Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

“Technically,” I said.

He swallowed. “You work for the Rag Lady.”

Hell’s bells. The kid was terrified of Molly. And I’d known plenty of kids like Fitz when I was growing up in the system. I met them in foster homes, in orphanages, in schools and summer camps. Tough kids, survivors, people who knew that no one was looking out for them except themselves. Not everyone had the same experience in the system, but portions of it were positively Darwinian. It created some hard cases. Fitz was one of them.

People like that aren’t stupid, but they don’t scare easily, either.

Fitz was terrified of Molly.

My stomach quivered in an unpleasant manner.

“No,” I told him. “I don’t work for her. I’m not a servitor.”

He frowned. “Then . . . you work for the ex-cop bi . . . uh, lady?”

“Kid,” I said, “you have no idea who you’re screwing around with. You pointed weapons at the wrong people. I know where you live now. They will, too.”

He went white. “No,” he said. “Look . . . you don’t know what it’s like here. Zero and the others, they can’t help it. He doesn’t let them do anything but what he wants.”

“Baldy, you mean?” I asked.

Fitz let out a strained, half-hysterical bark of laughter. “He calls himself Aristedes. He’s got power.”

“Power to push a bunch of kids around?”

“You don’t know,” Fitz said, speaking quietly. “He tells you to do something and . . . and you do it. It never even occurs to you to do anything else. And . . . and he moves so fast. I’m not . . . I think he might not even be human.”

“He’s human,” I said. “He’s just another asshole.”

A faint, weary spark of humor showed in Fitz’s face. Then he said, “If that’s true, then how does he do it?”

“He’s a sorcerer,” I said. “Middleweight talent with a cult to make him feel bigger. He’s got some form of kinetomancy I’m not familiar with, to move that fast. And some really minor mind mojo, if he’s got to pick kids to do his dirty work for him.”

“You make him sound like a small-time crook . . . like a car thief or something.”

“In the greater scheme, yeah,” I said. “He’s a petty crook. He’s Fagin.”

Fitz frowned. “From . . . from that Dickens book? Uh . . . Oliver Twist ?”

I lifted my eyebrows. The kid had read. Serious readers weren’t common in the system. Those who did read mostly seemed to focus on, you know, kids’ books. Not many of them rolled around to Dickens unless they got unlucky in high school English. I would have been willing to bet that Fitz hadn’t made it past his freshman year of high school, at the very most.

He was someone who thought for himself, and he had at least a little bit of magical talent. That probably explained why he’d been put in charge of the other boys. Aside from his evident good sense, his company notwithstanding, the kid had some innate magical talent of his own. Fitz had probably been slowly learning to shake off whatever magic it was that Baldy—Aristedes—used on him. The bad guy operated in a cultleader mind-set. Anyone who wasn’t a slavish follower would be utilized as a handy lieutenant, until such time as they could be disposed of productively—or at least quietly.

I didn’t like Fitz’s chances at all.

“Something like that,” I said.

Fitz leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. “I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” he said. “I don’t even know any of those people. But he ordered it. And they were all going to do it. And I couldn’t let them just . . . just turn into murderers. They’re the only . . . They’re . . .”

“They’re yours,” I said quietly. “You look out for them.”

“Someone has to,” Fitz said. “Streets weren’t ever easy. About six months ago, though . . . they got hard. Real hard. Things came out. You could see them at night sometimes—shapes. Shadows.” He started shivering, and his voice became a whisper. “They’d take people. People who didn’t have someone to protect them would just vanish. So . . .”

“Baldy,” I said quietly.

“He killed one of them,” Fitz whispered. “Right in front of me. I saw it. It looked human, but when he was done with it . . . It just melted , man.” He shook his head. “Maybe I am crazy. God, it would almost be a relief.”

“You aren’t crazy,” I said. “But you’re in a bad place.”

The light went completely out of the kid’s eyes. “What else is new?”

“Oy,” I muttered. “Like I didn’t have enough to do already.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Look, kid. Go back to the guns at eleven tonight. That street will have gotten quieter by then. I’ll meet you.”

His dull eyes never flickered. “Why?”

“Because I’m going to help you.”

“Crazy, imaginary, invisible-voice hallucination guy,” Fitz said. “He’s going to help me. Yeah, I’ve lost it.”

There was the sudden, burring, metallic buzz of a bell, much like you’d hear in a high school or university hallway. It echoed through the entire building.

“Time for class?” I asked.

“No. Aristedes had us set it up on a timer. Says he needed the warning for his work. It goes off about five minutes before sunrise.”

I felt my back stiffen. “Five minutes?”

Fitz shrugged. “Or seven. Or two. It’s in there somewhere.”

“Hell’s bells,” I said, turning it into a swearword. “Stu was right. Time does get away from you. Be at the guns at eleven, Fitz.”

He grunted and said, in a tired monotone, “Sure, Harvey. Whatever.”

Old books and old movies. I had to help this kid.

I turned away from him and plunged through several walls and out the side of the building, clenching my teeth over snarls of discomfort. The sky had grown almost fully light. Red was swiftly brightening to orange on the eastern horizon out over Lake Michigan. Once yellow got here, I was history.

Five minutes. Or seven. Or two. That was how long I had to find a safe spot. I consulted my mental map of Chicago, looking for the nearest probable shelter, and found the only spot I thought I could get to in a couple of minutes, Nightcrawler impersonation and all.

Maybe I could get there. And maybe it would protect me from the sunrise.

I gritted my teeth, consulted the images in my memory, and, metaphorically speaking, ran for it.

I just had to hope that it wasn’t already too late.

One of the things a lot of people don’t understand about magic is that the rules of how it works aren’t hard-and-fast; they’re fluid, changing with time, with the seasons, with location, and with the intent of a practitioner. Magic isn’t alive in the sense of a corporeal, sentient being, but it does have a kind of anima all its own. It grows, swells, wanes, and changes.

Some facets of magic are relatively steady, like the way a person with a strong magical talent fouls up technology—but even that relative constant is one that has been slowly changing over the centuries. Three hundred years ago, magical talents screwed up other things—like causing candle flames to burn in strange colors and milk to instantly sour (which had to be hell on any wizard who wanted to bake anything). A couple of hundred years before that, exposure to magic often had odd effects on a person’s skin, creating the famous blemishes that had become known as the devil’s mark.

Centuries from now, who knows? Maybe magic will have the side effect of making you really good-looking and popular with the opposite sex—but I’m not holding my breath.

I mean, you know.

I wouldn’t be. If I still had any.