Ghost Story

Chapter Twenty-three

Which only goes to prove that you’re never too old, too jaded, too wise—or too dead—to be hoodwinked by one of the fae.

“You set her up,” I snarled, “for my benefit? As a lesson for me?”

“Child,” Lea said, “of course not. It was entwined with her own lesson as well.”

Molly smiled very slightly. “Oh yes. I feel I have grown tremendously from my experience of nearly being incinerated.”

“You saw that your survival depended on the protection of another,” my godmother responded, her voice sharp. “Without help from my godson’s spirit, you would have died.”

“There are a lot of people who can say something like that,” Molly said. “There’s no shame in being one of them.”

Lea looked from Molly to me and then said, “Children. So emotional—and so rarely grateful. I will leave you to consider the value of what I have this evening shown unto you both.”

“Hold it,” I said. “You aren’t going yet.”

Lea looked at me with a flat expression. “Oh?”

“No. You’re giving Molly money first.”

“Why would I do such a thing?”

“Because she’s hungry, she’s tired, she survived your lesson, and she needs to eat.”

Lea shrugged a shoulder. “What is that to me?”

I scowled. “If you’re her mentor, your support of her physical needs while she learns is implicit in the relationship. And since you’re filling in for me anyway, and since my choice right now would be to get food into her, if you don’t do it, you’ll be failing in your duty.”

The Leanansidhe rolled her eyes and murmured, with a trace of amusement, “Now is when you choose to begin paying attention to proper protocol, child?”

“Apparently,” I said. “Stop being cheap. Cough up the dough.”

Her green eyes narrowed dangerously. “I do not care for your tone, child.”

“I’m through being intimidated by you,” I replied, and to my surprise, it came out in a calm and reasonable tone, rather than a defiant one. “You’re the one with an obligation. I’m not being unreasonable. Pay up.”

The Leanansidhe turned to face me fully, those feline eyes all but glowing with either anger or pleasure. Or maybe both.

Molly ordered the Moons Over My Hammy. And hot chocolate.

I sat across the table from her at Denny’s, my elbow on its surface, my chin resting on the heel of my hand. The table could support my elbow because I had decided it should. Her tuning fork sat upright on the table, humming slightly, directly between us. She’d said she could see me if I didn’t move too far to the left or right.

Molly tore into the food with a voracious appetite.

“Weren’t you the one always trying to get me to eat healthier?” I mused.

“Bite me,” she mumbled through a mouthful of food. “Freaking ice age out there. Gotta have fats, proteins, carbs, just to get my furnace going, keep my body temperature up.”

“You know what else would keep it up?” I asked her. “Being indoors.”

She snorted and ignored me for several minutes, venting a ravenous appetite onto the food. I watched her and found it oddly fulfilling. I’d been looking out for the grasshopper for a while. It made me feel good to see her hunger being satisfied because of something I had done.

I guess ghosts have to take pleasure in the little victories—just like everyone else.

I waited until she was cleaning up the remains to ask, “So. What’s with the Ophelia act in front of Murphy and company?”

She froze for a second, then continued moving bits and pieces around her plate with somewhat less enthusiasm. “It isn’t . . .” She exhaled slowly, and her eyes moved around the room restlessly. “There’s more than one reason.”

“I’m listening,” I said.

“Well. Who says it’s an act?” She flipped a couple of bits of hash brown onto her fork and then into her mouth. “Look at me. I’m sitting here talking to my dead mentor. And half the restaurant is worried about it.”

I looked around. She was getting covert stares, all right. “Yeah, but there’s hardly anyone here.”

She laughed a bit harshly. “That makes me feel better.” She put her cup of hot chocolate to her lips and just held it there, trails of steam curling up around her blue eyes. “So. You’ve finally been inside me. I feel like I should be offering you a cigarette.”

I choked and had to clear my throat. “Um. It wasn’t like that, kid.”

“Of course it wasn’t,” she said, an edge in her voice. “It never was. Not for you.”

I rubbed at the back of my neck. “Molly. When I met you . . .”

“I was a child who didn’t need a bra,” she said.

“It’s about your father, too,” I said. “Michael—”

“Is the uncle you never had,” she said, her voice still calm but crisp. “You’ve always wanted his approval. Because he’s a good man, and if he approves of you, you can’t be a total wreck.”

I scowled at her. “I’ve never said that,” I said.

She looked at me through wisps of steam and said, “But it’s true all the same. I had that worked out by the time I was about seventeen. You were afraid that if you touched me, you’d be losing his approval. That it would make you some kind of monster.”

“I was afraid that I’d be losing my approval of me,” I responded. “And not a monster, Molly. Just an asshole.”

“When I was a child,” she said, still speaking very quietly, “you’d have been right. I’m in my mid-twenties, Harry. I’m not a child.”

“Don’t remind—” I paused. Then I said, “I was going to make an old-age joke.” I looked down at my immaterial self. “But all things considered . . .”

She let out enough of a snort to stir the steam. She took a slow drink of hot chocolate. “Little inappropriate. Even if you were still alive.”

“But funnier,” I said.

“You’re not the one who is going to watch her entire family grow old and die, Harry.” She said it without malice. “Not just my parents. My brothers and sisters. All of them. I’m going to be beginning to get respect from other wizards about the same time Hope and Little Harry are dying of old age.”

“Maybe you’ll get lucky and someone will kill you first.”

She shrugged. “Lea’s been doing what she could about that. If it happens, it happens. As long as there’s a reason for it, that kind of death wouldn’t bother me.”

I shivered, just from the emotionless tone of her voice. “Except for the dead part?”

“Everyone dies, Harry,” she said. “There’s no use whining about it.”

I waited for a couple of beats and then said, “Here’s where you talk about how what you do with your life is what’s truly important.”

Her head fell back and she let out a belly laugh. It sounded warm and natural. Her eyes were just too wide, though, her smile too strained.

“Yeah. Exactly.” She shook her head and looked at me intently. “Is that what it’s always like for you? Throwing fire that way?”

I blinked and tried to change mental gears. I didn’t do it as smoothly as she had. Someone uncharitable or unbiased might note that it could be because Molly had stripped said gears. “Um. Oh, back at the fight with the Fomor guys?”

“They weren’t the Fomor,” Molly corrected me. “They were humans the Fomor have altered. They’re called—”

“Turtlenecks,” I said.

She arched an eyebrow. “You and Murphy both. No, they’re known as servitors. The Fomor muck around with them. Install things. Gills, extra muscles, organs for sonar, night-vision eyes . . .”

I whistled. “All kinds of fun.”

She nodded. “The odd bits kind of turn to jelly when they die. Police are calling them transients.”

I nodded, and tried to keep the conversation casual. “A lot of them dying around here?”

“It’s Chicago,” she said. “There’s always someone dying around here. And you should see what these . . . these animals do, Harry. They take people right out of their beds. Grab children waiting for the school bus. They’ve tortured people to death for fun.”

As she spoke, the calm in her voice had begun to fracture. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a break of her voice, an inhalation between sentences that was a little too harsh.

“You can’t stand around doing nothing,” I said, nodding.

“No,” she said. “They’ll come and scream at you in your sleep if you try. So . . .”

“So?”

Molly was silent. I didn’t push. Five minutes went by before she closed her eyes and whispered, “It’s easy. It shouldn’t be so easy.”

Technically, I didn’t have a heart anymore. It couldn’t twist. It couldn’t break.

It did anyway.

“The first one was paying off a cop. Gold coins. He stood there with a little girl in a gym bag and paid the cop to look the other way.” She swallowed. “God, if I could be like you. Have so much power to pour out. Like water from a hydrant. But I’ve just got a squirt gun. Not even a Super Soaker. Just one of the little ones.” She opened her eyes and met mine. “But it was enough. They didn’t even know I was there.”

“Molly,” I said gently, “what did you do?”

“An illusion. A simple one. I made the bag of gold look like a gun. The cop drew his weapon and shot him. But the servitor lived long enough to break the cop’s neck.” She held up a pair of fingers. “Twofer. For one little illusion.”

I swallowed. I couldn’t speak.

Her voice slowly gained volume. “There have been others like that. I mean, God, they make it simple. You just need an opportunity and the right little nudge at the right time. Green traffic light instead of a red one. Put a knife in someone’s hand. Or a wedding ring on one finger. Add a spot of blood to someone’s collar. They’re animals. They tear into one another like animals.”

“Molly,” I said gently.

“I started leaving the bits of rag on them,” she said. “It hurt at first. Being near that kind of . . . experience. It still hurts. But I have to do it. You don’t know, Harry. What you did for this town.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t know how many things just didn’t come here before, because they were afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

She looked at me as if her heart was breaking. “Of you, Harry. You could find anything in this town, but you never even noticed the shadow you cast.” Her eyes overflowed and she slashed at them angrily with one hand. “Every time you defied someone, every time you came out on top against things you couldn’t possibly have beaten, your name grew. And they feared that name. There were other cities to prey on—cities that didn’t have the mad wizard Dresden defending them. They feared you.”

I finally understood. “The Rag Lady.”

“Sometimes me,” Molly said. “Sometimes it’s Lea. She’s like a kid on recess when she takes a shift. I’m building a new name. Creating something else for them to fear. I can’t do what you did, Harry.” Her eyes, red and blue, flashed with something dangerous, deadly, and she slammed the heel of her hand onto the table as she leaned toward me. “But I can do that. I can kill them. I can make the fuckers afraid.”

She stared at me, her breathing heavy. It took her several seconds to look slowly around the room.

Every eye in the place was locked on Molly. A waitress stood with wide eyes and a telephone against her ear.

Molly looked around at them for a moment and then said, “God, you people have it good. You don’t know. You wouldn’t know if one of them walked up to you and tore the thoughts out of your skull.”

She rose, grabbed the tuning fork, and left a pile of wadded bills on the table. She pointed at the waitress and said, “Put the phone down. Or you won’t get a tip.”

The telephone dropped from the woman’s fingers and clattered on the floor.

“See?” she said, glancing back in my general direction. “It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good for.”

I sat there, stunned and heartbroken, unable to think of anything to say or do to help Molly.

I watched my mad apprentice stalk out of the silent restaurant and into the frozen night.