Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

It was a vivid recollection, silly and a little sad—and it was my first time.

It was a powerful memory.

“Three!” Sir Stuart cried, and leapt.

So did I, my eyes and will locked on the retreating pickup full of gunmen.

There was a twisting, dizzying sensation that reminded me very strongly of a potion Bob had helped me mix up when I’d tangled with the Shadowman. It was that same experience: a feeling of flying apart into zillions of pieces, rushing forward at a speed too great to be measured, only to abruptly coalesce again.

There was a sudden cold wind against my face and I staggered, nearly falling off the roof of the pickup as it continued to slowly accelerate down the street.

“Holy crap!” I said, as a huge smile stretched my face. “That was cool . First Shadowcat, now Nightcrawler!”

I turned to find Sir Stuart standing on the bed of the truck, looking up at me with a disapproving eyebrow lifted. One of the shooters’ backs was in the same space as the shade’s right leg.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” I asked him, nodding to his leg.

“Hmmm?” Sir Stuart said. He glanced down and saw what I was talking about. “Oh. I suppose, yes. I stopped noticing it after seventy or eighty years. Now. If you don’t mind, Dresden, might we proceed?”

“To do what?” I asked.

“To teach you what are obviously badly needed lessons,” Sir Stuart said, “and to stop these pirates.” He spat the last word with a startling amount of venom.

I frowned and eyed the gunmen, who were all reloading, having emptied their weapons in sheer, nervous excitement. They weren’t particularly good at reloading, either.

“Hell, one man with a handgun could take them all right now,” I said. “Too bad neither of us has one.”

“We cannot touch flesh,” Sir Stuart said. “And while it is possible for a shade to, for example, move an object, it is impractical. With practice, you could push a penny across a table over the course of a couple of minutes.”

“Too bad neither of us has a penny,” I said.

He ignored me entirely. “That’s because we can put forth only minuscule physical force. You couldn’t lift the coin into the air against the pull of gravity.”

I frowned. This sounded a lot like a basic lesson most young wizards received. Most of the time, when you wanted to move something around, you didn’t have the kind of energy you needed stored inside you. That didn’t mean you couldn’t move it, though. It just meant you had to get the energy to do so from another source. “But . . . you can co-opt energy from elsewhere?”

The big man pointed an index finger at me, a smile stretching his mouth. “Excellent. We cannot interact with something being moved by a living creature. We can’t even touch an object that is being carried too closely to a living body. But . . .” He glanced up at me, inviting me to finish the thought.

I blinked twice, mind racing, and said, “Machines. We can work with machines.”

Sir Stuart nodded. “As long as they are in motion. And there is an enormous amount of energy and motion passing through a nonliving, mechanical engine.”

Without another word, he paced forward, through the back wall of the cab, sat on the passenger’s seat, and leaned to his left. I couldn’t see what he was doing, so I dropped to all fours, took a deep breath, and stuck my face through the roof of the cab. It tingled and hurt, but I had literally spent a lifetime learning to cope with pain. I pushed it to the back of my mind, gritted my teeth, and watched.

Sir Stuart had pushed his hand into the steering wheel of the truck. He pushed the other forward, leaning partly through the dashboard to do it, and waited patiently, watching the road ahead of us. It didn’t take long for the truck to hit a hummock in the ice coating the streets, and the truck bounced, shocks squealing. Just as it did, the shade’s eyes fluttered closed, and he gave a peculiar jerking twist of his arm.

The truck’s air bag exploded out of the steering wheel.

It struck the driver, smacking him back into the driver’s seat, and the man panicked. His arms tightened in surprise as he was hit, and he turned the steering wheel several degrees to one side. Then he broke the cardinal rule of driving on ice and stomped his foot on the brake.

The slight turn and the sudden braking motion put the car into a slide. The driver was trying to push the air bag out of his face, and he didn’t compensate and turn into the slide. The slide became a spin.

Sir Stuart watched in satisfaction, looked up at me, and said, “Not much different from spooking a horse, really.”

The gunmen in the back were screaming in confusion as the car spun through three ponderous circles, somehow putting forth the illusion of grace. They bounced off the snow piled high on one side of the street, and then slid into an intersection, up over a sidewalk, and through the front windows of a small grocery store. The sounds of shattering glass and brick, screaming metal crumpling through its zones, and cracking snow and ice were shockingly loud.

The steadily ringing bell of the store’s security alarm sounded like my old Mickey Mouse alarm clock, in comparison.

The gunmen sat there doing nothing for a moment, clearly stunned, but then they began cursing and scrambling to get gone before the cops showed up.

Sir Stuart vanished and reappeared across the street. I made the same effort of will I had while jumping to the truck, reaching back for that memory once more. Again I flew apart and came back together, reappearing standing next to Sir Stuart, facing a brick wall.

“Next time turn around on the way,” he advised.

I snorted and looked back at the gunmen. “What about them?”

“What about them?”

“Can’t we . . . I don’t know, possess them and make them bang their heads into a wall or something?”

Sir Stuart barked out a harsh laugh. “We cannot enter unless the mortal is willing. That is the purview of demons, not shades.”

I scowled. “So . . . what? We stand here and watch them walk?”

He shrugged. “I’m not willing to leave Mortimer alone for so much time. You may also wish to consider, Dresden, that dawn is not far away. It will destroy you if you are not within a sanctum such as Mortimer’s residence.”

I frowned, looking up at the sky. City light had wiped away all but the brightest stars, but the sky to the east held only a hint of blue, low on the horizon. Dawn was hard on spirits and shades and magical spells alike. Not because one is inherently good and one inherently evil, but because dawn is a time of new beginnings, and the light of a new day tends to sweep away the supernatural litter from the day before. For spirit beings to survive sunrise, they had to be in a protected place—a sanctum. My trusty lab assistant, Bob, had a sanctum; in his case, a specially enchanted skull designed to protect him from dawn and daylight and to provide a home. A plain old threshold wouldn’t get it done, although my old apartment had probably qualified as a sanctum, given how many layers and layers of defense I’d put up around it.

But I didn’t have either of those things anymore.

“Go back to Mort,” I said. “It was fun playing Maximum Overdrive with these chowderheads, but that isn’t going to protect the people we care about. I’m going to follow the shooters back to their place and see what I can find out about them.”

Sir Stuart frowned at me and said, “The dawn is not something to take chances with, man. I strongly advise against your doing so.”

“So noted,” I said, “but the only real weapon I have against them is knowledge. Someone needs to get it, and I’m the only one who isn’t susceptible to lead poisoning. I’m the logical choice.”