Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

Molly slammed the Corpsetaker against the wall so hard that stolen teeth slammed together. Then she seized Butters’s freaking face in a clawlike hand and thrust her head close, locking eyes with the Corpsetaker.

I wanted to scream a negation, but nothing came out. I frantically tried to move faster. If I succeeded, it didn’t show.

“You want to play head games?” Molly snarled, her blue eyes blazing. “Let’s go.”

The Corpsetaker’s face contorted into an expression somewhere between murderous rage and that of an orgasm, and she opened her stolen eyes wide.

Molly and the dark wizard went into a soulgaze, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it—except keep trying to get closer.

I could feel power flickering between them, though, like bursts of heat coming out of a furnace, as I got glacially nearer. It was an entirely invisible struggle, a simultaneous and mutual siege of the personality. Mind magic is dangerous, slippery stuff, and doing combat with another mind is all about imagination, focus, and sheer willpower. Right now, Molly was thrusting an array of images and ideas at the Corpsetaker, trying to force the other to pay attention to them. Some of the thoughts would be there to undermine defenses, others to assault them, and still others trying to slip past unnoticed to wreak havoc from within. Some of the thoughts would be simple things—whispered doubts meant to shake the other’s confidence, for example. Others would be far more complex constructions, idea demons imagined ahead of time, prepared for such an occasion and unleashed upon the thoughts and memories of the foe.

The White Council hated mind magic, generally speaking. If you beat someone’s defenses, you could do a lot of things to them, and precious few of them were good. Events, however, had forced them to acknowledge the necessity of giving all of its members lessons in psychic self-defense that were more comprehensive than the simple wall technique that I’d been briefly introduced to. A couple of old-timers who knew how to play the game had begun dispensing the basics to everyone interested in learning.

As it turned out, I had a natural fortress of personality, which explained a lot—like how hard it had always been for faerie glamour to trick me for long, and why I’d been able to grind through several forms of mental assault over the years. If someone came in after me, they had a big badass castle to contend with. They could pound on it all day, as such things were measured, without breaking the defenses, and I’d been told that it would take an extended campaign to conquer my head entirely—like any decent castle, there were multiple lines and structures where new defenses could take hold. But I didn’t have much of a forward game. For me, the best offense had to be an obstinate defense.

Molly, on the other hand . . . well. Molly was sort of scary.

Her castle wasn’t huge and imposing—the damned thing was invisible. Made of mirrors, covered in fog, wrapped in darkness, and generally hard even to pin down, much less besiege; anyone who went into her head had better bring a GPS, a seeing-eye dog, and a backup set of eyeballs. Worse, her offense was like dealing with a Mongolian horde. She’d send in waves and waves of every kind of mental construction imaginable, and while you were busy looking at those, ninja thoughts would be sneaking through your subconscious, planting the psychological equivalent of explosives. We’d practiced against each other a lot—immovable object versus irresistible force. It generally ended in a draw, when Molly had to quit and nurse a headache, at which point I would join her in scarfing down aspirin. A couple of times, my thuggish constructions had stumbled over her defenses and started breaking mirrors. A couple of times, her horde had gotten lucky or particularly sneaky. We’d had the same thought-image set up to signal victory—Vader swooping down in his TIE fighter, smugly stating, “I have you now.” Once that got through, the game was over.

But outside of practice, that thought could just as easily be something more like, “Put your gun into your mouth and pull the trigger.” We both knew that. We both worked hard to improve as a result. It was a part of the training I’d taken every bit as seriously as teaching her theory or enchantments or exorcism, or any of a hundred other areas we’d covered over the past few years.

But we’d never done it for blood.

The Corpsetaker moved Butters’s hands up to gently frame Molly’s cheeks and said, “My, my, my. Training standards have improved.”

Molly slammed Corpsetaker’s head back against the wall with a short, harsh motion, and said, “Stop squirming and fight.”

Corpsetaker bared Butters’s teeth in a slow grin, and suddenly surged forward, slamming Molly’s back against the opposite wall while simultaneously moving up a stair, so that their eyes were on the same level. “Slippery little girl. But I was crushing minds like yours centuries before your great-grandfather’s grandfather left the Old Country.”

Molly suddenly let out a gasp, and her face twisted in pain.

“They never have the stomach to hurt their darling little apprentices,” Corpsetaker crooned. “That’s called pain. Let me give you a lesson.”

“Lady,” Molly panted, “did you pick the wrong part of my life in which to mess with me.” She took a deep breath and spoke in a ringing, furious voice. “Now get the fuck out of my friend. Ideru! ”

I felt the surge of her will as she spoke the word, and suddenly reality seemed to condense around my apprentice. There was a terrible, terrible force that ripped forth from her, pulling hungrily at everything around it. I’d felt something similar once, when a nascent White Court vampire had unintentionally begun to feed on me—an energy that spiraled and swirled and pulled at the roots of my senses. But that was only one facet of the gravity that Molly exuded with the spell.

Corpsetaker’s eyes widened in surprise and sudden strain. Then she snarled, “Have it your way. The little doctor was my second choice, in any case.”

And then I saw Corpsetaker’s dark, mad soul flow into my apprentice on the tidal pull of the beckoning she’d performed.

The expression of Butters’s face went empty and he collapsed, utterly without movement of any kind. Three feet away, his shade’s helpless, confused gaze locked onto his fallen physical form, and his eyes went wide with terror.

Molly screamed in sudden shock—and fear. In that instant, I saw in her eyes the reflection of her terror, the panic of someone who has come loaded for bear and found herself face-to-face with a freaking dinosaur instead.

My drifting, dream-slow advance had finally gotten me close enough. With sluggish and agonizing grace, I stretched out one hand . . .

. . . and caught the Corpsetaker’s ankle as she slithered into my apprentice.

I settled my grip grimly and felt myself pulled forward, into the havoc of the war for Molly’s body, mind, and soul.

Ilanded in the middle of a war.

There was a ruined city all around me. The sky above boiled with storm clouds, moving and roiling too quickly to be real, filled with contrasting colors of lightning. Rain hammered down. I heard screams and shouted imprecations all around me, overlapping one another, coming from thousands of sources, blending into a riotous roar—and every single voice was either Molly’s or the Corpsetaker’s.

As I watched, some great beast somewhere between a serpent and a whale smashed its way through a brick building—a fortress, I realized—maybe fifty yards away, thrashing about as it fell and grinding it to powder. A small trio of dots of bright red light appeared on the vast thing’s rubble-dusted flanks, just like the targeting of the Predator’s shoulder cannon in the movies of the same name, and then multiple streaks of blue-white light flashed in from somewhere and blew a series of holes the size of train tunnels right through the creature. Around me, I saw groups of soldiers, many of them in sinister black uniforms, others looking like idealized versions of United States infantry, laying into one another with weapons of every sort imaginable, from swords to rocket launchers.