Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

“Marcone. They aren’t cheap.”

“Him again.”

Butters shrugged. “I don’t like the guy, either, Harry. But he’s smart enough to realize that if the Fomor take control of the streets, they’re going to get rid of him as a matter of course.”

“Too simple,” I said. “Too easy. He’s running some kind of game on you.”

We went through another door and then up some stairs, which opened onto the second floor.

The place was one enormous chamber almost entirely free of interior walls. There was a small gym, complete with shower rooms and a boxing ring. Inside the ring, Murphy, wearing her street clothes, stood facing a man who had inherited a portion of his DNA from a rhinoceros—and not many generations ago. He was huge and heavily muscled, his dark hair and beard in long braids. He wore an old pair of jeans and nothing else. His upper body was coated with more dark hair.

(Not like a werewolf or circus freak or anything. Just at the top end of the hirsute bell curve. A real hair ball.)

Butters froze in place, waiting.

Murphy stared steadily at the big man for several moments, her body relaxed, her eyes never blinking. He returned a blank stare of his own. Then they both moved.

I couldn’t tell who went first, but Murphy’s fist streaked toward the big guy’s groin. He twisted his hip, deflecting the blow, and when he returned it to balance, his leg scythed up in an arc that clipped the tip of Murphy’s chin. She spun away and went down.

Hair Ball did not hesitate for so much as a second. He moved toward her, fast for someone so large, and stomped his heel down toward her head.

Murphy rolled and dodged the blow, but he followed up and she had to keep rolling to stay ahead of his sledgehammer heels. She hit the edge of the boxing ring, then abruptly reversed her roll, moving toward him instead of away.

She slipped the next stomp, scissored his knee with her legs, twisted her whole body, and brought him down. Hair Ball fell like a tree, huge and slow. The boxing ring ropes shook when he landed.

Murphy came up onto all fours, scrambled a bit to one side, and then swept her foot at Hair Ball’s head. He dodged, but her kick shifted direction, her leg moving up, then straight down, bringing her heel down like a hatchet onto the hand Hair Ball was using to support his weight. Bones snapped.

Hair Ball howled, scrambled to his feet, and started swinging wildly at her. Murphy dodged and slipped one blow after another, and at one point abruptly turned and drove her heel into Hair Ball’s solar plexus.

The blow rocked him back a step, but Murphy followed it too closely, too recklessly. Hair Ball recovered from the kick almost instantly, slapped a blow aside, and seized her arm. He turned and flung her, one-handed, over the top rope of the ring and into the nearest wall. She hit it with a yell and bounced off onto the floor.

“Dead,” I snarled, my fists clenched. I started forward and took three or four whole steps before I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to hit the guy. Or blow him up. Or send him on a vacation to another reality. Hell, I couldn’t even sneak up on him and shout, “Boo!”

“Harry, wait,” Butters hissed. “It’s okay.”

Murphy picked herself up from the floor, moving slowly. As she did, the giant Hair Ball came over to the nearest side of the ring, holding his right hand in his left. Murphy brushed some dust from her clothing and turned to face him. Her blue eyes were steady and cold, her mouth set in a small smile. Her teeth were white, and rich red blood quivered on her lower lip where the impact had split it open. She wiped the blood off on her sleeve without looking away from Hair Ball. “Three?” she asked.

“Broke all four,” he said, moving his right hand a little by way of demonstration. “Took out my best sword hand. Good. If you hadn’t gotten greedy for the kill, maybe you’d have taken this round.”

Murphy snorted. “You’ve been drinking bad mead, Skaldi Skjeldson.”

That made Hair Ball smile. “Sword tomorrow?”

Murphy nodded. The two of them stared at each other for a moment, as if each expected the other to suddenly charge the second the other turned his back. Then, with no detectable signal passing between them, they simultaneously nodded again and turned away from each other, relaxing.

“Butters,” rumbled Skaldi Hair Ball. If he really had broken fingers, it didn’t look like they were bothering him much. “When are you going to get in this ring and train like a man?”

“About five minutes after I get a functional lightsaber,” Butters replied easily, much to Hair Ball’s amusement. Then the little medical examiner nodded to Murphy and said, “Can we talk in the conference room?”

“Sure,” she said. She walked by the ring and bumped (left) fists with Skaldi. Then she led Butters and me out of the gym, down another hallway, and into a long, narrow conference room. She shut the door behind us, and Butters popped Bob’s flashlight onto the table. His eyelights winked on again, and I saw Murphy react visibly when that light revealed my presence.

She stiffened a little, looking at me, and her eyes showed a sudden weariness and pain. She took a deep breath through her nose and closed her eyes for a second. Then she took off her jacket, moving gingerly, and said, “Hi, Harry.”

Butters put the radio on the table and I said, “Hi, Murph.”

She was wearing thin, light padding under the jacket—like the stuff I’d seen on stuntmen on a case I’d done not long after I’d gone into business. So her full-contact practice hadn’t been as vicious as it had looked. She’d be covered in bruises, but the impact with the wall hadn’t actually been likely to break her back. Her skull, maybe, but not her back.

“You okay?”

She rolled one shoulder with a grimace of discomfort. “I will be.”

“Big guy like that going to town on you,” I growled. “Someone needs to push his face in.”

Her eyes glittered as she gave me a sharp look. “Dresden . . . when, exactly, am I going to fight someone my size and strength?”

“Um.”

“If you want to wrestle hostile mooses—”

“Moose,” Butters corrected absently. “Singular and plural, same word.”

“Gorillas,” Murphy continued, hardly breaking stride, “then the best way to train for it is by wrestling slightly less hostile gorillas. Skaldi’s two hundred pounds heavier than me, almost two feet taller, and he has going on two millennium—”

“Millennia,” Butters said. “ Millennium is the singular.”

Murphy pushed a breath out through her nose and said, “Millennia of experience in breaking the backs of annoying little doctors with annoying little grammar fetishes.”

Butters grinned.

“I’m not going to beat him, Harry. Ever. That isn’t the point.” She looked away and her voice became quiet. “The point is that the world isn’t getting any kinder. A girl’s got to take care of herself.”

The expression on her face? It hurt. Hearing the words that went with it felt like a knife peeling back layers of skin. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t let it show. Murphy would have been offended at the notion that she needed my protection, and if she thought I felt guilty for not being there to protect her, to help her, she’d be downright angry.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t think Murphy was a princess in a tower. But at the end of the day, she was just one person, standing in defiance of powers that would regard her with the same indifference as might an oncoming tsunami, volcanic eruption, or earthquake. Life is precious, fragile, fleeting—and Murphy’s life was one of my favorites.

“Okay, Harry,” Murphy said. “Where do we get started?”