Ghost Story (59 page)

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.

I
pounded up the stairs and found that it was getting dark. Dammit. I'd gotten way too used to the upside of ghostliness. I reached up to my neck to find my mother's pentacle amulet and . . .

. . . and it wasn't there. Which it
should
have been. I mean, my actual duster had been destroyed, but the one I was wearing was an exact duplicate. There was no reason my mother's amulet shouldn't have been there, but it wasn't. That was possibly something significant.

But I didn't have time to worry about it at the moment. Instead, I sent a whisper of will into my staff, and the runes carved in it began to glow with blue-white wizard light, casting their shapes in pure light on the moldy stone walls and floor of the hallway, showing me the way. I didn't have much magic left in me, but a simple light spell was much, much easier than any kind of violent spell, requiring far less energy.

I ran down the hall, past the filthy sleeping rooms with curtains for doors, and through the break in the wall, to the old electrical-junction room.

A flashlight lay on the floor, spilling light onto a patch of wolf fur from a couple of inches away and otherwise doing nothing to illuminate the scene. I had to brighten the light from my staff to see that Murphy and the wolves were lying in a heap on the floor, next to the unconscious Big Hoods.

The Corpsetaker was nowhere to be seen.

Neither was Molly.

I turned in a slow circle, looking for any sign of what had happened, and found nothing.

Feet scraped on rock and I turned swiftly, bringing up my staff, ready to unleash whatever power I had left in me—and found Butters standing halfway down the stairs, looking like a rabbit about to bolt. His face was pale as a sheet behind his glasses, and his dark hair was a wild mess.

“My God,” he breathed. “Dresden?”

“Back for a limited engagement,” I breathed, lowering the staff. “Butters, what happened?”

“I . . . I don't know. They started shouting something and then they just . . . just collapsed.”

“And you didn't?” I asked.

“I was out there,” he said, pointing behind him. “You know. Looking out for the police or whatever.”

“Being Eyes, huh?” I said. I turned back to Murphy and the wolves.

“Yeah, pretty much,” he said. He moved quietly down the stairs. “Are they all right?”

I crouched down over Murphy and felt her neck. Her pulse was strong and steady. Ditto for the nearest of the wolves. “Yeah,” I said, my heart slowing down a little. “I think s—”

Something cold and hard pressed against the back of my head. I looked down.

Murphy's SIG was missing from its holster.

“Everyone trusts a doctor,” purred Butters, in a tone of voice that Butters would
never
have used. “Even wizards, Dresden.”

I felt myself tensing. “Corpsetaker.”

“You were able to manifest after all? Intriguing. You've a natural gift for darker magic, I think. My master would have snapped you up in an instant.”

I'd spent an afternoon with Murphy working on gun disarms, at Dough Joe's Hurricane Gym. I tried to remember which way I had to spin to attempt to take the gun away. It depended on how it was being held—and I had no idea how Corpsetaker was holding the weapon on me. I was pretty sure Butters was a lefty, but I didn't think that would matter to the Corpsetaker once she set up shop. “Oh, boy. I could have hung out with people like you? I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have worked out.”

“Possibly not,” Corpsetaker said. “I accorded you far more respect than you merited, as an opponent. How much of you is left behind that body you've cobbled together? Scarcely more than one of those pathetic wraiths, I think. You could have made a viable move in time, but clearly you've no patience, no head for strategy.”

“Yeah. I guess I've still got a soul and a conscience where you installed that stuff.”

“Soul? Conscience?” Corpsetaker said, almost laughing. “Those are nothing but words. They aren't even true limits—just the figments of them. Useless.”

“Just because something isn't solid doesn't mean it isn't real,” I said. “If you had a brain in your head, you'd know that.”

“You're obsessed with the fantasies of the young,” she replied with my friend's breath. “Though I must admit that that the ironic reversal of our current state is simply delicious.”

And without a hesitation or any change in the tone of her voice, she put a bullet into the back of my head.

The pain was infinitely brief and indescribable, a massive spike of agony that felt as if it should have sent me flying. I saw a cloud of something fly forward and then splatter all over one of the wolves and the nearest Big Hood. Ectoplasm, I realized dully. My physical body had been destroyed. It had fallen back into the spirit matter from which I'd formed it.

The pain faded, and then I was back in the still, neutral absence of sensation of the ghost state. I reached for the splattered matter with an instinctive, unspoken yearning to return to it.

I could barely see my hand.

I tried to turn around, but it felt like I was submerged in something thicker and more viscous than water, and it took forever.

I stared into the Corpsetaker's eyes within Butters's face and watched the body-jumping lunatic smirk at me. “Not much of you now, is there?” she murmured. “You'll be a wraith within days. I think that balances our account. Enjoy eternity, Dresden.”

I tried to snarl a curse, but I was just so tired. I couldn't get the sound to come out of me. And by the time I had tried, Corpsetaker had taken Butters's body back to the bottom of the stairs. She was moving so
fast
.

Or . . . or maybe I was just that slow.

I tried to follow, and all I could manage was to drift in the Corpsetaker's wake, moving with grace, but slowly. So slowly.

Corpsetaker made a gesture and a veil fell away from another shade at the top of the stairs. It was Butters. He stood there dressed not in his winter gear, but in the scrubs I was far more used to seeing him wear. He was completely motionless except for his eyes, which rolled around frantically. A rapidly evaporating puddle of ectoplasm spread at his feet. An expression of pure confusion was locked onto his face.

Corpsetaker had been a big fan of body switching. When she left me and Morty in the basement, she must have come directly up here to grab a new body. She'd probably dropped some variant of a sleeping spell on Murphy and the wolves—and then Butters must have shown up.

Corpsetaker had gone with her usual trick, forcibly trading bodies with a victim—and the manifested ghost body she'd been in had fallen back into ectoplasm the moment she wasn't there to give it energy and form. Butters's essence, his
soul
, had just been booted out of his body, and now it stood there, vulnerable and unmoving—brightly colored but fading away, even as I watched. She'd tossed a quick veil over Butters's shade so that no one who might come upon her would see him standing there, forlorn and confused, while she drove around in his hijacked body.

The thing that really got to me? Corpsetaker threw a little smirk back at me as she got to Butters's shade. There wasn't anything I could do to stop her, but she wanted me to see how thoroughly she'd outthought and outmaneuvered me.

But the universe has a funny sense of humor, and apparently it's not
always
aimed at me. While Corpsetaker looked back at me to smirk, Molly rippled forth from under a veil of her own, on the last step between Butters's stolen body and the explosion-chewed door. She grabbed the Corpsetaker by the front of Butters's coat. Butters wasn't exactly heroic in build. Molly, on the other hand, was several inches taller than he and had her mother's genes, everything I'd been able to teach her about mixing it up, and six months of hard time under the tender guiding hand of the Leanansidhe.

Molly slammed the Corpsetaker against the wall so hard that stolen teeth slammed together. Then she seized Butters's freaking
face
in a clawlike hand and thrust her head close, locking eyes with the Corpsetaker.

I wanted to scream a negation, but nothing came out. I frantically tried to move faster. If I succeeded, it didn't show.

“You want to play head games?” Molly snarled, her blue eyes blazing. “Let's go.”

The Corpsetaker's face contorted into an expression somewhere between murderous rage and that of an orgasm, and she opened her stolen eyes wide.

Molly and the dark wizard went into a soulgaze, and there wasn't a thing I could do about it—except keep trying to get closer.

I could feel power flickering between them, though, like bursts of heat coming out of a furnace, as I got glacially nearer. It was an entirely invisible struggle, a simultaneous and mutual siege of the personality. Mind magic is dangerous, slippery stuff, and doing combat with another mind is all about imagination, focus, and sheer willpower. Right now, Molly was thrusting an array of images and ideas at the Corpsetaker, trying to force the other to pay attention to them. Some of the thoughts would be there to undermine defenses, others to assault them, and still others trying to slip past unnoticed to wreak havoc from within. Some of the thoughts would be simple things—whispered doubts meant to shake the other's confidence, for example. Others would be far more complex constructions, idea demons imagined ahead of time, prepared for such an occasion and unleashed upon the thoughts and memories of the foe.