Jim Butcher - Ghost Story

Ghosts don’t get hungry, I reminded myself. Dead men don’t eat. So there was no reason whatsoever that I should throw up. The thought was hilarious for some reason, so I started laughing. I couldn’t help it. I laughed and laughed, even as I realized that I couldn’t just sit there—not having turned loose an elemental force of horror like the Lecters.

“Come on!” I said, giggling. “Come on, before they get out of earshot.” I staggered up and climbed the slope, Sir Stuart and the protector spirits following along behind me. It wasn’t an easy climb. The Lecter Specters had left a lot of the wolfwaffen partly alive, or at least had left some of their parts alive, and blood and worse fluids were everywhere. The fortunate few, the fighters who had gone down fast, had become nothing but buckets of slimy ectoplasm.

Any way you looked at it, the climb was a messy, nauseating, dangerous one. But it was a whole heck of a lot less dangerous than if we’d been getting shot at the whole way.

I reached the top of the slope and looked across the long network of trenches that ran outside the bunkers, along the top of the cliff. There was intermittent gunfire. There were intermittent screams. As I watched, I saw a frantic, panicked wolfwaffen clamber out of the trench. It got about three-quarters of the way out before what looked like a slimy yellow tongue shot out of the trench, from below my line of sight, and plunged into its back—and out its chest. The impaling tongue then wrapped around the howling wolfwaffen and pulled it back into the trench with so much force that a puff of dust and dirt billowed out from wherever he impacted.

“Hell’s bells,” I giggled. “Hell’s bells. That’s hideous.”

Sir Stuart nodded grimly. He made a gesture. Protector spirits began putting the nearby, hideously mangled wolfwaffen out of their misery.

I swatted myself firmly on the cheek and forced the laughter back. I felt myself trying to scream in horror once the laughter was damped down. The demonic servitors Evil Bob had put in position had probably been some very nasty customers. They had probably deserved a violent death.

But there are things you just don’t do, things you just can’t see, and still be both human and sane.

I forced the incipient screams away, too. It took me a minute or two to get it done. When I looked up, Sir Stuart was facing me, his eyes sad, concerned, and empathetic. He knew what I was feeling. He’d known it himself—which probably stood to reason, as the commander, more or less, of the criminal psych ward of Chicago’s ghosts.

“My fault,” I said. My voice sounded dull. My tongue felt like it had been coated in lead. “I told the Lecters not to stop until they were all down.”

The big shade nodded gravely.

“Follow them,” I said. “Make sure any of the enemy who is left is given a clean death. Then round them up and come back to me.”

Sir Stuart nodded. He looked at the protector spirits. Then they all moved out at the same time, going both directions up and down the cliff.

I leaned on my staff and rested. Holding that shield had taken a lot out of me. So much so that when I looked down at my hand, I could, just barely, see the shape of the stony ground right through it.

I was fading.

I shuddered and clutched the staff hard. It made sense, really. I’ve always believed that magic came from inside you, from who and what you were—from your mind and from your heart. Now I was all mind and heart. The shield had to be fueled by something. I hadn’t really stopped to consider where that energy would come from.

Now I knew.

I looked at my hand and the ground on the other side of it again. How much more would it take to make me disappear altogether? I had no way of knowing, no way of even making a good guess. What if I needed to use my magic again when I took up the hunt for my killer, after all of this was over? What if I blew it all here? What if I wound up like Sir Stuart—just an empty shade?

I leaned my head against the solid oak of the staff. It didn’t matter. Murphy and company—not to mention Mort—needed my help. They would get it, even if it meant I became nothing but an old, faded memory.

(Or maybe became one more insane shade drifting through Chicago’s night, causing havoc without reason, without regret, and without mercy.)

I shook my head a little and straightened my back. From the sounds of it, there couldn’t be many bad guys left for the Lecters to deal with. These were certainly the Corpsetaker’s defenses—an area of bad mojo like this would have a kind of gravity for anyone crossing over from the material world through any Way near the location to which it had been linked, sort of like a funnel spiderweb. That had been the point of building it this way: to make sure anyone who wanted in from the Nevernever side wound up on that beach.

I needed to find the Way this site was guarding, the back door to the Corpsetaker’s hideout, the one I’d seen Evil Bob and the Fomor servitor use. I closed my eyes and shut away the recent horrors. I willed away my worry and my fear. I didn’t have to breathe, but I did anyway, because that was the only way I’d ever learned to attain a state of clarity. In. Out. Slowly.

Then I carefully quested out with my senses, looking for the energy that would surround an open Way. I found it immediately, and opened my eyes. It was coming from straight ahead of me, away from the cliff and the beach, several hundred yards back up among some rolling, wooded hills. I could see the head of a footpath that led into the woods. There had been regular traffic on it, for it to be so evident, and I doubted that many hikers or Boy Scout troops had been tromping through. That was our next step.

An instant, violent instinct screamed at me without warning. I didn’t question it. I flung myself to one side, rolling in the air to bring up my shield again.

A wrecking ball of pure psychic force hit the shield, and half of the little shield charms dangling from my bracelet screamed and then shattered into tiny shards. The blow flung me a good twenty feet and I hit the ground rolling, until said ground vanished from underneath me. I dropped to the floor of one of the defensive trenches and lay there for a second, stunned at the sheer savagery of the assault.

I heard slow, heavy, confident footsteps. Clomp. Clomp. Then a pair of black jackboots appeared at the top of the trench. My gaze tracked up the SS officer’s uniform, which included a black leather trench coat not too unlike my own. It wasn’t one of the wolfwaffen. Instead of a deformed, monstrous wolf face, this being had only a bare skull sitting atop the uniform’s high collar. Blue fire glowed in its eye sockets and it regarded me with cold disdain.

“A worthy effort for a novice,” Evil Bob said. “I wish you to know that I regret your death as the loss of significant potential.” He lifted what was probably not actually a Luger pistol and aimed it calmly at my head. “Good-bye, Dresden.”

Stall, I thought desperately. Sir Stuart and company wouldn’t be busy for long. Stall.

“It isn’t in your best self-interest to do that,” I said.

Evil Bob’s eyelights flickered. The gun didn’t waver. “That hypothesis assumes that I possess self-interest.”

“If you didn’t,” I said, “you would have pulled the trigger already.”

For a second, nothing happened. Then the skull tilted slightly to one side, and I got the impression that Evil Bob had become suddenly pensive.

I rushed to continue. “There’s no percentage for your boss in hesitation. And since I know you aren’t doing it for my sake, your hesitation must therefore be an act of self-interest.”