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
“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
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.
Chapter Forty-eight
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
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
