Ghost Story

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