Ghost Story

Chapter Seven

Mort drove one of those little hybrid cars that, when not running on gasoline, was fueled by idealism. It was made out of crepe paper and duct tape and boasted a computer system that looked like it could have run the NYSE and NORAD, with enough attention left over to play tic-tac-toe. Or possibly Global Thermonuclear War.

“Kinda glad I’m dead,” I muttered, getting into the car by the simple expedient of stepping through the passenger’s door as if it had been open. “If I were still breathing, I’d feel like I was taking my life into my hands here. This thing’s an egg. And not one of those nice, safe, hard-boiled eggs. A crispy one.”

“Says the guy who drove Herbie’s trailer-park cousin around for more than ten years,” Mort sniped back.

“Gentlemen,” Stuart said, settling rather gingerly into the tiny backseat. “Is there a particular reason we should be disagreeable with one another, or do you both take some sort of infantile pleasure in being insufferably rude?”

Now that the fighting was done, Sir Stuart’s mannerisms were reverting to something more formal. I made a mental note of the fact. The Colonial Marine hadn’t started off a member of proper society, wherever he’d been. The rather staid, formal, archaic phrasing and patterns of speech were all something he’d acquired as a learned habit—one that apparently deserted him under the pressure of combat.

“Okay, Dresden,” Mort said. “Where to?” He opened his garage door and peered out at the snow. It was coming down even more thickly than earlier in the night. Chicago is pretty good about keeping its streets cleared in winter weather, but it was freaking May.

From the deep piles of old snow that had apparently been there for a number of weeks, I deduced that the city must have become increasingly beleaguered by the unseasonable weather. The streets were covered in several inches of fresh powder. No plow had been by Mort’s house in hours. If we hit a patch of ice, that heavy, crunchy little hybrid was going to skitter like a puppy on a tile floor.

Thinking, I referenced a mental map of the city. I felt a little bad making Mort come out into weather like this—I mean, given that he wasn’t dead and all. I was going to feel like crap if something bad happened to him, and it wouldn’t be a kindness to ask him to go farther than he absolutely had to. Besides, with the weather worsening, his one-hour time limit seemed to put further constraints on my options.

“Murphy’s place,” I said quietly. I gave him the address.

Mort grunted. “The ex-cop?”

I nodded. Murph had gotten herself fired by showing up to help me one too many times. She’d known what she was doing, and she’d made her own choices, but I still felt bad about it. Dying hadn’t changed that. “She’s a pretty sharp lady. Better able than most in this town to look out for you.”

Mort grunted again and pulled out into the snow, driving slowly and carefully. He was careful to keep his expression blank as he did it.

“Mort,” I said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“Driving over here,” he said.

I made a rude sound. Then I looked back over my shoulder at Sir Stuart. “Well?”

Sir Stuart reached into his coat and drew out what looked like a briar pipe. He tapped something from a pouch into it, struck an old wooden match, and puffed it to life. The smoke rose until it touched the ceiling of the car, where it congealed into a thin coating of shining ectoplasm—the residue of the spiritual when it becomes the physical.

“To hear him tell it,” he said, finally, indicating Mort, “the world’s gone to hell the past few months. Though I’ve got to admit, it doesn’t seem much different to me. Everything’s been madness since those computers showed up.”

I snorted. “What’s changed?”

“The scuttlebutt says that you killed the whole Red Court of Vampires,” said Sir Stuart. “Any truth to that?”

“They abducted my daughter,” I said. I tried for a neutral tone, but it came out clipped and hard. I hadn’t even known Maggie existed until Susan Rodriguez had shown up out of nowhere after years overseas and begged for my help in recovering our daughter. I’d set out to get her back by any means necessary.

I shivered. I’d . . . done things, to get the child away from the monstrous hands of the Red Court. Things I wasn’t proud of. Things I would never have dreamed I would be willing to do.

I could still remember the hot flash of red from a cut throat beneath my fingers, and I had to bow my head for a moment in an effort to keep the memory from surging into my thoughts in all its hideous splendor. Maggie. Chichén Itzá. The Red King. Susan.

Susan’s blood . . . everywhere.

I forced myself to speak to Sir Stuart. “I don’t know what you heard. But I went and got my girl back and put her in good hands. Her mother and a whole lot of vampires died before it was over.”

“All of them?” Sir Stuart pressed.

I was quiet for a moment before I nodded. “Maybe. Yeah. I mean, I couldn’t exactly take a census. The spell could have missed some of the very youngest, depending on the details of how it was set up. But every single one of the bastards nearby me died. And the spell was meant to wipe the world clean of whoever it targeted.”

Mort made a choking sound. “Couldn’t . . . I mean, wouldn’t the White Council get upset about that? Killing with magic, I mean?”

I shrugged. “The Red King was about to use the spell on an eightyear-old girl. If the Council doesn’t like how I stopped that from happening, they can kiss my immaterial ass.” I found myself chuckling. “Besides. I killed vampires, not mortals, with that magic. And what are they gonna do anyway? Chop my head off? I’m dead already.”

I saw Mort trade a look with Sir Stuart in the rearview mirror.

“Why are you so angry at them, Harry?” Mort asked me.

I frowned at him and then at Stuart. “Why do I feel like I should be lying on a couch somewhere?”

“A shade is formed when something significant is left incomplete,” Sir Stuart said. “Part of what we do is work out what’s causing you to hold on to your life so hard. That means asking questions.”

“What? So I can go on my way? Or something?”

“Otherwise known as leaving me alone,” Mort muttered.

“Something like that,” Sir Stuart said quickly, before I could fire back at Mort. “We just want to help.”

I gave Sir Stuart the eye and then Mort. “That’s what you do? Lay spirits to rest?”

Mort shrugged. “If someone didn’t, this town would run out of cemetery space pretty fast.”

I thought about that for a moment. Then I said, “So how come you haven’t laid Sir Stuart to rest?”

Mort said nothing. His silence was a barbed, stony thing.

Sir Stuart leaned forward to put a hand on Mort’s shoulder, seemed to squeeze it a little, and let go. Then he said to me, “Some things can’t be mended, lad. Not by all the king’s horses or all the king’s men.”

“You’re trapped here,” I said quietly.

“Were I trapped, it would indicate that I am the original Sir Stuart. I am not. I am but his shade. One could think of it that way nonetheless, I suppose,” he said. “But I prefer to consider it differently: I regard myself as someone who was truly created with a specific purpose for his existence. I have a reason to be who and what and where I am. How many flesh-and-blood folk can say as much?”

I scowled as I watched the snowy road ahead of us. “And what’s your purpose? Looking out after this loser?”

“Hey, I’m sitting right here,” Mort complained.

“I help other lost spirits,” Sir Stuart said. “Help them find some sort of resolution. Help teach them how to stay sane, if it is their destiny to become a mane. And if they become a lemur, I help introduce them to oblivion.”

I turned to frown at Sir Stuart. “That’s . . . kinda cut-and-dried.”

“Some things assuredly are,” he replied placidly.

“So you’re a mane, eh? Like the old Roman ancestral ghost?”

“It isn’t such a simple matter, Dresden. Your own White Council is a famous bunch of namers,” he said. “Their history is, I have heard, rooted in old Rome.”

“Yeah,” I said.

He nodded. “And, like the Romans, they love to name and classify and outline facts to the smallest, permanently inflexible, set-in-stone detail. The truth, however, is that the world of remnant spirits is not easily cataloged or defined.” He shrugged. “I dwell in Chicago. I defend Mortimer’s home. I am what I am.”

I grunted. After a few moments, I asked, “You teach new spirits?”

“Of course.”

“Then can I ask you some questions?”

“By all means.”

Mort muttered, “Here we go.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m a ghost and all now. And I can go through just about anything—like I went through this car door to get inside.”

“Yes,” Sir Stuart said, a faint smile outlining his mouth.

“So how come my ass doesn’t go through the seat when I sit down on—”

I was rudely interrupted by the tingling sensation of passing through solid matter, beginning at my butt and moving rapidly up my spine. Cold snow started slamming into my rear end, and I let out a yelp of pure surprise.

Sir Stuart had evidently known what was coming. He reached over, grabbed me by the front of my leather duster, and unceremoniously dragged me back up into the car and sat me on the seat beside him, back in the passenger compartment. I clutched at the door handle and the seat in front of me for stability, only to have my hands go right through them. I pitched forward, spinning as if I were floating in water, and this time it was my face plunging toward the icy street.

Sir Stuart hauled me back again and said, in a faintly annoyed tone, “Mortimer.”

Mort didn’t say anything, but when I was once again sitting down, I didn’t fall right through the bottom of the car. He smirked at me in the rearview mirror.

“You don’t fall through the bottom of the car because on some deep, instinctual level, you regard it as a given of existence here,” Sir Stuart said. “You are entirely convinced that illusions such as gravity and solidity are real.”

“There is no spoon,” I said.

Sir Stuart looked at me blankly.

I sighed. “If I believe in an illusory reality so much, then how come I can walk through walls?” I asked.

“Because you are convinced, on the same level, that ghosts can do precisely that.”

I felt my eyebrows trying to meet as I frowned. “So . . . you’re saying I don’t fall through the ground because I don’t think I should?”

“Say instead that it is because you assume that you will not,” he replied. “Which is why, once you actively considered the notion, you did fall through the floor.”

I shook my head slowly. “How do I keep from doing it again?”

“Mortimer is preventing it, for the time being. My advice to you is not to think about too much,” Sir Stuart said, his tone serious. “Just go about your business.”

“You can’t not think about something,” I said. “Quick, don’t think about a purple elephant. I dare you.”

Sir Stuart let out a broad laugh, but stopped and clutched at his wounded flank. I could tell it hurt him, but he still wore the smile the laugh had brought on. “It usually takes them longer to recognize that fact,” he said. “You’re right, of course. And there will be times when you feel like you have no control whatsoever over such things.”

“Why?” I asked, feeling somewhat exasperated.

Sir Stuart wasn’t rattled by my tone. “It’s something every new shade goes through. It will pass.”

“Huh,” I said. I thought about it for a minute and said, “Well. It beats the hell out of acne.”

From the front seat, Mort let out an explosive little snicker.

Stars and stones, I hate being the new guy.