Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

So instead of tracking Molly with physical links, I tried using memories of her in their place. It worked—sort of. The first tracking spell led me to the hotel that had once hosted a horror convention known as SplatterCon! It was closed now, and deserted. I guess maybe all the deaths at SplatterCon! had taken a toll on the hotel in the civil-court cases that followed the phobophage attacks. I took a quick spin through the place, hardly even flinching before I stomped through one wall after another. Except for a few transients who had broken into the building and were squatting there, I found nothing.

I went back over my work. The memory I’d used was one that had stuck in my head for some reason, of Molly here in this building. That must have thrown off the spell. It had homed in on this place because it had been part of the memory I used to create the link.

I tried again, this time omitting the background and picturing only Molly against an empty field of black. This second attempt took me to a police station from which I had once posted bail for Molly’s boyfriend. I figured I’d bungled the spell somehow, but took a quick look around anyway, just in case. No Molly.

“Okay, smart guy,” I said to myself. “So what if the memory-image you’re using is too old? You’re tracking her memory-self to a memorylocation. Which means you have to think of her as she is now to find where she is now. Right?

“Theoretically,” I said to myself.

“Right. So test the theory.”

Well, obviously. Although discussing a problem with yourself is almost never a good way to secure a divergent viewpoint.

“In fact, talking to yourself is often considered a sign of impending insanity,” I noted aloud.

Which hardly seemed encouraging.

I shook off the unsettling thought and worked the tracking spell again. This time, instead of using one of my earlier memories of Molly, I used my most recent one. I pictured her in her cast-off clothing and rags, as she’d been at Murphy’s place.

Forming a memory into an image that would support the energy required for a spell isn’t as simple as closing your eyes and daydreaming. You have to produce it in exact, even fanatical, detail, until it is as real in your mind as any actual object. It takes a lot of practice and energy to do that—and it is why people use props when they set out to do magic. A prop can be used as an anchor, saving the spellcaster the effort of creating not just one, but multiple, mental constructs, and supporting them all in a state of perfect focus and concentration.

I had learned how to do magic the hard way first—all of it in my head. Only after I’d proved I could do it without the aid of props did Justin tell me that it was even possible to use them. Over the years, I’d practiced fairly complex thaumaturgic spells without props maybe once a season, keeping my concentration and imagination sharp. It was a damned good thing I had. Working magic as a ghost was all about doing it au naturel.

I reached into my memory to produce the construct I’d need to stand in for Molly in the tracking spell. At the time, I’d been handed a lot to process, and I hadn’t really taken stock of exactly what kind of shape Molly was in. I’d seen that she was under strain, but upon closely reviewing the memory, I was somewhat shocked at how gaunt and weary she looked. Molly had always been the sort of young person who almost glowed with good health. After six months on her own, she looked like an escapee from a gulag: scrawny, tough, and beaten down, if not broken.

I added more than that to the image. I imagined her cheery goodwill, the self-loathing she still sometimes felt for the pain she’d caused her friends in the days before I agreed to teach her. I thought of her precise, orderly approach to her studies, so much different from my own, her diligence, and the occasional arrogance that pretty much every young wizard has until they’ve walked into enough walls to know better. I thought of the most powerful force in her life, a deep and abiding love for her family, and added in the desolation she must be feeling to be separated from them. Eager, beautiful, dangerous Molly.

I held that image of my apprentice in mind, drew together my will, and tapped into the recollection of one of my more memorable tracking spells, all at the same time. I established the pattern of the modified version of the spell I’d had to cobble together, walked, chewed bubble gum, and released the spell with a murmured word.

The power surged out through me, and a precise, powerful force spun me into a pirouette. I extended my left arm, index finger pointing, and felt a sharp tug against it each time it passed an easterly point of the compass. Within a couple of seconds I stopped spinning, rotated a little past the point, and then settled back slightly in the opposite direction. My index finger pointed straight at the heart of the city.

“Crombie,” I said, “eat your heart out.”

I followed the spell to Molly.

I pulled my vanishing act and went zipping downtown a few hundred yards at a time. I paused to check the spell twice more and correct my course, though by the third check, I was starting to feel like a human weather vane. I had to stop more frequently as I got closer to make sure I was moving in the right direction, and the trail took me down into the great towers within the Loop, where the buildings rose high enough to form what felt like the walls of a deep ravine, a man-made canyon of glass, steel, and stone.

I wasn’t terribly surprised when the spell led me to the lower streets. Some of the streets downtown have two or even three levels. One is up on the surface, with the others stacked below it. A lot of the buildings have upper and lower entrances and parking as well, doubling the amount of access to the buildings within those blocks.

There were also plenty of empty spaces, pseudo-alleyways, walkways, and crawl spaces. Here and there, abandoned chambers in the basements and subbasements of the buildings above sat in silent darkness, waiting to be remade into something new. The commuter tunnels could connect down there, and there were several entrances to the insane, deadly labyrinth beneath the city known as Undertown.

Chicago cops patrolled the lower streets on a regular basis. Things came slinking out of Undertown to prowl the darkness. Traffic would blaze through on the actual streets, which were occasionally only separated from the sidewalks by a stripe of faded paint.

All in all, it’s not the sort of place a sane person will casually wander through.

I found Molly standing in one of the narrow alleyways. Snow had fallen through a grate twenty feet overhead and covered the ground. She was dressed in the same rags I’d seen the night before, with her arms clenched around her stomach, shivering in the cold. There was a fresh, purpling bruise on her cheek. She was breathing heavily.

“Again,” said a cool, calm woman’s voice from farther down the alley, out of sight.

“I’m t-t-tired,” Molly said. “I haven’t e-eaten in a day and a half.”

“Poor darling. I’m sure Death will understand and agree to return another time.”

There was a sharp hissing sound, and Molly threw up her left hand, fingers spread. She spat out a word or two, and flickering sparkles of defensive energy spread from her fingertips into a flat plane.

Molly simply didn’t have a talent for defensive magic—but this was the best shield I’d ever seen the grasshopper pull off.

A hurtling white sphere hit the shield. It should have bounced off, but instead it zipped through the shield, its course barely bent. The sphere struck Molly in the left shoulder and exploded into diamond-glitter shards of ice. She let out a short, harsh grunt of pain and staggered.