Ghost Story

Chapter Seventeen

I found Stu’s pistol on the ground where I’d dropped it during the struggle. Then I followed Butters to his car—an old Plymouth Road Runner. It looked almost worse than my old VW Beetle had the last time I’d seen it. Dents and dings covered its all-steel frame, and some of them looked suspiciously like they’d been raked into the metal with a two-pronged claw—but its engine throbbed with impressive, harmonious power. Its license plates read: MEEPMEEP.

“I kinda traded in my old one,” Butters told me as I got in, going straight through the door. I didn’t make any noise about the discomfort. Not in front of Butters. It would totally blow my ghostly cool.

“For another old one,” I said. My voice issued out of the radio he slipped into a clip attached to the car’s sun visor.

“I like steel better than fiberglass,” he said. “The Fomor and the faeries are apparently related. Neither one of them likes the touch of any metal with iron in it.”

Bob’s skull rested in a container that had been custom mounted on the Road Runner’s dash—a wooden frame set on a plate that made the skull wobble back and forth like a bobblehead doll. “Lot of interbreeding there,” Bob said. “Back in the old, old, old days. Before the Sidhe Wars.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “I haven’t heard much about it.”

“Crazy stuff,” Bob said with tremendous enthusiasm. “Even before my time, but I’ve heard all kinds of stories. The Daoine Sidhe, the Tuatha, the Fomor, the Tylwyth Teg, the Shen. Epic alliances, epic betrayals, epic battles, epic weddings, epic sex—”

“Epic sex?” I sputtered. “By what standards, precisely, is sex judged to be epic?”

“And tons and tons of mortal simps like you used as pawns.” Bob sighed happily, ignoring my question. “There are no words. It was like The Lord of the Rings and All My Children made a baby with the Macho Man Randy Savage and a Whac-A-Mole machine.”

Butters sputtered at that image.

But . . . I mean, Hell’s bells. Who wouldn’t?

“Anyway,” he choked out a moment later, “the Fomor have a lot of faerie blood in their makeup. I like having Detroit steel around me when I drive.”

“Murphy said something about the Fomor last night,” I said. “I take it they’ve been moving in on the town?”

His face grew more remote. “Big-time. I’ve been busy.” He exhaled a slow breath. “Um. Look, man. It’s really you?”

“What’s left of me,” I said tiredly. “Yeah.”

He nodded. “Um. There’s a problem with Molly.”

“I saw,” I said.

“You didn’t see,” he said. “I mean, I heard that Murphy told you she was a couple bubbles off plumb last night, but there’s more than that.”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Seventeen people murdered in the past three months,” he replied in a steady voice.

I didn’t say anything for a couple of blocks. Then I said, “Who?”

“Scum,” he said candidly. “Mostly. A cop who was maybe raping a prostitute. Petty criminals. Muggers. She doesn’t even try to avoid being seen. She’s gone totally Dark Knight. Witnesses left and right have reported a tall woman dressed in layers and layers of ragged, cast-off clothing. Took the papers about two weeks to name her the Rag Lady. People call her various versions, to make fun, to show her they aren’t afraid, but . . .”

“A lot of people get killed in this town,” I said. “Doesn’t mean it’s Molly.”

“Harry . . .” Butters stopped at a light and gave me a direct look. “I’ve examined twelve of the victims. Different manner of death for each of them, but I found them all with a scrap of torn cloth stuffed in their mouths.”

“So?” I demanded.

“I matched the cloth. It’s the same as what was left of the clothes you wore to Chichén Itzá. They had some of it in evidence when they investigated the scene of your . . . your murder. Only someone got in there without being seen by anyone or any camera, and took it right out.”

Memory flashed at me, hard. The silent stone ziggurats in the night. The hiss and rasp of inhuman voices. The stale, reptilian scent of vampires. My faerie godmother (yes, I’m serious. I have one, and she is freaking terrifying) had transformed my clothes into protective armor that had probably saved my life half a dozen times that night without my even being aware of it. When they had turned back into my coat, my shirt, and my jeans, there had been little left of them but tatters and scraps.

Sort of like me.

Someone who had major issues with my death was killing people in my town.

Could it be my apprentice?

She had a thing for me, according to practically every woman I knew. I didn’t have a thing back. Yes, she was gorgeous, intelligent, quickwitted, brave, thoughtful, and competent. But I’d known her when her bra had been a formality, back when I’d begun working with her father, one of the very few men in the world I hold in genuine respect.

There was darkness in Molly. I’d soulgazed her. I’d seen it in more than one of her possible futures. I’d felt it in the black magic she had worked, with the best of intentions, on fragile mortal minds.

But though she’d fought tooth and nail at Chichén Itzá, beside the rest of us . . . she wasn’t a killer. Not Molly.

Was she?

People could be driven to extremes by the right events, the right stakes. I’d bargained away my future and my soul when I had needed to do it to save my daughter.

And I was Molly’s teacher. Her mentor. Her example.

Had she let herself be driven to extremes at my loss, the way I had been to the potential loss of my daughter? Had she turned aside from everything I’d tried to teach her and let herself slide down into the violent exercise of power?

Why shouldn’t she have done so, moron? I heard my own voice say in the dark of my thoughts. You showed her how it worked. She’s always been an able student.

Worse, Molly was a sensitive, a wizard whose supernatural senses were so acute that surges of powerful magic or the emotions that accompanied life-and-death situations were something that caused her psychic and physical pain. It was something I had barely even considered when I dragged her along to Chichén Itzá with me for the largest, most savage, and deadliest brawl I had ever personally participated in.

Had the pain of participating in the battle done something to my apprentice? Had it left her with permanent mental damage, just as the gunshot wound she’d received must have left her a permanent scar? Hell, it didn’t require any supernatural elements at all for war—and that was what Chichén Itzá was, make no mistake—to screw up young soldiers who found themselves struggling to stay alive. Throw in all the mystic menace on top of it, and it started to seem a little bit miraculous that I’d gotten as far as I had while remaining mostly sane.

I didn’t want to admit it or think about it, but I couldn’t deny that it was possible that my apprentice hadn’t been as lucky as I had.

“Hey,” Butters said quietly. “Harry? You all right?”

“That’s . . . kinda subjective, all things considered,” I answered.

He nodded. “No one wanted to be the one to tell you the details. But Murphy’s pretty sure. She says that if she was still working as a cop, she’d be convinced and digging as hard as she could to turn up enough evidence to let her put the perp away.”

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I get what she means by that.” I swallowed. “Why hasn’t she?”

“We need Molly,” Butters said. “She’s made the difference between happily ever after and everyone dying in two raids against the Fomor.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Okay. It’s . . . something I’ll start processing. But I’m not saying that I believe it. Not until I talk to her about it. See her reaction with my own eyes.”

“Right,” Butters said, his voice gentle.

I eyed him. “Murphy wouldn’t want you telling me this.”

He shrugged. “Murphy’s not full all the way to the brim herself some days. What she’s been doing . . . It’s been hard on her. She’s gotten more and more guarded.”

“I can imagine.”

Butters nodded. “But . . . I’ve always been kind of a trust-my-instincts guy. And I think you need to know this stuff.”

“Thanks,” I said. “We’ve got some other problems, too.”

His tired, worried face lifted into a sudden grin. “Of course we do. Harry Dresden is in town. What’s that?”

I put Sir Stuart’s pistol into the voluminous pocket of my duster and said, “A cannon. Someone gave it to me.”

“Huh.” His voice turned casual. “Could something like that hurt me?”

I grinned and shook my head. “Nah. Ghost-on-ghost action only. Assuming I’m able to make it work in the first place.”

The snow had stopped falling, and Butters turned off his windshield wipers. “What’s it like?”

“What is what like?”

“Being . . . you know.”

“Dead?”

He shrugged a shoulder, betraying his discomfort. “A ghost.”

I thought about my answer for a moment. “Everything in my body that used to hurt all the time got better. I don’t feel hungry or thirsty. Other than that, it feels a lot like being alive, except . . . my magic is gone. And, you know, hardly anyone can see me or hear me.”

“So . . . so the world is the same?” he asked.

I shivered. “No. It’s chock-full of all sorts of weird stuff. You wouldn’t believe how many ghosts are running around this place.”

Even as I spoke, I turned my head to watch two wraiths glide down the sidewalk as the car passed them. I frowned. “Including one of you, Bob.”

Bob the Skull snorted. “I’m not mortal. I don’t have a soul. The only thing waiting for me when I cease to be is entropy. I can’t leave a ghost.”

“Then how come I saw a floating skull with blue eyelights helping attack Mort Lindquist’s place last night?”

The skull just stared for a moment. Then he suggested lamely, “You were high?”

I snorted. “Can’t be many things like that running around,” I said. “What do you know?”

“I have to think about this,” Bob said in a rushed tone, and his orange eyelights winked out.

Butters and I both stared at the skull.

“Huh,” Butters said. “I’ve never seen anyone make him shut up before.”

I grunted. Then I said quietly, “Scared the hell out of me, seeing that. Thought something had happened to him.”

“He’s fine,” Butters said. “Best roommate I ever had.”

“I’m glad you’re taking care of him,” I said. “He wouldn’t do well alone.”

“It’s not a big deal, right?”

“What isn’t a big deal?”

“If there’s an Evil Bob out there,” he said. “I mean . . . it’ll just be another nerd like this one, right? Only with a black hat?”

The orange eyelights winked back on, and Bob said, “Hey!”

“Butters . . . Bob is spooky strong,” I said quietly. “Knowledge is power, man. Bob has a lot of it. When I accidentally flipped his switch to black hat a few years ago, he nearly killed me in the first sixty seconds.”

Butters blinked several times. He tried to talk for a few seconds, swallowed, and then said in a small voice, “Oh.” He eyed Bob sideways.

“I don’t like to make a big thing of it, sahib,” Bob said easily. “Not really my bag to do that kind of thing anyway.”

I nodded. “He was created to be an assistant and counselor,” I said. “It’s unprofessional to treat him as anything else.”

“Which sahib doesn’t,” Bob noted. “Due to complete ignorance, but he doesn’t.”

“Oh,” Butters said again. Then he asked, “How do I . . . make sure not to set him on black hat?”

“You can’t,” Bob said. “Harry ordered me to forget that part of me and never to bring it out again. So I lopped it off.”

It was my turn to blink. “You what?”

“Hey,” Bob said, “you told me never to bring it out again. You said never. As long as I was with you, that wouldn’t be an issue—but the next guy could order me to do it and it would still happen. So I made sure it couldn’t happen again. No big whoop, Dresden. Oy, but you are such a little girl sometimes.”

I blinked several more times. “Oy?”

“My mother calls me twice a week,” Butters explained. “He listens in.”

“She’s right, you know, sahib,” Bob said brightly. “If you’d just do something with your hair and wear nicer clothes, you’d find a woman. You’re a doctor, after all. What woman doesn’t want to marry a doctor?”

“Did he just get a little Yiddish accent?” I asked Butters.

“I get it twice a week already, Bob,” Butters growled. “I don’t need it from you, too.”

“Well, you need it from somewhere,” Bob said. “I mean, look at your hair.”

Butters ground his teeth.

“Anyway, Harry,” Bob began.

“I know,” I said. “The thing I saw with the Grey Ghost must be the piece that you cut off.”

“Right,” he said. “Got it in one.”

“Your offspring, one might say.”

The skull shuddered, which added a lot of motion to the bobblehead thing. “If one was coming from a dementedly limited mortal viewpoint, I guess.”

“So it’s a part of you, but not all of you. It’s less powerful.”

Bob’s eyelights narrowed in thought. “Maybe, but . . . the whole of any given being is not always equal to the sum of its parts. Case in point: you. You aren’t working with a lot of horsepower in the brains department, yet you manage to get to the bottom of things sooner than most.”

I gave the skull a flat look. “Is it stronger than you or not?”

“I don’t know,” Bob said. “I don’t know what it knows. I don’t know what it can do. That was sort of the whole point in amputating it. There’s a big hole where it used to be.”

I grunted. “How big?”

Bob rolled his eyes. “Do you want me to tell you in archaic measurements or metric?”

“Ballpark it.”

“Um. A hundred years’ worth of knowledge, maybe?”

“Damn,” I said quietly. I knew that Bob had once been owned by a necromancer named Kemmler. Kemmler had fought the entire White Council in an all-out war. Twice. They killed him seven times over the course of both wars, but it didn’t take until number seven. Generally remembered as the most powerful renegade wizard of the second millennium, Kemmler had at some point acquired a skull inhabited by a spirit of intellect, which had served as his assistant.

Eventually, when Kemmler was finally thrown down, the skull had been smuggled away from the scene by a Warden named Justin DuMorne—the same Justin who had adopted me and trained me to grow up into a monster, and who had eventually decided I wasn’t tractable enough and attempted to kill me. It didn’t go as he planned. I killed him and burned down his house around his smoldering corpse instead. And I’d taken the same skull, hidden it away from the Wardens and company, and named it Bob.

“Is that bad?” Butters asked.

“A bad guy had the skull for a while,” I said. “Big-time dark mojo. So those memories Bob lost are probably everything he learned serving as the assistant to a guy who was almost certainly the strongest wizard on the planet—strong enough to openly defy the White Council for decades.”

“Meaning . . . he learned a lot there,” Butters said.

“Probably,” Bob said cheerfully. “But it’s probably limited to pretty much destructive, poisonous, dangerous stuff. Nothing important.”

“That’s not important?” Butters squeaked.

“Destroying things is easy,” Bob said. “Hell, all you really have to do to destroy something is wait. Creation, now. That’s hard.”

“Bob, would you be willing to take on Evil Bob?”

Bob’s eyes darted nervously. “I’d . . . prefer not to. I’d really, really prefer not to. You have no idea. That me was crazy. And buff. He worked out.”

I sighed. “One more thing to worry about, then. And meanwhile, I still don’t know a damned thing about my murder.”

Butters brought the Road Runner to a stop and set the parking break. “You don’t,” he said. “But we do. We’re here. Come on.”