Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

As an adult, I could see that our efforts were about as obvious as they could possibly be. Justin had known, I was certain—now. But back then, Elaine and I had been sure that we were masters of deceit.

That scheme’s trappings were sure as hell turning out to be handy that day. My strides slowed but turned longer, steadier, machinelike. I was sixteen. I didn’t wind down for almost an hour.

When I finally stopped, the terror had faded, if not the heartache, and I found myself in an entirely unexpected position.

I didn’t know what was coming next. I didn’t know what was expected of me.

I had to think. All by myself.

I ducked off the road and into a large culvert, huddling there while I got my breath back and flailed at the wet paper bag my brain was trapped within.

Mostly, I just kept thinking that I should have known. No one in my life had gone an inch out of their way to look out for me once my parents were gone. Justin’s generosity, even seasoned with the demands of studying magic, had been too good to be true. I should have known it.

And Elaine. She’d just sat there while he’d been doing whatever he was going to do. She hadn’t tried to warn me, hadn’t tried to stop him. I had never known anyone in my life I had loved as much as Elaine.

I should have known she was too good to be true, too.

I wept for a while. I was tired and cold and my chest ached with the pain of loss. In a single moment, my home had been destroyed. My life had been destroyed.

But I shook my head ferociously, wiping my eyes and my nose on the leather sleeves of my jacket, heedless of what it did to them. I was still in danger. I had to think.

I had no means of travel, no money, and no idea of where to go. Hell’s bells, I was lucky I had my shiny new driver’s license in my pocket. It was mid-November, and my school letter jacket wasn’t going to be enough to keep me warm once it got dark. My stomach made a cavernous noise, and I added starving hunger to my list of problems.

I needed shelter. I needed food. I needed to find someplace safe to hide from my mentor until I could figure out how to take him on—and to get all of that, I needed money. And I needed it fast.

So, once it got dark, I, uh . . .

Look. I was sixteen.

Once it got dark, I sort of knocked over a convenience store.

For lack of anything better to hide my face, I’d tied my sweaty T-shirt around my head in a sort of makeshift balaclava. I didn’t have anything else to wear except my letter jacket, which seemed more or less like a screaming advertisement to make it simple for the cops to figure out my identity. There wasn’t much I could do except to rip all the patches off of it and hope for the best. After that, I’d scavenged a paper sack from a trash bin, emptied it, and stuck my right hand in it.

Once I had my equipment ready, I looked up at the streetlights glowing outside the QuikStop and flicked a quick hex at them.

Learning magic is hard, but if you can do even fairly modest spells, you find out that wrecking technology is easy . Anything with electronics built into it is particularly susceptible to a hex, but if you put enough oomph into it, even simpler technology can be shorted out or otherwise made to malfunction. At sixteen, I wasn’t anywhere near the wizard I would be even five or six years later—but those lights didn’t have a prayer. The two streetlights over the parking lot flickered and went black.

I hit the lights outside the store next, and two security cameras. I was getting increasingly nervous as I went along, and the last hex accidentally blew out the store’s freezers and overhead lights along with the security camera. The only lighting left in the place came from a pinball machine and a couple of aging arcade video games.

I swallowed and hit the door, going through in a half-doubled-over crouch, so that there wouldn’t be any way to compare my height to the marker on the inside frame of the door. I held out my right hand like it was a gun, which it might have been: I had the paper sack I’d acquired pulled over it. There was something cold and squishy and greasy on the inside of the bag. Mayonnaise, maybe? I hated mayo.

I hustled up to the cashier, a young man with a brown mullet and a Boston T-shirt, pointed the paper sack at him, and said, “Empty the drawer!”

He blinked reddened, watery eyes at me. Then at the paper bag.

“Empty the drawer or I’ll blow your head off!” I shouted.

It probably would have been more intimidating if my voice hadn’t cracked in the middle.

“Uh, man,” the cashier said, and I finally twigged to the scent of recently burned marijuana. The guy didn’t look scared. He looked confused. “Dude, what is . . . Did you see the lights just . . . ?”

I really hadn’t wanted to do this, but I didn’t have much of a choice. I made a little bit of a production of turning the “gun” to point at the liquor bottles behind the counter, gathered up my will, and screamed, “Ka-bang! Ka-bang!”

My verbal incantations have actually gotten more sophisticated and worldly over the years, not less.

I know, right? It shocks me, too.

The spell was just basic kinetic energy, and it didn’t really hit much harder than a baseball thrown by a high school pitcher—a regular pitcher, not like Robert Redford in The Natural . That wasn’t really enough power to threaten anyone’s life, but it was noisy and it was more than enough energy to smash a couple of bottles. They shattered with loud barking sounds and showers of glass and booze.

“Holy crap!” shouted the cashier. I saw that his name tag read STAN. “Dude!” He flinched down, holding his arms up around his head. “Don’t shoot!”

I pointed the paper bag at him and said, “Give me all the money, Stan!”

“Okay, okay!” Stan said. “Oh, God. Don’t kill me!”

“Money!” I shouted.

He turned to the register and started fumbling at it, stabbing at the keys.

As he did, I sensed a movement behind me, an almost subliminal presence. It’s the kind of thing you expect to experience while standing in a line—the silent pressure of another living being behind you, temporarily sharing your space. But I wasn’t standing in a line, and I whirled in panic and shouted, “Ka-bang!” again.

There was a loud snap of sound as pure force lashed through the air and the glass door to a freezer of ice cream shattered.

“Oh, God,” Stan moaned. “Please don’t kill me!”

There was no one behind me. I tried to look in every direction at once and more or less succeeded.

There was no one else in the store. . . .

And yet the presence was still there, on the back of my neck, closer and more distinct than a moment before.

What the hell?

“Run!” said a resonant baritone.

I turned and pointed the paper bag at the pair of video games.

“Run!” said the voice on the Sinistar game. “I live! I . . . am . . . Sinistar!”

“Don’t move,” I said to Stan. “Just put the money in a bag.”

“Money in a bag, man,” Stan panted. He was practically sobbing. “I’m supposed to do whatever you want, right? That’s what the owners have told us cashiers, right? I’m supposed to give you the money. No argument. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, my eyes flicking nervously around the place. “It’s not worth dying for, is it, Stan?”

“Got that right,” Stan muttered. “They’re only paying me five dollars an hour.” He finally managed to open the drawer and started fumbling bills into a plastic bag. “Okay, dude. Just a second.”

“Run!” said the Sinistar machine. “Run!”

Again, the insubstantial pressure against the back of my neck increased. I turned in a slow circle, but nothing was there—nothing I could see, at any rate.