coating of snow from their little branches.
What was left of Sir Stuart lay in a circle in the snow.
They’d used fire.
A perfect circle was melted in the show, out toward the back of the yard. They’d used gasoline, it looked like—the snow was melted down all the way to the scorched grass. Alcohol burns about three times as hot as gas, and faster, and it melts the snow fast enough for water to drown the flame. Someone had used the fire as part of a circle trap—pretty standard for dealing with spirits and other heavily supernatural entities. Once trapped in a circle, a spirit was effectively helpless; unable to leave, and unable to exercise power through its barrier.
The devilish part of the trap was the fire. Fire’s real, even to spirits, and brings pain to the immaterial as fast as it does to flesh-and-blood creatures. That’s one huge reason I always used fire in my mortal career. Fire burns, period. Even practically invulnerable things don’t like dealing with fire.
There was maybe half of Sir Stuart left. Most of his upper body was there and part of his right arm. His legs were mostly gone. There wasn’t any blood. What was left of him looked like a roll of papers rescued from a fire. The edges were blackened and crumbling slowly away.
The horrible part was that I knew he was still alive, or what passed for being alive among ghosts. Otherwise, he would simply be gone.
Did he feel pain? I knew that if I were in his condition, I would. Sure, maybe I knew that there was no spoon, but when it came down to it, I wasn’t sure I could deny that much apparent reality. Or maybe the memory of pain wasn’t an issue. Maybe the weird form of pain Eternal Silence had showed me had some sort of spiritual analogue. Or maybe, fire being fire, he was just in very real, very familiar agony.
I shuddered. Not that I could do anything about it. The circle that trapped him would keep me out as easily as it kept him in. In theory, I could take it down, but only if I could physically move something across it to break its continuity. I looked around quickly and spotted a twig standing out of the snow a few feet away. All I would need to do was move it about three feet.
It was like trying to eat broth with a fork. I just couldn’t get hold of the stick. My hand went through it time and time again, no matter what I tried. I couldn’t even get the damned thing to wiggle.
I wasn’t ghost enough to help Sir Stuart. Not like that, anyway.
“Sir Stuart?” I asked quietly.
I could see only one of his eyes. It half opened. “Hmmmm?”
I squatted down on my heels next to the circle. “It’s Harry Dresden.”
“Dresden,” he slurred, and his mouth turned up in a faint smile. “Pardon me if I don’t rise. Perhaps it was something I ate.”
“Of course,” I said. “What happened?”
“I was a fool,” he said. “Our attacker came at the same time every night. I made the mistake of assuming that was true because it was as soon as the attacker could assemble his forces.”
“The Grey Ghost,” I said.
Sir Stuart grunted. “Arrived at dusk, sooner than I would have dared the open air. No mob of spirits this time. It came with half a dozen mortals and they set the house on fire. I was able to get Mortimer out of the house in time, but they’d set a trap for me in the backyard.” One hand gestured at the circle within which he lay. “He was taken at the command of the Grey Ghost.”
I frowned. “These mortals. They could hear the Grey Ghost?”
“Aye,” Sir Stuart said.
“Stars and stones,” I growled. “I could barely get two people in Chicago to hear me. This joker has half a dozen? How?”
Sir Stuart shook his head faintly. “Would that I knew.”
“We’ll find Morty,” I said. “Let me figure out how to get you out of there, and then we’ll go find him.”
He opened his eyes fully and focused on me for the first time. “No,” he said in a gentle voice. “I won’t.”
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t talk like that. We’ll get you patched up.”
Sir Stuart let out a small laugh. “Nay, wizard. Too much of me has been lost. I’ve only held together this long so that I could speak to you.”
“What happened to our world being mutable in time with our expectations? Isn’t that still true?”
“To a degree,” Sir Stuart said affably, weakly. “I’ve been injured before. Small hurts are restored simply enough.” He gestured at his broken body. “But this? I’ll be like the others when I restore myself.”
“The others?”
“The warriors who defended Mortimer’s home,” he said. “They faded over time. Forgetting, little by little, about their mortal lives.”
I thought about the soldiers I’d seen battling the enemy shades and wraiths—silent, severe, seemingly disconnected from the world around them. They’d fought loyally and ably enough. But I was willing to bet that they couldn’t remember why they did so or who they were fighting.
I imagined Sir Stuart like the rest of them—a translucent outline, his empty eyes focused on something else entirely. Always faithful. Always silent.
I shivered.
It could happen to me, too.
“Listen to me, boy,” Sir Stuart said. “We didn’t trust you. We assumed you were mixed up in whatever it is the Grey Ghost wanted.”
“Like hell,” I said.
“You don’t know that,” Sir Stuart said flatly. “For all we knew, you could have been directed by that creature without your own knowledge. For that matter, you don’t have the feel of a normal ghost. It could have created you whole from the spirit world.”
I scowled and began to argue—and couldn’t. I’ve been faced with the odd and unusual and had drawn incorrect conclusions too many times. When people are scared, they don’t think straight. Mort had been terrified.
“Do you still think that?” I asked.
“No reason for you to be here if you were,” Sir Stuart said. “The worst has happened. Were you a plant, you would not have come. Though I suppose you might still be a dupe.”
“Thanks,” I said wryly.
He softened the words with another smile. “But dupe or not, it may be that ye can help Mortimer. And it is critical that you do so. Without his influence, this city will be in terrible danger.”
“Yeah, you aren’t exactly increasing the tension by telling me that,” I said. “We’re already sort of playing for maximum stakes.”
“I know not what you mean,” Sir Stuart replied. “But I tell you this: Those shades standing around the house, one and all, are murderers.”
I blinked and looked back at the still-smoldering house and at the enormous circle of spirits around it.
“Each and every one of them,” Sir Stuart said. “Mortimer gave them something they needed to turn aside from their madness: a home. If you do not restore him to freedom so that he may care for these poor souls, they will kill again. As sure as the sun rises, they won’t be able to help themselves.” He exhaled wearily and closed his eyes. “Fifty years of maddened shades unleashed upon the city all at once. Preying on mortals. Blood will run in buckets.”
I stared at him for a moment. Then I said, “How am I supposed to do that?”
“I’ve not the foggiest,” Sir Stuart replied. He fumbled at his belt and drew that monster pistol. He paused for a moment, grimacing. Then he tossed it weakly at my feet. It tumbled through the circle with a flicker of energies and landed atop the snow without sinking into it—the apparition of a weapon.
I stared for a second. A spirit couldn’t project its power across a circle—and I was sure that power was exactly what the gun represented. So if it had crossed the circle’s barrier, it meant that it was power that no longer belonged to Sir Stuart. On several levels, what he had just done was a violent act of self-mutilation—like chopping off your own hand.
He gestured weakly toward the gun, and said, “Take it.”
I picked it up gingerly. It weighed a ton. “What am I going to do with this?”
“Help Mortimer,” he replied. His shape began to flicker and fade at the edges. “I’m sorry. That I couldn’t do
