaten.” I shook my head. “I remember saying to myself that it was all over. And it was all your fault, Harry.”

  “Ah,” Uriel said as I finished the last sentence, and he lifted his hand. “Now look.”

  I blinked at him and then at the image of me lying on the cot. “I don’t . . .” I frowned. There was something odd about the shadows in the room, but . . .

  “Here,” Uriel said, lifting a hand. Light shone from it as though from a sudden sunrise. It revealed the room, casting everything in stark relief—and I saw it.

  A slender shadow crouched beside the cot, vague and difficult to notice, even by Uriel’s light—but it was there, and it was leaning as though to whisper in my ear.

  And it was all your fault, Harry.

  The thought, the memory, resonated in my head for a moment, and I shivered.

  “That . . . that shadow. It’s an angel?”

  “It was once,” he said, and his voice was gentle—and infinitely sad. “A long, long time ago.”

  “One of the Fallen,” I breathed.

  “Yes. Who knew how to lie to you, Harry.”

  “Yeah, well. Blaming myself for bad stuff isn’t exactly, um . . . completely uncharacteristic for me, man.”

  “I’m aware—as was that,” he said, nodding at the shadow. “It made the lie even stronger, to use your own practice against you. But that creature knew what it was doing. It’s all about timing. At that precise moment, in that exact state of mind, the single whisper it passed into your thoughts was enough to push your decision.” Uriel looked at me and smiled faintly. “It added enough anger, enough self-recrimination, enough guilt, and enough despair to your deliberations to make you decide that destroying yourself was the only option left to you. It took your freedom away.” His eyes hardened again. “I attempt to discourage that sort of thing where possible. When I cannot, I am allowed to balance the scales.”

  “I still don’t understand,” I said. “How does me coming back to haunt Chicago for a few nights balance anything?”

  “Oh, it doesn’t,” Uriel said. “I can only act in a mirror of the offending action, I’m afraid.”

  “You . . . just get to whisper in my ear?”

  “To whisper seven words, in fact,” he said. “What you did . . . was elective.”

  “Elective?” I asked.

  “I had no direct involvement in your return. In my judgment, it needed to happen—but there was no requirement that you come back to Chicago,” Uriel said calmly. “You volunteered.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Well, yes. Duh. Because three of my friends were going to die if I didn’t.”

  Uriel arched an eyebrow at me abruptly. Then he reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a cell phone. He made it beep a couple of times, then turned on the speakerphone, and I heard a phone ringing.

  “Murphy,” answered Captain Jack’s baritone.

  “What’s this Dresden is telling me about three of his friends being hurt?”

  “Dresden,” Jack said in an absent tone, as if searching his memory and finding nothing.

  Uriel seemed mildly impatient. He wasn’t buying it. “Tall, thin, insouciant, and sent back to Chicago to search for his killer?”

  “Oh, right, him,” Jack said. “That guy.”

  “Yes,” Uriel said.

  There was a guileless pause, and then Jack said, “What about him?”

  Uriel, bless his angelic heart, closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep, calming breath. “Collin . . .” he said, in a reproving, parental tone.

  “I might have mentioned something about it,” Jack said. “Sure. Guy’s got a lot of friends. Friends are running around fighting monsters. I figure at least three of them are going to get hurt if he isn’t there to back them up. Seemed reasonable.”

  “Collin,” Uriel said, his voice touched with an ocean of disappointment and a teaspoon of anger. “You lied.”

  “I speculated,” Captain Jack replied. “I got him to do the right thing, didn’t I?”

  “Collin, our purpose is to defend freedom—not to decide how it should be used.”

  “Everything I told him was technically true, more or less, and I got the job done,” Jack said stubbornly. “Look, sir, if I were perfect, I wouldn’t be working here in the first place. Now, would I?”

  And then he hung up. On speakerphone. On a freaking archangel.

  I couldn’t help it. I let out a rolling belly laugh. “I just got suckered into doing this by . . . Stars and stones, you didn’t even know that he . . . Big bad angel boy, and you get the wool pulled over your eyes by . . .” I stopped trying to talk and just laughed.

  Uriel eyed the phone, then me, and then tucked the little device away again, clearly nonplussed. “It doesn’t matter how well I believe I know your kind, Harry. They always manage to find some way to try my patience.”

  It took me a moment to get the laughter under control, but I did. “Look, Uri, I don’t want to say . . .”

  The archangel gave me a look so cold that my words froze in my throat.

  “Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden,” he said quietly—and he said it exactly right, speaking my Name in a voice of that same absolute power that had so unnerved me before. “Do not attempt to familiarize my name. The part you left off happens to be rather important to who and what I am. Do you understand?”

  I didn’t. But as he spoke, I knew—not just suspected, but knew—that this guy could obliterate me, along with the planet I was standing on, with a simple thought. In fact, if what I’d read
about archangels was right, Uriel could probably take apart all the planets. Like, all of them. Everywhere.

  And I also knew that what I had just done had insulted him.

  And . . . and frightened him.

  I swallowed. It took me two tries, but I managed to whisper, “Aren’t we just Mr. Sunshine today.”

  Uriel blinked. He looked less than certain for a moment. Then he said, “Mr. Sunshine . . . is perfectly acceptable. I suppose.”

  I nodded. “Sorry,” I said. “About your name. I didn’t realize it was so, um . . .”

  “Intimate,” he said quietly. “Sensitive. Names have tremendous power, Dresden. Yet mortals toss them left and right as though they were toys. It’s like watching infants play with hand grenades sometimes.” The ghost of a smile touched his face as he glanced at me. “Some more so than others. And I forgive you, of course.”

  I nodded at him. Then, after a quiet moment, I asked, “What happens now?”

  “That’s up to you,” Uriel said. “You can always work for me. I believe you would find it challenging to do so—and I would have considerable use for someone of your talents.”

  “For how long?” I asked. “I mean . . . for guys like Captain Jack? Is it forever?”

  Uriel smiled. “Collin, like the others, is with me because he is not yet prepared to face what comes next. When he is, he’ll take that step. For now, he is not.”

  “When you say what comes next, what do you mean, exactly?”

  “The part involving words like forever, eternity, and judgment.”

  “Oh,” I said. “What Comes Next.”

  “Exactly.”

  “So I can stay Between,” I said quietly. “Or I can go get on that train.”

  “If you do,” Uriel said, his eyes intent and serious, “then you accept the consequences for all that you have done while alive. When judged, what you have done will be taken into account. Your fate, ultimately, will be determined by your actions in life.”

  “You’re saying that if I don’t work for you, I’ll just have to accept what comes?”

  “I am saying that you cannot escape the consequences of your choices,” he said.

  I frowned at him for a minute. Then I said, “If I get on the train, it might just carry me straight to Hell.”

  “I can’t talk to you about that,” he said. “What comes next is about faith, Harry. Not knowledge.”

  I folded my arms. “What if I dig the ghost routine?”

  “You don’t,” Uriel replied. “But even if you did, I would point out to you that your spiritual essence has been all but disintegrated. You would not last long as a shade, nor would you have the strength to aid and protect your loved ones. Should you lose your sanity, you might even become a danger to them—but if that is your desire, I can facilitate it.”

  I shook my head, trying to think. Then I said, “It . . . depends.”

  “Upon?”

  “My friends,” I said quietly. “My family. I have to know that they’re all right.”

  Uriel watched me for a moment and then opened his mouth to speak, shaking his head a little as he did.

  “Stop,” I said, pointing a finger at him. “Don’t you dare tell me to make this choice in the dark. Captain Jack gave me a half-truth that sent me running around Chicago again. Another angel told me a lie that got me killed. If you really care so much about my free will, you’ll be willing to help me make a free, informed choice, just as if I was a grown-up. So either admit that you’re trying to push me in your own direction or else put your principles where your mouth is and make like the Ghost of Christmas Present.”

  He stared at me for a long moment, his brow furrowed. “From your perspective . . . yes, I suppose it does look that way.” Then he nodded firmly and extended his arm toward me. “Take my hand.”

  I did.

  The white expanse gave way to reality once more. Suddenly, I stood with Uriel inside the Corpsetaker’s hideout, on the stairs where that final confrontation had come. Molly was at the top of the stairs, leaning back against the wall. Her body was twisting and straining, her chest heaving with desperate breaths. Blood ran from both nostrils and had filled the sclera of her eyes, turning them into inhuman-looking blue-and-red stones. She let out little gasps and choked screams, along with whispered snatches of words that didn’t make any sense.

  Uriel did that thing with his hand again, and suddenly I could see Molly even more clearly—and saw that some kind of hideous mass was wound around her, like a python constricting its prey. It consisted of strands of some kind of slimy jelly, purple and black and covered with pulsing pustules that reeked of corruption and decay.

  Corpsetaker.

  Molly’s duel with the Corpsetaker was still under way.

  Butters’s body lay at Molly’s feet, empty of life and movement. And his shade—now I could see that it was bound into near immobility by threads of the Corpsetaker’s dark magic—stood exactly as he had when I last saw him, staring down at his own body in horror. Down here in the electrical-junction room, Murphy and the wolves were bound with threads of the same dark magic as Butters—a sleeping spell that had compelled them all into insensibility.

  Molly whimpered, drawing my gaze back to the top of the stairs as her legs gave way. She slid slowly down the wall, her eyes rolling wildly. Her mouth started moving more surely, her voice becoming stronger. And darker. For about two seconds, one of the Corpsetaker’s hate-filled laughs rolled from Molly’s lips. That hideous, slimy mass began to simply ooze into the young woman’s skin.

  “Do something,” I said to Uriel.

  He shook his head. “I cannot interfere. This battle was Molly’s choice. She knew the risks and chose to hazard them.”

  “She isn’t strong enough,” I snapped. “She can’t take on that thing.”

  Uriel arched an eyebrow. “Were you under the impression that she did not know that from the beginning, Harry? Yet she did it.”

  “Because she feels guilty,” I said. “Because she blames herself for my death. She’s in the same boat I was.”

  “No,” Uriel said. “None of the Fallen twisted her path.”

  “No, that was me,” I said, “but only because one of them got to me.”

  “Nonetheless,” Uriel said, “that choice was yours—and hers.”

  “You’re just going to stand there?” I asked.

  Uriel folded his arms and tapped his chin with one fingertip. “Mmmm. It does seem that perhaps she deserves some form of aid. Perhaps if I’d had the presence of mind to see to it that some sort of agent had been sent to balance the scales, to give her that one tiny bit of encouragement, that one flicker of inspiration that turned the tide . . .” He shook his head sadly. “Things might be different now.”

  And, as if on cue, Mortimer Lindquist, ectomancer, limped out of the lower hallway and into the electrical-junction room, with Sir Stuart’s shade at his right hand.

  Mort took a look around, his dark eyes intent, and then his gaze locked onto Molly.

  “Hey,” he croaked. “You. Arrogant bitch ghost.”

  Molly’s eyes snapped fully open and flicked to Mort. They were filled with more bitter, venomous hate than my apprentice could ever have put into them.

  “I’m not really into this whole hero thing,” Mort said. “Don’t have the temperament for it. Don’t know a lot about the villain side of the equation, either.” He planted his feet, facing the Corpsetaker squarely, his hands clenched into fists at his side. “But it seems to me, you half-wit, that you probably shouldn’t have left a freaking ectomancer a pit full of wraiths to play with.”

  And with a howl, more than a thousand wraiths came boiling around the corner in a cloud of clawing hands, gnashing teeth, and screaming hunger. They rode on a wave of Mort’s power and no longer drifted with lazy, disconnected grace. Now they came forth like rushing storm clouds, like racing wolves, like hungry sharks, a tide of mindless destruction.

  I saw Molly’s eyes widen and the pulsi
ng spiritual mass that was the Corpsetaker began to pull away from the young woman.

  My apprentice didn’t let her.

  Molly let out a wheezing cackle and both hands formed into claws that clutched at the air. I saw the energy of her own magic surround her fingers so that she grasped onto the Corpsetaker’s essence as if it had been a nearly physical thing. The necromancer’s spirit began to ooze through Molly’s grip. The exhausted girl could only slow the Corpsetaker down.

  But it was enough.

  The tide of wraiths slammed into the Corpsetaker like a freight train, their wails blending into a sound that I had heard before, in the train tunnel where Carmichael saved me. The Corpsetaker had begun to resume her usual form the instant she disengaged from Molly, and I could see the sudden shock and horror in her beautiful eyes as that spiritual tide overwhelmed her. I saw her struggle uselessly as the wraith train carried her up the stairs and out into the night. The train swept her straight up into the air—and then reversed itself and slammed her down, into the earth.

  I saw her try to scream.

  But all I heard was the blaring howl of the horn of a southbound train.

  And then she was gone.

  “You’re right,” Uriel said, his tone filled with a chill satisfaction. “Someone needed to do something.” He glanced aside at me, gave me a slight bow of his head, and said, “Well-done.”

  Mort limped up the stairs to check on Molly. “You’re the one who called to me, eh?”

  Molly looked up at him, obviously too exhausted to move more than her head. “Harry . . . Well, it’s sort of complicated to explain what was going on. But he told me you could help.”

  “Guess he was right,” Mort said.

  “Where is he?” Molly asked. “I mean . . . his ghost.”

  Mort glanced around and looked right at me—right through me. He shook his head. “Not here.”

  Molly closed her eyes and began to cry quietly.

  “I got her, boss,” Molly said quietly. “We got her. And I’m still here. Still me. Thank you.”

  “She’s thanking me,” I said quietly. “For that.”