Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

“She gave Bob to you?”

“She did,” he said. “You being dead and all. She wanted to keep it need-to-know.”

“It doesn’t upset me,” I said, even though it sort of did. “I entrusted those things to her judgment.”

“Oh, hey, great segue. Speaking of judgment, you’d better come with me.”

“I can do that,” I said, and fell into pace beside him. “Where are we going?”

“The Batcave,” he said. “Headquarters.”

“Headquarters of what?” I asked.

He blinked at me. “The Alliance, of course. The Chicago Alliance.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “What Chicago Alliance?”

“The one he organized to help defend the city from the Fomor,” Butters replied.

“He?” I asked. “Fomor? What he? He who?”

“I’m sorry, Harry,” he said. He bit his lip and looked down. “I figured you knew . . . Marcone. Baron John Marcone.”

Ifound Stu’s pistol on the ground where I’d dropped it during the struggle. Then I followed Butters to his car—an old Plymouth Road Runner. It looked almost worse than my old VW Beetle had the last time I’d seen it. Dents and dings covered its all-steel frame, and some of them looked suspiciously like they’d been raked into the metal with a two-pronged claw—but its engine throbbed with impressive, harmonious power. Its license plates read: MEEPMEEP.

“I kinda traded in my old one,” Butters told me as I got in, going straight through the door. I didn’t make any noise about the discomfort. Not in front of Butters. It would totally blow my ghostly cool.

“For another old one,” I said. My voice issued out of the radio he slipped into a clip attached to the car’s sun visor.

“I like steel better than fiberglass,” he said. “The Fomor and the faeries are apparently related. Neither one of them likes the touch of any metal with iron in it.”

Bob’s skull rested in a container that had been custom mounted on the Road Runner’s dash—a wooden frame set on a plate that made the skull wobble back and forth like a bobblehead doll. “Lot of interbreeding there,” Bob said. “Back in the old, old, old days. Before the Sidhe Wars.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “I haven’t heard much about it.”

“Crazy stuff,” Bob said with tremendous enthusiasm. “Even before my time, but I’ve heard all kinds of stories. The Daoine Sidhe, the Tuatha, the Fomor, the Tylwyth Teg, the Shen. Epic alliances, epic betrayals, epic battles, epic weddings, epic sex—”

“Epic sex?” I sputtered. “By what standards, precisely, is sex judged to be epic?”

“And tons and tons of mortal simps like you used as pawns.” Bob sighed happily, ignoring my question. “There are no words. It was like The Lord of the Rings and All My Children made a baby with the Macho Man Randy Savage and a Whac-A-Mole machine.”

Butters sputtered at that image.

But . . . I mean, Hell’s bells. Who wouldn’t?

“Anyway,” he choked out a moment later, “the Fomor have a lot of faerie blood in their makeup. I like having Detroit steel around me when I drive.”

“Murphy said something about the Fomor last night,” I said. “I take it they’ve been moving in on the town?”

His face grew more remote. “Big-time. I’ve been busy.” He exhaled a slow breath. “Um. Look, man. It’s really you?”

“What’s left of me,” I said tiredly. “Yeah.”

He nodded. “Um. There’s a problem with Molly.”

“I saw,” I said.

“You didn’t see,” he said. “I mean, I heard that Murphy told you she was a couple bubbles off plumb last night, but there’s more than that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Seventeen people murdered in the past three months,” he replied in a steady voice.

I didn’t say anything for a couple of blocks. Then I said, “Who?”

“Scum,” he said candidly. “Mostly. A cop who was maybe raping a prostitute. Petty criminals. Muggers. She doesn’t even try to avoid being seen. She’s gone totally Dark Knight. Witnesses left and right have reported a tall woman dressed in layers and layers of ragged, cast-off clothing. Took the papers about two weeks to name her the Rag Lady. People call her various versions, to make fun, to show her they aren’t afraid, but . . .”

“A lot of people get killed in this town,” I said. “Doesn’t mean it’s Molly.”

“Harry . . .” Butters stopped at a light and gave me a direct look. “I’ve examined twelve of the victims. Different manner of death for each of them, but I found them all with a scrap of torn cloth stuffed in their mouths.”

“So?” I demanded.

“I matched the cloth. It’s the same as what was left of the clothes you wore to Chichén Itzá. They had some of it in evidence when they investigated the scene of your . . . your murder. Only someone got in there without being seen by anyone or any camera, and took it right out.”

Memory flashed at me, hard. The silent stone ziggurats in the night. The hiss and rasp of inhuman voices. The stale, reptilian scent of vampires. My faerie godmother (yes, I’m serious. I have one, and she is freaking terrifying) had transformed my clothes into protective armor that had probably saved my life half a dozen times that night without my even being aware of it. When they had turned back into my coat, my shirt, and my jeans, there had been little left of them but tatters and scraps.

Sort of like me.

Someone who had major issues with my death was killing people in my town.

Could it be my apprentice?

She had a thing for me, according to practically every woman I knew. I didn’t have a thing back. Yes, she was gorgeous, intelligent, quickwitted, brave, thoughtful, and competent. But I’d known her when her bra had been a formality, back when I’d begun working with her father, one of the very few men in the world I hold in genuine respect.

There was darkness in Molly. I’d soulgazed her. I’d seen it in more than one of her possible futures. I’d felt it in the black magic she had worked, with the best of intentions, on fragile mortal minds.

But though she’d fought tooth and nail at Chichén Itzá, beside the rest of us . . . she wasn’t a killer. Not Molly.

Was she?

People could be driven to extremes by the right events, the right stakes. I’d bargained away my future and my soul when I had needed to do it to save my daughter.

And I was Molly’s teacher. Her mentor. Her example.

Had she let herself be driven to extremes at my loss, the way I had been to the potential loss of my daughter? Had she turned aside from everything I’d tried to teach her and let herself slide down into the violent exercise of power?

Why shouldn’t she have done so, moron? I heard my own voice say in the dark of my thoughts. You showed her how it worked. She’s always been an able student.

Worse, Molly was a sensitive, a wizard whose supernatural senses were so acute that surges of powerful magic or the emotions that accompanied life-and-death situations were something that caused her psychic and physical pain. It was something I had barely even considered when I dragged her along to Chichén Itzá with me for the largest, most savage, and deadliest brawl I had ever personally participated in.

Had the pain of participating in the battle done something to my apprentice? Had it left her with permanent mental damage, just as the gunshot wound she’d received must have left her a permanent scar? Hell, it didn’t require any supernatural elements at all for war—and that was what Chichén Itzá was, make no mistake—to screw up young soldiers who found themselves struggling to stay alive. Throw in all the mystic menace on top of it, and it started to seem a little bit miraculous that I’d gotten as far as I had while remaining mostly sane.