Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

Gandalf never had this kind of problem.

He had exactly this problem, actually, standing in front of the hidden Dwarf door to Moria. Remember when . . .

I sighed. Sometimes my inner monologue annoys even me.

“Edro, edro,” I muttered. “Open.” I rubbed at the bridge of my nose and ventured, “Mellon . ”

Nothing happened. The wards stayed. I guessed the Corpsetaker had never read Tolkien. Tasteless bitch.

“I hate this depending-on-others crap,” I muttered. Then I vanished and reappeared at the head of my horde. “Okay, everybody,” I said. “Huddle up.”

I got a lot of blank looks. Which was probably only reasonable. Most of those spirits predated football.

“Okay,” I said. “Everyone get to where you can see and hear me clearly. Gather in.”

The ghosts understood that. They huddled—in three dimensions. Some crowded around me in a circle on the ground. The rest took to the air and arranged themselves overhead.

“Christ,” I muttered. “It’s like Thunderdome.” I held out my hand, palm up, and closed my eyes for a moment. I called up my most recent memories of Molly, both of her physical appearance and of her evident state of mind. Then I focused on projecting those memories, following my newly developing instincts with the whole ghost routine. When I opened my eyes, a small, three-dimensional image of Molly hovered above the surface of my palm, rotating slowly.

“This young woman is somewhere in Chicago,” I said. “Maybe nearby. We need her help to get to Mort. So, um. Soldier boys, stay here with me. The rest of you guys, go locate her. Appear to her. Tell her that Harry Dresden sent you, and lead her back here. Do not reveal yourselves to anyone else. Harm no one.” I looked around at them. “Okay?”

Before I’d finished the last word, half of the crowd—the crazy half—was gone.

I just hoped that they would listen to me, that my beckoning spell and the mantle of authority Sir Stuart had passed to me would help ensure their cooperation. I felt fairly confident in my instinct that nutty killer ghosts were not terribly good at following orders.

“This could turn out bad in so many ways,” I muttered.

But it mostly didn’t.

Maybe ten minutes after I’d dispatched them, the Lecter Specters reappeared among the ranks of the quiet guardians with no sound, no flash, no fanfare. One second, nothing; the next, there they all were. All but two.

A moment later, the twins came walking toward us. Molly limped along between the two little spirits, holding hands with each of them. She was moving with her back perfectly rigid, her steps cautious, and she looked a little green around the gills. Like I said, she’s a sensitive. She must have figured out the true nature of the child ghosts immediately upon meeting them, and she clearly did not relish the idea of being in skin contact with them. It said a lot about her intestinal fortitude that she had accompanied them at all.

It probably said even more about her trust in me.

It was no coincidence that the ghosts had found her so quickly, either. She’d already been on the way; Molly was dressed for battle.

There were still bloodstains on the front of her long coat, where she’d taken a bullet through the muscle of her thigh. It was based on the design of a fireman’s coat and, like Daniel’s vest, Molly’s coat contained an armored lining of titanium rings sandwiched between layers of ballistic fabric. She still wore her ragged clothing beneath the coat, but she’d added a nylon-web tactical belt to her ensemble. It bore several potions, which she’d always been good at making, and a pair of wands covered in rows of runes and sigils like those on my own staff. One was tipped in a crystal of white quartz, the other with an amethyst.

Once the twins had led her to me, they vanished, reappearing in their previous spaces in the ranks. Molly blinked and looked around for a moment. She took her cane from under one arm and leaned on it, taking some of the weight off her wounded leg. Then she took out the little tuning fork, rapped it once against the cane, and held it up in front of one of her eyes, so that she was looking through the tines.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” she breathed, her eyes widening as she took in the spook squad. “Harry, is that you in there?”

“Two ghosts enter; one ghost leaves,” I replied. Then I vanished from the Spookydome and reappeared in front of her. “Hi.”

Molly shook her head a little. She looked tired still, but some of the strain I’d seen in her the night before seemed to have drained out of her. “Who are they?”

“Morty’s friends,” I said. I gestured at her. “You wore your party dress, I see.”

She smiled for a second, enough to show her dimples. Then it was gone. “Butters got in touch with me. He told me what was going on.”

I nodded. “Murphy?”

Molly looked away. “She’s on the way with whoever she can get.”

“Marcone’s guys?”

She shook her head. “Marcone is in Italy or something. Childs is in charge.”

“Let me guess. He’s just supposed to mind the store until the boss gets back, and he didn’t get chosen for his daring and ambition.”

Molly nodded. “Pretty much.”

I grimaced. “How’s your brother?”

“More stitches. More scars,” Molly said, looking away—but not in time to hide the flash of pure, murderous rage I saw in her eyes. “He’ll live.”

“The padre?”

“Stable. Unconscious. He was beaten badly.”

“What about Fitz and his gang?” I asked.

“With my father for now,” she said. “Mom makes battalion-sized meals already. Eight or ten more mouths isn’t bad. Just until there’s enough time to figure out what to do with them.”

I snorted quietly. “And Murph would just call in the kids’ location and tell the cops to round them up for that hit if they’d gone anywhere else. She wouldn’t do that to Michael.”

“I thought the same thing.”

“Your idea?”

Molly shrugged.

“Very good, grasshopper,” I said, smiling.

She smiled, but only with the corners of her eyes. “Thanks.”

I shook my head. Crap. It was easy to get distracted when talking about memories. The ghost thing must have been slowly congealing my brain. “Okay, chitchat’s over. Here’s the short version.”

I told her about the Big Hood hideout, the wards, and what the Corpsetaker was up to. As I spoke, Molly took a moment to open her Sight and take a quick glance at the wards. She shuddered and closed it again. “Are you sure we can’t just hammer through them?”

“If we studied the layout for a day or two, maybe,” I said. “We don’t have that kind of time.”

“What’s the plan, then?”

“Me and my army go in through the back door in the Nevernever,” I said. “Once I’m in, I’ll wreck those formulae and take down the wards. Team Murphy comes storming in like they do on TV. I need you to open the Way.”

Molly bit her lip and then nodded. “I can do that. Are you sure that when I do, the other side will be close enough?”

The Nevernever isn’t subject to normal geography. It attaches to the physical world by means of symbols and ideas. Open a Way in a happy place, and odds are you’ll get a happy place in the Nevernever. Open a Way in a bad place, and the spirit world near it will be the same flavor of bad. Sometimes Ways that opened only ten or twenty feet apart from each other go to radically different portions of the Nevernever. Molly was concerned that if a Way was opened anywhere but in the basement of the stronghold, it might lead to the spiritual version of Timbuktu, rather than where I wanted to go.

“There’s seriously bad juju infesting this whole area,” I said. “We’ll get as close as we can to the entrance. It should get me somewhere in the same neighborhood—and I’mpretty light on my feet these days.”