Ghost Story

Murphy shrugged. “Least said, soonest mended.”

My apprentice sighed and began pulling her tattered layers about herself a little more securely. “Mr. Lindquist appears to be working in good faith. I’ll come back tomorrow with something that might let you communicate with Harry’s shade a little more easily.”

“Thank you,” Murphy said. “While you’re at it, it might be smart to—”

There was the sudden blaring of a pocket-sized air horn from outside.

Mort hopped up from his seat into a crouch, ready either to run or to fling himself heroically to the floor. “What was that?”

“Trouble,” Murphy said, unlimbering her gun. “Get d—”

She hadn’t finished speaking when gunfire roared outside and bullets began ripping through the windows and the walls.

Chapter Twelve

I did what any sane person would do in a situation like that. I threw myself to the ground.

“Oh, honestly, Dresden,” Sir Stuart snapped. He sprinted toward the gunfire, out through the wall of the house. I actually saw the building’s wards flare up with spectral, blue-white light around him as he went through unimpeded.

“Right, dummy,” I growled at myself. “You’re already dead.” I got up and ran after the elder shade.

The living were all kissing hardwood floor as I plunged into the wall of the house. I wasn’t worried about the wards keeping me in—no one ever designed their wards so that bad things couldn’t leave, only so that they couldn’t enter. Besides, I’d had an invitation to come in, which technically made me a friendly—but I found out that “friendly” wards operated on much the same principle as “friendly” fire. Going out through the warded wall didn’t just tingle unpleasantly. I felt like I’d just plunged naked down a waterslide lined with steel wool.

“Aaaaaaaagh!” I screamed, emerging from the wards and onto Murphy’s front lawn, chock-full of new insight as to why ghosts are always moaning or wailing when they come popping out of somebody’s wall or floor. Not much mystery there—it freaking hurts.

I staggered for several steps and looked up in time to see the drive-by still in progress. They were in a pickup truck. Someone in the passenger’s compartment had the barrel of a shotgun sticking out the window, and four figures in dark clothing crouched in the truck’s cargo bed, pointing what looked like assault weapons and submachine guns at Murphy’s house. They were cutting loose with them, too, flashes of thunder and lightning too bright and loud to be real, seemingly magnified by the quiet, still air between the snow and the streetlights.

These guys weren’t real pros. I’d seen true professional gunmen in action, and these jokers didn’t look anything like them. They just pointed the business end more or less in a general direction and sprayed bullets. It wasn’t the disciplined fire of true professionals, but if you throw out enough bullets, you’re bound to hit something.

Bullets went through me, half a dozen flashes of tingling discomfort too brief to be more than an annoyance, and I suddenly found myself sprinting toward the truck beside Sir Stuart, exhilarated. Being bulletproof is kind of a rush.

“What are we doing?” I shouted at him. “I mean, what are we accomplishing here? We can’t do anything to them. Can we?”

“Watch and learn, lad!” Sir Stuart called, his teeth bared in a wolfish grin. “On three, be on the truck!”

“What!? Uh, I think—”

“Don’t think,” the shade shouted. “Just do it! Let your instincts guide you! Be on the truck! One, two . . .” The shade’s feet struck the ground hard twice, like a long jumper at the end of his approach. I followed Sir Stuart’s example on little more than reflex.

A sudden memory flashed into my head—a school playground from my childhood, where mock Olympic Games were being run, students competing against one another. The sun was hot above us, making the petroleum smell of warm asphalt rise from the surface of the playground. I had been competing in the running long jump, and it hadn’t been going well. I forget exactly why I was so desperate to win, but I was fixated on it as only a child could be. I remembered willing myself to win, to run faster, to jump farther, as I sprinted down the lane toward the pink-chalk jump line.

It was the first time I used magic.

I had no idea at the time, naturally. But I remembered the feeling of utter elation that flooded through me, along with an invisible force that pushed against my back as I leapt, and for just an instant I thought I had spontaneously learned to fly like Superman.

Reality reasserted itself in rapid order. I fell, out of control, my arms spinning like a windmill. I went down on the blacktop and left generous patches of skin on its surface. I remember how much it hurt—and how I didn’t care because I’d won.

I broke the Iowa state high school long-jump record by more than a foot. It didn’t stick, though. They disqualified me. I hadn’t even gotten serious about puberty yet. Clearly, something irregular had happened, mistakes had been made, and surely the best thing was to ignore the anomalous leap.

It was a vivid recollection, silly and a little sad—and it was my first time.

It was a powerful memory.

“Three!” Sir Stuart cried, and leapt.

So did I, my eyes and will locked on the retreating pickup full of gunmen.

There was a twisting, dizzying sensation that reminded me very strongly of a potion Bob had helped me mix up when I’d tangled with the Shadowman. It was that same experience: a feeling of flying apart into zillions of pieces, rushing forward at a speed too great to be measured, only to abruptly coalesce again.

There was a sudden cold wind against my face and I staggered, nearly falling off the roof of the pickup as it continued to slowly accelerate down the street.

“Holy crap!” I said, as a huge smile stretched my face. “That was cool. First Shadowcat, now Nightcrawler!”

I turned to find Sir Stuart standing on the bed of the truck, looking up at me with a disapproving eyebrow lifted. One of the shooters’ backs was in the same space as the shade’s right leg.

“Doesn’t that hurt?” I asked him, nodding to his leg.

“Hmmm?” Sir Stuart said. He glanced down and saw what I was talking about. “Oh. I suppose, yes. I stopped noticing it after seventy or eighty years. Now. If you don’t mind, Dresden, might we proceed?”

“To do what?” I asked.

“To teach you what are obviously badly needed lessons,” Sir Stuart said, “and to stop these pirates.” He spat the last word with a startling amount of venom.

I frowned and eyed the gunmen, who were all reloading, having emptied their weapons in sheer, nervous excitement. They weren’t particularly good at reloading, either.

“Hell, one man with a handgun could take them all right now,” I said. “Too bad neither of us has one.”

“We cannot touch flesh,” Sir Stuart said. “And while it is possible for a shade to, for example, move an object, it is impractical. With practice, you could push a penny across a table over the course of a couple of minutes.”

“Too bad neither of us has a penny,” I said.

He ignored me entirely. “That’s because we can put forth only minuscule physical force. You couldn’t lift the coin into the air against the pull of gravity.”

I frowned. This sounded a lot like a basic lesson most young wizards received. Most of the time, when you wanted to move something around, you didn’t have the kind of energy you needed stored inside you. That didn’t mean you couldn’t move it, though. It just meant you had to get the energy to do so from another source. “But . . . you can co-opt energy from elsewhere?”

The big man pointed an index finger at me, a smile stretching his mouth. “Excellent. We cannot interact with something being moved by a living creature. We can’t even touch an object that is being carried too closely to a