Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

I didn’t want to admit it or think about it, but I couldn’t deny that it was possible that my apprentice hadn’t been as lucky as I had.

“Hey,” Butters said quietly. “Harry? You all right?”

“That’s . . . kinda subjective, all things considered,” I answered.

He nodded. “No one wanted to be the one to tell you the details. But Murphy’s pretty sure. She says that if she was still working as a cop, she’d be convinced and digging as hard as she could to turn up enough evidence to let her put the perp away.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I get what she means by that.” I swallowed. “Why hasn’t she?”

“We need Molly,” Butters said. “She’s made the difference between happily ever after and everyone dying in two raids against the Fomor.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Okay. It’s . . . something I’ll start processing. But I’m not saying that I believe it. Not until I talk to her about it. See her reaction with my own eyes.”

“Right,” Butters said, his voice gentle.

I eyed him. “Murphy wouldn’t want you telling me this.”

He shrugged. “Murphy’s not full all the way to the brim herself some days. What she’s been doing . . . It’s been hard on her. She’s gotten more and more guarded.”

“I can imagine.”

Butters nodded. “But . . . I’ve always been kind of a trust-my-instincts guy. And I think you need to know this stuff.”

“Thanks,” I said. “We’ve got some other problems, too.”

His tired, worried face lifted into a sudden grin. “Of course we do. Harry Dresden is in town. What’s that?”

I put Sir Stuart’s pistol into the voluminous pocket of my duster and said, “A cannon. Someone gave it to me.”

“Huh.” His voice turned casual. “Could something like that hurt me?”

I grinned and shook my head. “Nah. Ghost-on-ghost action only. Assuming I’m able to make it work in the first place.”

The snow had stopped falling, and Butters turned off his windshield wipers. “What’s it like?”

“What is what like?”

“Being . . . you know.”

“Dead?”

He shrugged a shoulder, betraying his discomfort. “A ghost.”

I thought about my answer for a moment. “Everything in my body that used to hurt all the time got better. I don’t feel hungry or thirsty. Other than that, it feels a lot like being alive, except . . . my magic is gone. And, you know, hardly anyone can see me or hear me.”

“So . . . so the world is the same?” he asked.

I shivered. “No. It’s chock-full of all sorts of weird stuff. You wouldn’t believe how many ghosts are running around this place.”

Even as I spoke, I turned my head to watch two wraiths glide down the sidewalk as the car passed them. I frowned. “Including one of you, Bob.”

Bob the Skull snorted. “I’m not mortal. I don’t have a soul. The only thing waiting for me when I cease to be is entropy. I can’t leave a ghost.”

“Then how come I saw a floating skull with blue eyelights helping attack Mort Lindquist’s place last night?”

The skull just stared for a moment. Then he suggested lamely, “You were high?”

I snorted. “Can’t be many things like that running around,” I said. “What do you know?”

“I have to think about this,” Bob said in a rushed tone, and his orange eyelights winked out.

Butters and I both stared at the skull.

“Huh,” Butters said. “I’ve never seen anyone make him shut up before.”

I grunted. Then I said quietly, “Scared the hell out of me, seeing that. Thought something had happened to him.”

“He’s fine,” Butters said. “Best roommate I ever had.”

“I’m glad you’re taking care of him,” I said. “He wouldn’t do well alone.”

“It’s not a big deal, right?”

“What isn’t a big deal?”

“If there’s an Evil Bob out there,” he said. “I mean . . . it’ll just be another nerd like this one, right? Only with a black hat?”

The orange eyelights winked back on, and Bob said, “Hey!”

“Butters . . . Bob is spooky strong,” I said quietly. “Knowledge is power, man. Bob has a lot of it. When I accidentally flipped his switch to black hat a few years ago, he nearly killed me in the first sixty seconds.”

Butters blinked several times. He tried to talk for a few seconds, swallowed, and then said in a small voice, “Oh.” He eyed Bob sideways.

“I don’t like to make a big thing of it, sahib,” Bob said easily. “Not really my bag to do that kind of thing anyway.”

I nodded. “He was created to be an assistant and counselor,” I said. “It’s unprofessional to treat him as anything else.”

“Which sahib doesn’t,” Bob noted. “Due to complete ignorance, but he doesn’t.”

“Oh,” Butters said again. Then he asked, “How do I . . . make sure not to set him on black hat?”

“You can’t,” Bob said. “Harry ordered me to forget that part of me and never to bring it out again. So I lopped it off.”

It was my turn to blink. “You what ?”

“Hey,” Bob said, “you told me never to bring it out again. You said never . As long as I was with you, that wouldn’t be an issue—but the next guy could order me to do it and it would still happen. So I made sure it couldn’t happen again. No big whoop, Dresden. Oy, but you are such a little girl sometimes.”

I blinked several more times. “Oy?”

“My mother calls me twice a week,” Butters explained. “He listens in.”

“She’s right, you know, sahib,” Bob said brightly. “If you’d just do something with your hair and wear nicer clothes, you’d find a woman. You’re a doctor, after all. What woman doesn’t want to marry a doctor?”

“Did he just get a little Yiddish accent?” I asked Butters.

“I get it twice a week already, Bob,” Butters growled. “I don’t need it from you, too.”

“Well, you need it from somewhere,” Bob said. “I mean, look at your hair.”

Butters ground his teeth.

“Anyway, Harry,” Bob began.

“I know,” I said. “The thing I saw with the Grey Ghost must be the piece that you cut off.”

“Right,” he said. “Got it in one.”

“Your offspring, one might say.”

The skull shuddered, which added a lot of motion to the bobblehead thing. “If one was coming from a dementedly limited mortal viewpoint, I guess.”

“So it’s a part of you, but not all of you. It’s less powerful.”

Bob’s eyelights narrowed in thought. “Maybe, but . . . the whole of any given being is not always equal to the sum of its parts. Case in point: you. You aren’t working with a lot of horsepower in the brains department, yet you manage to get to the bottom of things sooner than most.”

I gave the skull a flat look. “Is it stronger than you or not?”

“I don’t know,” Bob said. “I don’t know what it knows. I don’t know what it can do. That was sort of the whole point in amputating it. There’s a big hole where it used to be.”

I grunted. “How big?”

Bob rolled his eyes. “Do you want me to tell you in archaic measurements or metric?”

“Ballpark it.”

“Um. A hundred years’ worth of knowledge, maybe?”

“Damn,” I said quietly. I knew that Bob had once been owned by a necromancer named Kemmler. Kemmler had fought the entire White Council in an all-out war. Twice. They killed him seven times over the course of both wars, but it didn’t take until number seven. Generally remembered as the most powerful renegade wizard of the second millennium, Kemmler had at some point acquired a skull inhabited by a spirit of intellect, which had served as his assistant.

Eventually, when Kemmler was finally thrown down, the skull had been smuggled away from the scene by a Warden named Justin DuMorne—the same Justin who had adopted me and trained me to grow up into a monster, and who had eventually decided I wasn’t tractable enough and attempted to kill me. It didn’t go as he planned. I killed him and burned down his house around his smoldering corpse instead. And I’d taken the same skull, hidden it away from the Wardens and company, and named it Bob.