Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

More to the point, Mort was the freaking expert on ghosts. I mean, I knew my way around the block, but Mort had been a specialist. Normally, on purely technical matters regarding spirits and shades, I would give his opinion significant weight, probably a little more than I would my own. Morty had never been a paragon of courage and strength, but he was smart, and clearly tough enough to survive a long career that had been a lot more dangerous than I thought.

Hell. For all I knew, while I had been busy saving Chicago from things no one knew were there, Mort might have been saving me from things I never knew were there. Funny world, isn’t it?

I stopped in my tracks and shook my head as if to clear water from my eyes. “Dresden, have your personal existential crisis later. The bad guys are obviously working hard. Get your ass in gear.”

Good advice, that.

The question was, How?

Normally, I would have tracked Molly down with a fairly simple piece of thaumaturgy I’d done a thousand times. After her unplanned vacation to Arctis Tor, in Faerie, I had always been sure to keep a fairly recent lock of her hair handy. And more recently, I’d found I could get a fix on all the energy patterns she used to make her first few independent magical tools—like the hair, they were something specific and unique to her and her alone. A signature. I could be pretty sure to find her when I needed to do so. Hell, for that matter, I’d spent so much time around her that she had become almost like family. I could generally tell by pure intuition when she was nearby, as long as she wasn’t actively trying to hide herself.

That, of course, had all been when I had magic. Now I didn’t.

Which was, upon thinking about it, probably another bit of evidence in favor of Stuart and Mort’s theory, and against mine. You can’t take magic away from a person. It’s a part of who and what they are. They can abandon it, if they work at it hard enough, but you can’t strip it out of them. If my ghost had truly been me, it would have had power, just as that bastard Leonid Kravos’s ghost had.

Right?

Or . . . maybe not. Maybe I’d been making more assumptions without ever questioning them. I had already assumed that matter was solid when it wasn’t; that I could get cold, which I couldn’t; and that I was still beholden to the laws of gravity, which I wasn’t.

Maybe I’d made the same assumptions about magic. I mean, after all, I had thrown a solid shield spell during the first attack on Mort’s place, when I had been sharing space with the ectomancer. That would seem to show that my talent was still there, still real.

I just had to figure out how to access it.

Memories are power.

I dug into my duster’s pocket and drew out the massive pistol Sir Stuart had given me. Black-powder weaponry isn’t my thing, but I made sure there was nothing in the priming pan before turning it barrel down and shaking it. I had to give it several hard thumps with the heel of my hand to get the ball, wad, and powder to spill out into my palm.

The ball, the bullet, gleamed as if newly molded. Upon closer look, fine swirls on the surface of the metal took on the shapes of a simple, pastoral scene: a colonial-style home in the middle of a little green valley surrounded by apple trees; clean, neat cropland; and a pasture dotted with white sheep. Just looking at it seemed to give the scene life. Wind stirred the crops. Apples stood out like specks of bright green against the darker leaves. Lambs gamboled among adult members of the flock, playing for the pure joy of it. The door to the house opened, and a tall, straightbacked woman with hair blacker than a raven’s wing emerged from the house, trailing a small cloud of children, clearly giving calm instructions.

With the sight, a flood of emotions coursed through me. A fierce and jealous pride of possession—not pride that I owned such a beautiful home, but that the home was beautiful because I owned it, because I had made it so. Mixed with that was an ocean-deep surge of love for the woman and her children, raw happiness at seeing them—and a heavy, entirely pleasurable surge of desire for the woman, whom I had not held in far too long—

I suddenly felt that I had intruded upon something personal and intimate. I closed my eyes and looked away from the scene.

Memories, I realized. These were all things from Sir Stuart’s mortal memories. This memory was what he had cast forth against that wraith the first time I met him. He hadn’t used memories of destruction as his weapon, but those of identity, of the reasons he was willing to fight.

That was why as a ghost he still used that ax, this pistol. Far more modern weapons were available to copy, but his memories were of himself using those weapons, and so they were the source of his power, the embodiment of his will to change what was around him.

They were Sir Stuart’s identity. They were also his magic.

Memories equaled power.

For a moment, I thought it couldn’t be that simple. But a lot of magic is actually disgustingly simple—which is not to be confused with easy.

There was only one way to find out.

The first spell I’d ever done had been during that long-ago class Olympics—but that was spontaneous, accidental magic, hardly worthy of the term. The first conscious spell I’d knowingly worked, fully planned, fully visualized, fully realized, had been calling forth a burst of fire.

Justin DuMorne had shown me how it worked.

I plunged into the memory.

“I don’t understand,” I complained, rubbing at my aching temples. “It didn’t work the first fifty times. It isn’t going to work now.”

“Forty-six times,” Justin corrected me, his voice very precise, like always. He had an accent, but I couldn’t figure out which kind it was. I hadn’t heard one like it on TV. Not that Justin had a TV. I had to sneak out on Friday nights to watch it in the store at the mall, or else face the real risk that I’d miss Knight Rider altogether.

“Harry,” Justin said.

“Okay,” I sighed. “My head hurts.”

“It’s natural. You’re blazing new trails in your mind. Once more, please.”

“Couldn’t I blaze the trails somewhere else?”

Justin looked up at me from where he sat at his desk. We were in his office, which was what he called the spare bedroom in the little house about twenty miles outside Des Moines. He was dressed in black pants and a dark grey shirt, like on most days. His beard was short, precisely trimmed. He had very long, slender fingers, but his hands could make fists that were hard as rocks. He was taller than me, which most grownups were, and he never called me anything mean when he got mad, which most of the foster parents I’d been with did.

If I angered Justin, he just went from saying please to using his fists. He never swung at me while screaming or shook me, which other caretakers had done. When he hit me, it was really quick and precise, and then it was over. Like when Bruce Lee hit a guy. Only Justin never made the silly noises.

I ducked my head, looking away from him, and then stared at the empty fireplace. I was sitting in front of it with my legs crossed. There were logs and tinder ready to go. There was a faint smell of smoke, and a bit of wadded-up newspaper had turned black at one corner, but otherwise there was no evidence of a fire.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Justin turn back to his book. “Once more, if you please.”

I sighed. Then I closed my eyes and started focusing again. You started with steadying your breathing. Then once you were relaxed and ready, you gathered energy. Justin had told me to picture it as a ball of light at the center of my chest, slowly growing brighter and brighter, but that was a load of crap. When the Silver Surfer did it, energy gathered around his hands and his eyes. Green Lantern gathered it around his ring. Iron Fist had glowing fists, which was pretty much as cool as you could get. I guess Iron Man had the glowing thing in the middle of his chest, but he was, like, the only one, and he didn’t really have superpowers anyway.