Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

“I am of two worlds,” she said, her tone slightly impatient. As she often did, she had evidently guessed at my thoughts. “Of course I don’t feel the same as mortal flesh.”

“Oh,” I said. “Uh. Listen. I just want . . . I need to know that you’re going to take care of Molly.”

She tilted her head and studied me for a moment. “But . . . child. It was never your responsibility to care for the young woman.”

“Yes, it was,” I said. “She was my apprentice.”

“Indeed. Someone whom you had pledged to teach—not to care for. Child, did you miss the entire point of the exercise?”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again. “Maybe I did. What was supposed to happen?”

“You were supposed to teach her to care for herself,” Lea replied in a matter-of-fact tone. “Your failure to do so . . .” She frowned. “I confess that I have only a limited understanding of the concepts of good and evil. The differences seem largely semantic to me when applied to empiric situations. Yet it seems to me that you did her no great kindness by being gentle.”

I met the Sidhe’s impassive gaze for a moment before I looked away. “You might be right.”

“I am very old, child. It is a safe assumption in most circumstances.” She sniffed and leaned down to pat my hand in a rather peremptory gesture. “Now, then. Listen to the nice statue. And do try to destroy anyone who seeks to do you harm. Death should be a learning experience, after all, or what’s the point?”

Something in my godmother’s words managed to land on the ghost of a functioning brain cell somewhere, and a flash of inspiration hit me. “That’s it!” I blurted. “That’s how to handle the Corpsetaker.”

Lea tilted her head, her eyes intent, and then smiled a knowing smile. “Ahhh. If you can do it.”

I swallowed. “Yeah.”

“Interesting,” she murmured. “If you can control them. They are a power potentially deadly even to the one who wields it. Explosive. Dangerous. And very typical of you. Excellent.” Then she moved the fingers of her right hand through a series of little gestures and was gone.

That left me alone in my grave with my thoughts.

I leaned against the wall again, but I didn’t settle down on the ground. Instead I thought about Molly and how screwed up she was.

That was my fault, in a lot of ways.

First thing to jump out at me: I never should have let Molly go to Chichén Itzá.

I had led her into the fight of my life against the Red Court, to save my daughter. But I shouldn’t have exposed Molly to that. She was a sensitive, a wizard whose magical senses were naturally attuned to the finest, lightest, most delicate workings of the Art. Or, to put it in more Harryfriendly terms, she had great big, honking Dumbo ears that were extremely sensitive to loud noises.

Magic is life. Some forms of death—like murder, the abrupt and violent termination of a life that was not otherwise ending—were the equivalent of enormous, screeching feedback to her senses. And I had dragged her into a freaking concert hall of it at Chichén Itzá. Murderpalooza. Not to mention setting off the biggest, most violent magical curse to be unleashed in the past century—hell, I wasn’t exactly a sensitive guy, magically speaking, but even I had a blank spot in my memory over the minutes right after that arcane explosion.

It’s got to be bad for me to shut it out. For Molly, it had to have been a whole lot worse. And, oh yes, she had been shot and nearly killed to go with everything else. I had watched her collapse from blood loss.

Mistake. It had been a big damned mistake. At the time, I had been so focused on getting Maggie out that I’d let Molly persuade me that she deserved to be on the team. I never would have let her do that if I’d been thinking straight. I would have told her to stay at home, hold the fort, or maybe stay in the car. That was what I’d always done when I was on my way to a slugfest. Exposure to that kind of noise could quite effectively shatter her sanity.

And maybe it had.

Even if her mental house was still on a good foundation, you didn’t need monsters or magic to get damaged by a brush with death. Soldiers coming home from wars had known that for centuries. Post-traumatic stress disorder from life-threatening injuries had screwed up the lives of a lot of people—people who didn’t have supernatural powers as a possible outlet for their anger, fear, grief, or guilt.

And who had been there to catch her? The freaking Leanansidhe, deputy of Her Wickedness, with her Nietzsche and Darwin Were Sentimental Pansies outlook on life.

Stars and stones. When Molly insisted on going, why didn’t I just tell her, “Of course you can come, grasshopper. I’ve always wanted to create a mentally mutilated monster of my very own.”

Man. It wasn’t the legacy I’d wanted to leave behind me. I mean, I hadn’t ever thought much about leaving a legacy, truth be told, but an apprentice with a crippled heart and mind who was probably going to get hunted down by her own people was definitely never in the plan.

“Oh, kid,” I breathed to no one. “Molly. I’m so sorry.”

It turns out ghosts can cry.

“Over here,” said a familiar voice. It was later, but not much later. Sometime after noon, maybe? It was hard to tell from the grave.

“You’ve never even been here before,” answered another. “I was at the funeral. How the hell would you know where his grave was?”

I heard Fitz let out a sigh front-loaded with so much drama that only a teenager could have managed it without hurting himself. “Is it the gaping hole in the ground over there, with the big pentacle on the headstone?”

There was a brief, miffed pause, and Butters answered, “Okay. Maybe it is.”

Footsteps crunched through wet, melting snow. Fitz and Butters appeared at the edge of my grave and peered down.

“Well?” Butters asked. “Is he there?”

“How the hell should I know?” Fitz replied. “I don’t see dead people. I hear them. And I don’t hear anything.”

“Hey, Fitz,” I said.

The kid jumped. He was wearing his newly laundered clothes and had added one of Forthill’s old coats over the top of everything. “Christ. Yeah, he’s there.”

“Oh, fantastic,” Butters said. “Hi, Harry. Here, man. Help me down.”

“Help you down? It’s, like, five feet to the bottom, if that. Just jump down.”

“Jump into an open grave? What kind of idiot are you?” Butters replied. “I might as well put on a red shirt and volunteer for the away team. There’s snow and ice and slippery mud down there. That’s like asking for an ironically broken neck.”

“Are all doctors whiny girls like you?” Fitz asked.

“Hey. This whiny girl is still alive because he doesn’t do stupid crap.”

Fitz snorted. “So I help you down, my foot slips, we both fall in and die.”

Butters lifted an eyebrow and grunted. “Huh. True.”

I pinched at the bridge of my nose. “Oh, Hell’s bells, guys. Either get a room or stop flirting and get down here.”

“Ha-ha,” Fitz said toward me crossly. “He just called us gay.”

Butters blinked. “For not jumping into a hole we might not be able to climb out of? That’s kind of insensitive.”

“Not for that, for . . .” Fitz let out a sigh of vintage teenage impatience. “Christ, just give me your hand, okay? I’ll swing you down.”

Butters fussed for a moment more, making sure that Fitz had a solid place to plant his feet, and then he swung down into my grave. He was wearing his winter gear again and carrying the gym bag. Once he was down, he made sure he was out of direct sunlight and started opening the bag.

“What’s up?” I asked Fitz.