Ghost Story

Chapter Forty-seven

One thing you never do in a fight, no matter how emotionally satisfying it might seem, is pause to gloat with an enemy standing right in front of you. Savvy foes aren’t going to just hang around letting you yak at them. They’re going to take advantage of the opening you’re giving them.

The same goes for desperate foes who aren’t interested in trying to win a fair fight.

Before the Corpsetaker finished speaking, I snapped my staff forward and snarled, “Fuego!”

Fire lashed toward her. She deflected the strike with a motion of her hand, like you’d use to ward off a fly. The memory-fire went flying on by her, through the wall and gone.

“Such a pity,” she said. “I was just going to—”

She wanted to keep up the gloating, I was game.

I hit her again, only harder.

This time I sent it flying a lot faster and it stung, though she slapped the fire aside before it could do much more than singe her. She let out a furious sound. “Fool! I will—”

Some people. I swear they never learn.

I’d built up a rhythm. So I gave her my best evocation, a burst of fire and force, sizzling with a lot of curve and English on it, an ogre-buster the size of a softball, blazing with scarlet and golden light.

She swept both arms into an X-shaped defensive stance, fingers contorted in a desperate defensive gesture, and she snapped out a string of swift words. She stopped the strike, but an explosion of flame and force rolled over her and she screamed in pain as she was driven twenty feet back and into the solid rock of the wall.

“Yahhh!” I shouted in wordless defiance, even as I reached for my next spell . . .

. . . and suddenly felt very strange.

“—sden, stop!” Mort was screaming. His voice sounded very far away. “Look at yourself !”

I had the next blast of fire and energy ready in my mind, but I stopped to glance at my hands.

I could barely see them. They were faded to the point of near invisibility.

The shock drove the spell out of my head, and color and substance rushed back into my limbs. They were still translucent, but at least I could see them. I turned wide eyes to where Mort still hung over the wraith pit. His voice suddenly snapped back up in volume, becoming very clear.

“You keep throwing your memories at her,” Mort said, “but part of what you are now goes out with them—and it doesn’t come back. You’re about to destroy yourself, man! She’s luring you into it!”

Of course she was, dammit. Why stand around trying to block my attacks when she could just vanish from in front of them? Evil Bob’s fortifications, it seemed, had served a purpose other than simply barring the way—I’d used up way too much of myself on the way through them. And then here, trading punches with Corpsetaker, I’d used up a lot more, slinging out the memory of my magic left and right, when I’d seen how careful Sir Stuart was to recover such expended power practically the minute I’d gotten out of Captain Jack’s car.

I couldn’t see her without bringing up my Sight, but Corpsetaker’s mocking laugh rolled through the underground chamber from the section of wall I’d knocked her into. I stared at my hands again and clenched them in frustration. Mort was right. I’d already done too much. But how the hell else was I supposed to fight her?

I turned to Mort. He was having trouble keeping his eyes on me as he twisted slowly on the rope. He closed them. “Dresden . . . you can’t do anything more. Get out of here. I don’t want anyone else to give themselves away for me,” he said, his voice raw. “Not for me.”

Sir Stuart’s shade, floating protectively beside Mort, regarded me with sober, distant eyes.

Corpsetaker’s mad laughter mocked us all. Then she said, “If I’d known you would deliver so thoroughly, Dresden, I’d have gone looking for you ages ago. Boz. Kill the little man.”

There was a growl and the stirring of a large animal. And then a human garbage truck started climbing out of the wraith pit, emerging from the stewing broil of wraiths like Godzilla rising out of the surf. Boz had a stench to him so thick that it carried over into the realm of spirit—a psychic stink that felt like it might have choked me unconscious had I still been alive. The guy’s brain had been down there stewing in wraiths for only God knew how long, and if Morty’s reaction to exposure was any indication, Boz had to have had his sanity pureed. He was crusted over in filth so thick that I couldn’t tell where the spiritual muck left off and the physical crud began. I could see his eyes, like dull, gleaming stones underneath his hood. They were absolutely gone. This guy was only a person by legal definitions. His humanity had long since begun to fester and rot.

Boz climbed out of the pit, radiating a physical and psychic power full of rot and corruption and rage and endless hungers. He stood there blankly for a second. And then he turned and took one slow, lumbering, Voorheesian step after another, toward the apparatus from which Mort hung.

The ectomancer regarded Boz weakly and then said, “Great. This is all I need.”

“What?” I said. “Mort? What does she mean?”

“Uh, sorry. Little distracted here,” Mort said. “What?”

“The Corpsetaker! What did she mean that she doesn’t need you anymore?”

“You fed her enough power to fuel a couple of dozen Nightmares, Dresden,” Mort said. “She can do whatever she wants now.”

“What? So she gobbles a bunch of killers and she gets to be a real boy again? It can’t be that easy.”

Boz reached the basketball goal, grabbed it in his huge hands, and just turned it slowly, the hard way. Mort began to rotate toward the edge of the pit.

“Agh! Dresden! Do something!”

I glared at Morty, spreading empty hands, and then in pure frustration I tossed a punch at Boz. It was like slapping my fist through raw sewage. I didn’t hit anything solid, and my fist and arm came out covered in disgusting residue. I couldn’t act. Information was the only weapon I had. “Kind of limited here, Mort!”

Morty had begun to hyperventilate, but he clearly came to some sort of decision. He started gasping out words rapidly. “She can be real again—for a little while.”

“She can manifest,” I said.

Boz’s fingernails were spotted with dark green mold. He reached out and grabbed the rope holding Mort. He untied the rope from its stay without letting it slide and began to haul Mort toward the edge of the pit. Arms and mouths and fingers stretched up from the bubbling wraiths, trying to reach the ectomancer.

“Gah!” Mort gasped, trying to twist away. Wraith fingertips touched his face, and he winced in apparent pain. “Once she does that, she gets to be her old self for a while. She can walk, talk—whatever.”

“Use her magic for real,” I breathed. The Corpsetaker wouldn’t have to limit herself to people who could contact the dead, people from whom she could try to wrest consent, as she had done to Mort.

She could simply take someone new—and then she was back in the game, a body-switching lunatic with a hate-on for the White Council and all things decent in general. Her boss, Kemmler, had apparently slithered his way out of being dead more than once. Maybe her whole freaky-cult operation had been a page from his playbook.

I vanished to the bottom of the stairs and screamed, “Murph! Hurry!”

But I saw no one at the top of the stairs.

Sir Stuart stood in front of Boz, clenching his jaw and his ax in impotent rage, as Boz lowered Mort to the ground and then leaned over him, reaching down with his huge hands to grasp Mort on either side of his head. A twist, a snap, and it would be over for the ectomancer.

But what could I do? I had nothing more than the ghost of a decent spell in me, and then I was misty history. Morty was beat to hell, exhausted, unable to use his own magic—or he damned well would have gotten himself out of this clustergeist by now. Even if he’d let me in—which I wasn’t sure he would do in his condition, not even to save his life—I doubted the two of us had enough energy and control between us to get him free. Mort could have called Sir Stuart into him, drawn upon the marine’s experience and the memory of his strength, but the ectomancer was still tied up. And besides, Sir Stuart was in the same condition I was, only worse.

All of us were helpless to act on the physical world.

If I’d still had the Lecters, I could have ordered one of them to manifest and free Morty, which I maybe should have chanced a few minutes ago. Hindsight was blinding in its clarity. It was too late for that now—Corpsetaker had taken the Lecters out of the picture, and without the mad spirits’ ability to manifest in the physical world . . .

My thoughts sped to quicksilver flickering. Frantic memory hit me like a hammer.

“Hell’s bells. Every time I’ve run into a ghost, it’s tried to rip my lungs out! You’re telling me none of your spooks can do something?”

“They’re sane,” Mort shouted back. “It’s crazy for a ghost to interact with the physical world. Sane ghosts don’t go around acting crazy!”

For a ghost, manifesting in the material world was an act of madness—a memory trying to enforce its will on the living, the past struggling to steer the course of the present. It was, according to everything I had learned about magic and life, an inversion of the laws of nature, a defiance of the natural order.

Ghosts who weren’t supermighty manifested all the time. It wasn’t a question of raw power, and it never had been—it was a matter of desire. You just had to be crazy enough to make it happen. That was what the Corpsetaker had gotten from devouring the Lecters. Not sufficient power, but sufficient insanity. She just had to be crazy enough to make it happen.

For a wizard running around as a lost soul, expending his very essence in an attempt to rescue a guy who hadn’t even really been his friend was definitely of questionable rationality. Grabbing the leashes of several dozen maniac ghosts and leading them on a banzai charge against a far stronger foe was probably less than stable, too. Hell, even the last few major choices of my life—murdering Susan in order to save our child, giving myself to Mab so that I could save little Maggie—were not the acts of a stable, sane man. Neither had been my entire career, really, given the options that had been available to me. I mean, I don’t mean to brag, but I could have used my abilities to make money if I’d wanted to. A lot of money.

Instead? A little basement apartment. A job catering to clientele who hadn’t merely needed help—they’d needed a miracle. Money? Not much. The occasional good deed, sure, but you can’t eat sincere thanks. Girls don’t flock to the guy who drives the old car, reads a lot of books, and kicks down the doors of living nightmares. My own people in the White Council had persecuted me my whole life, mostly for trying to do the right thing. And I’d kept on doing it anyway.

Hell. I was pretty much crazy already.

That being the case . . . how hard could it be?

It would take a certain amount of energy, I was sure. Maybe everything I had left. It wouldn’t get me any closer to the answers I wanted. It wouldn’t let me find out who had murdered me. It might destroy me altogether. Heck, for that matter, if it took too much power to pull off, it could snuff me here and now.

But the alternative? Watching Morty die?

Not going to happen. I’d face oblivion first.

I gripped the wooden grain of my staff, recalling the feelings that had surged through me when I had summoned and bound the Lecters. I called on my memories one more time. I called up the ache of sore muscles after a hard workout, and the sheer physical joy of my body in motion during a run, walking down the street, sinking into a hot bath, swimming through cool water, stroking over the softness of another body beside mine. I thought of my favorite old T-shirt, a plain, black cotton one with 98% CHIMPANZEE written on the chest in white typeset letters. I thought of the creak of my old leather cowboy boots, the comfort of a good pair of jeans. The scent of a wood-smoked grill drifting into my nose when I was hungry, the way my mouth would water and my stomach would growl. I thought of my old Mickey Mouse alarm clock going off too early in the morning, and groaning out of bed to go to work. I remembered the smell of a favorite old book’s pages when I opened them again, and the smell of smoldering motor oil, a staple feature of my old Blue Beetle. I remembered the softness of Susan’s lips against mine. I remembered my daughter’s slight, warm weight in my arms, her exhausted body as limp as a rag doll’s. I remembered the way tears felt, sliding free of my eyes, the annoying blockage of congestion when I had a cold, and a thousand other things—little things, minor things, desperately important things.

You know. Life.

Then I did something fairly nutty, as I gathered the memory for what I was to attempt. I just uttered the spell in plain, old English. The energy seared through my thoughts in a way that would have been damaging to a living wizard, maybe fatal. It seemed appropriate to use it here, and I released whatever power I had left, clothing it in garments of memory, as I murmured the most basic of ideas, the foundation of words and of reality.

“Be.”

My universe shook. There was a vast rushing sound, rising to a crescendo that would have made a sane person flinch and crouch down to find shelter. And in a sudden burst of silence, I stood firmly in cold, dank dimness. The cold raised gooseflesh on my skin.

Shadows had swollen to cover almost all the details around me, and no wonder they had.

All the candles and lamps that lit the chamber had burned down to little pinpoints.

I tapped Boz on the shoulder and said, “Hey, gorgeous.”

His face twisted in complete surprise, turning to stare in blank incomprehension at mine.

I winked at him, and whispered, “Boo.”

And then I slugged him with my quarterstaff.

It hurt. I mean, more than the shock of impact that lanced up through my wrists. I was solid again, at least for a moment. I was myself again, and with my remembered body came a fountain of remembered pain. My legs and knees creaked and ached, something that was a natural progression for a big guy, a kind of background pain that I never noticed until it was gone and then back again. I hadn’t exactly stretched out, and I’d socked Boz with everything I had. I’d torn a muscle in my back doing it. My head wasn’t clear, suddenly riddled with a catalog of muscle twitches, physically painful hunger, and old injuries I’d just learned to ignore, now suddenly screaming in fresh agony.

I’ve said before that only the dead feel no pain, but I’d never spoken from experience before. Pain used as a weapon is one thing. Personal pain, the kind that comes from just living our lives, is something else.

Pain isn’t a lot of fun, at least not for most folks, but it is utterly unique to life. Pain—physical, emotional, and otherwise—is the shadow cast by everything you want out of life, the alternative to the result you were hoping for, and the inevitable creator of strength. From the pain of our failures we learn to be better, stronger, greater than what we were before. Pain is there to tell us when we’ve done something badly—it’s a teacher, a guide, one that is always there to both warn us of our limitations and challenge us to overcome them.

For something no one likes, pain does us a whole hell of a lot of good.

Stepping back into my old self and moving instantly into violent motion hurt like hell.

It.

Was.

Amazing.

I let out a whoop of sheer adrenaline and mad joy as Boz tumbled back over Mort’s recumbent form.

“Oof!” Mort shouted. “Dresden!”

A howl of excitement came rolling out of Sir Stuart’s throat and he clenched his fist in vicious satisfaction, flashing briefly into full color. “Aye, set boot to arse, boy!”

Boz came up into a crouch pretty smoothly for someone of his bulk and stayed there, low and on all fours, an animal that saw no advantage in learning to stand erect. Absolutely no sign of discomfort showed on his face, even though I’d split open his cheek with the blow from my staff and blood joined the other substances encrusting his face.

Hell’s bells. My staff wasn’t exactly a toothpick. It was as heavy as three baseball bats. I wasn’t a toothpick, either. I wasn’t sure of my weight in baseball bats, but I could look down at a lot of guys in the NBA, and I wasn’t a scrawny kid anymore. The point being that the blow, delivered with all the power of my shoulders, hips, and legs as well as my arms, should have knocked Boz out—or killed him outright. I’d been aiming for his temple. He’d jerked his head back so that the end of my staff hit his left cheekbone instead. Hell, I might have broken it.

But instead of collapsing in pain, he just crouched there, silent, stony eyes looking right through me as he faced me without flinching. I began to gather my will and staggered, nearly falling on my face. I had nothing left. It was only that burning flash of irrational certainty that had driven me to attempt to manifest that was keeping me on my feet at all—and I realized with a cold little chill that I might not be able to stop Boz from killing Morty.

“Good Lord, I’m regretting this now,” I muttered. “I have never—ever—smelled BO this bad in my life. And I once had s’mores with a Sasquatch.”

“Hang out with him for a while,” Mort gasped. “Eventually it’s not so bad.”

“Wow. Really?”

“No. Not really.”

I kept my eyes on Boz, but did my best to grin at Mort. He’d been strung up and tortured by lunatics for almost twenty-four hours, and his executioner was still trying to finish the job, but he still had the guts to engage in badinage. Anyone with that kind of spirit in the face of horror is okay in my book.

Boz came at me like a predator—a smooth, swift motion that moved his whole body at once, unfettered by any kind of reluctance or hesitation. He never rose to do it, either. He flung himself forward as much with his arms as his legs, and his body’s center of mass never came much higher than my knees.

I gave him a boot to the head. I literally kicked him in the head with my hiking boot, and it was like stubbing my toe on a large rock. He just plowed on through the kick and hit me at the knees. Boz had a lot of mass. We went down, me on my ass, him lying on my lower legs. He started trying to claw his way up my body to my throat. I declined to allow him such liberties, and communicated that desire to him by thrusting the end of my staff at his neck.

He slapped at the staff with one paw and caught it in an iron grip. I tried to roll away. He got his other hand on the weapon. We wrenched and wrestled for control of it. He was stronger than me. He was heavier than me. I had slightly more leverage, but not enough to make the difference.

Then Boz surged forward, driving with tree-trunk legs, and I went down on my back. All his weight came down on the staff and he drove it toward my throat.

Temporary body or not, it still worked the same way as the one I was used to. If Boz crushed my windpipe, the body would die. If that happened, I assumed I would be left behind, immaterial again, while the false flesh collapsed into ectoplasm—the way ghosts and demons were driven back to their spirit forms when their temporary bodies were destroyed. But we were getting pretty far out of my comfort zone when it came to ghostly lore.

Boz bore down, and it was all I could do to keep him from choking me with my own staff. I couldn’t even dream of moving him. He had seventy-five or eighty pounds on me, all of them solid, stinking mass, and he was coming at me with a silently psychotic determination.

But he hadn’t realized where we had fallen.

I released the staff with my right hand, and his shoulders bunched, his back rounding out in a massive hump of trapezius muscles. My one hand wasn’t able to do much to hold him back, and I felt the harsh pain of blood trying to hammer through the arteries Boz was compressing.

With my right hand, I seized the ends of the jumper cables still attached to the heavy-duty automobile battery, the one Morty had been tortured with—and jammed the metal ends of them both against the freshly blood-soaked side of Boz’s face.

It wasn’t exactly a surgical strike. I was holding both clamps in the same hand and only a couple of seconds from being choked unconscious, after all, but it worked. The clamps touched each other and wet skin, and sparks flew. Boz convulsed and jerked away from the sudden source of agony, a reflex action as immutable as pulling your arm away from a searing-hot pan handle. He shifted his weight and I pushed up, adding every ounce of muscle I had to aid the movement. He pitched off me, rolling, and I followed him, letting go of the staff and looping the main body of the jumper cable around his neck. He thrashed and tried to get away, but I had gotten onto his back and locked my legs around his hips. I grabbed the cable in both hands and hauled back on it with everything I had.

It was over pretty quick, though it didn’t feel like it at the time. Boz thrashed and struggled, but as heavily muscled as he was, he wasn’t flexible enough to get his arms back and up to reach where I was on his back, so he couldn’t pull me off. He tried to break away, but between the cable and the grip of my legs, he wasn’t able to shake me off. He tried to get his fingers in beneath the jumper cable, but though he managed to get in a couple of digits, I was pulling too hard and was more than strong enough to outmuscle one of his fingers.

I don’t care how crazy you are; when your brain doesn’t get oxygen, you go down. Boz did, too. I held the choke for another ten seconds to make sure he wasn’t playing possum on me, and then for fifteen. Then twenty. Someone was snarling a string of curses and I hadn’t realized it was me. The simple sensation of straining power, of primal victory, surged through me like a drug, and only the coup de grace remained.

I ground my teeth. I’d killed men and women before but never when I’d had an alternative. I might be a fighter, but I wasn’t a killer, not when there was a choice. I forced myself to let go of the cables, and Boz flopped to the ground, entirely limp but alive. I had to roll him off one of my legs, pushing with my other heel, but he finally went, and I shambled upright, breathing hard. Then I turned to Mort and started untying knots.

He watched me with wary eyes. “Dresden. What you’re doing . . . being in the flesh like that. It isn’t right.”

“I know,” I said. “But no one else was going to do it.”

He shook his head. “I’m just saying . . . it isn’t good for you. Those spirits, the ones I’d been sheltering—they weren’t any different from any other ghost when they got started. Doing this . . . It does things to you long-term. You’ll change.” He leaned a little toward me. “Right now, you’re still you. But what you felt there, at the end—it grows. Keep doing this and you won’t be you anymore.”

“I’m almost done,” I told him, jerking the ropes clear as fast as I could. It took a bit. They’d strung him up pretty carefully, distributing his weight across a lot of rope. I guess Corpsetaker hadn’t wanted to spend several hours getting her limbs back under control once Mort cracked.

He groaned and tried to sit up. It took him a couple of attempts, but when I tried to help him, he waved my offer away.

“Can you walk?” I asked him.

He shuddered. “I can damned well walk out of here. Just give me a minute.”

“I don’t have it,” I said. “I’ve got to move.”

“Why?”

“Because my friends are up there somewhere.”

He sucked in a breath.

“I know,” I said with a grimace. Then I rose, grabbed my staff, and started walking toward the stairs.

“Stu,” I heard Mort say. “You know knots, right?”

I glanced back and saw Sir Stuart nod. Mort nodded back and started gathering up the coils of rope I’d pulled off him. He beckoned to Sir Stuart. “Come in. I don’t want the man mountain there getting up and finishing what he started.”

I almost hesitated, to make sure Mort was all right, but I’d spent too much time down here already, and I could feel the hectic buzz of my fatigue growing by the moment. I had to get upstairs.

There was only one reason Corpsetaker would have taken down her own wards as she had. She wasn’t limited to such a small sampling of humanity now, when it came to seizing a new body. She’d wanted people to come inside her lair.

It would give her more variety to choose from.

I rushed up the stairs, praying that I would be in time to stop Kemmler’s protégé from taking one of my friends—for keeps.