Ghost Story

more. Couldn’t teach you more.” He opened his eyes again and leaned toward me, his expression intent. “Memories, Dresden. They’re power. They’re weapons. Make from your memory a weapon against them.” His voice lost its strength and his eyes sagged closed. “Three centuries of playing guardian . . . but I’ve failed my trust. Redeem my promise. Please. Help Mortimer.”

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I will.”

That faint smile appeared again, and Sir Stuart nodded once. Then he let out his breath in a sigh. He faded even more, and as I watched, his limbs simply renewed themselves, appearing as his shape became more translucent. The damage reversed itself before my eyes.

A moment later, he sat up. He looked around, his gaze passing right through me. Then he paused and stared at the ruined house, his brow furrowed in puzzled concentration—an expression mirrored on the faces of most of the spirits present.

Sir Stuart was nowhere to be seen in the shade’s hollow eyes.

I bowed my head and clenched my teeth, cursing. I had liked the guy. Just like I had liked Morty, whatever insults I may have offered him. I was angry about what had happened to him. And I was angry about the position he had put me in. Now I was the one responsible for somehow finding and helping Morty, when I could barely communicate with anyone without him. All while the bad guy, whatever the hell it was, apparently got to chat it up with its own flunkies at will.

I couldn’t touch anything. I couldn’t make anything happen. My magic was gone. And now not only was I to track down my own murderer, but I had to rescue Mort Lindquist, as well.

Fabulous. Maybe I should make it my new slogan: Harry Dresden—I take responsibility for more impossible situations in the first twenty-four hours of being dead than most people do all day.

More snow was beginning to fall. Eventually, it would break the circle that had trapped what was left of Sir Stuart. Though I didn’t know where he would go to take shelter from the sunrise. Maybe he would just know, the way I had seemed to—some kind of postdeath survival instinct. Or maybe he wouldn’t.

Either way, it didn’t seem like there was much I could do about it, and I hated that fact with a burning passion. Sir Stuart and the other spirits needed Morty Lindquist. Before I died, I might have been Harry Dresden, wizard at large. Now I was Harry Dresden, immaterial messenger boy, persuader, and wheedler.

I desperately wanted to blow something into tiny, tiny pieces—and then disintegrate the pieces.

All things considered, it was probably not the best frame of mind in which to handle a confrontation in a rational, diplomatic manner.

“Ah,” said a whispery, oily voice behind me. “She was right. The tall one returns.”

“Look at him,” said another voice, higher-pitched and inhuman. “He will make such a meal.”

“Our orders are—”

“Orders,” said a third voice, filled with scorn. “She is not here. We shall share him, the three of us, and none shall be the wiser.”

“Agreed,” said the second voice eagerly.

After a pause, the first voice said, “Agreed.”

I turned and saw three of the dark-robed forms from the night before during the attack on Casa Lindquist. Lemurs. Their clothing stirred with lazy, aquatic fluidity at the touch of an immaterial wind. From this close, I could see the faint images of pale faces inside their hoods, and the sheen of gleaming, hungry eyes.

“Take him!” said the first lemur.

And three of the hungriest old ghosts of Chicago blurred toward the new guy.

Chapter Sixteen

The lemurs pounced, and I vanished, straight up.

I stood in empty air a hundred feet above them, furious, and called down, “You mooks picked a really lousy time to start up with me!”

Hooded heads searched upward, but I was an indistinct shape in a darkened sky already blurred by snow, while they were sharp outlines against a field of white.

I started throwing a punch, vanished again, and reappeared right behind lemur number one. My fist drove into the base of his neck just as I shouted, “BAMF!”

There isn’t much honor in a rabbit punch, but it’s a pretty darned good way to down an opponent. Whatever rules governed the world of spirit, there must have been some kind of analogue to a human nervous system. The lemur let out a choking gasp and fell to the ground as the other two panicked at the sudden assault and vanished. I kicked the downed guy in the head and neck a few times to help him on his way to Analogue-Concussion Land, screaming in pure and incoherent rage all the while.

I had a fraction of a second’s warning, a cold breath on the back of my neck, a rippling wave of ethereal pressure against my back. I vanished, to reappear five feet behind my original position—and this time, I meant to be facing the same way when I arrived.

I got there in time to see one of the other lemurs swing a freaking hatchet at the space my skull had recently vacated. He stumbled, off balance from the miss, and I kicked his ass—literally. I leaned my upper body back a bit and pretended I was using my heel to stomp an aluminum can flat. It’s a powerful kick, especially with my full body weight behind it, and the lemur flew forward and into the snow.

“Who’s the man?!” I screamed at the sprawled lemurs, fear and anger and excitement pitching my voice about an octave higher than usual. “Who’s the man?!”

The hood had fallen from the face of the second, and an unremarkable man of middle age goggled at me in complete incomprehension—which made sense. Who knew how many decades of pop culture the lemurs had missed out on. They’d probably never even heard of Will Smith.

“I am completely unappreciated in my time,” I muttered.

I am also, apparently, no wizard when it comes to simple mathematics: While I was Will Smithing, lemur number three appeared out of nowhere and smashed a baseball bat against the side of my neck.

The pain was something incredible—more than merely the reaction of physical trauma that I would have expected from such a blow. It also encompassed an almost Olympian sense of nausea combined with a force-five storm of whirling confusion. I felt myself note idly that I guessed egos literally could be bruised. It took me another second or two after that to realize that I was floating, drifting sideways and slightly upward, my body at a forty-five-degree diagonal to the ground. There was a roaring sound in my head. An eerie cry of triumph and hunger pealed through the night.

Then the lemurs came for me.

I felt bitterly cold fingers seize me, clamping down like steel claws. I was hauled out to horizontal by frigid, steely hands. I was still disoriented—I was barely able to turn my head enough to see the third lemur approach.

Her hood had fallen back. She was a young woman of unexceptional appearance, neither beautiful nor displeasing. Her eyes, though, were dark and hollow, and a hideous emptiness lay behind them. She stared intently at me for a long beat, her body quivering in some kind of dark rapture.

Then she let out a slow hiss, sank her fingers into the flesh of my left biceps, and ripped off a handful of meat.

Ectoplasmic blood flew. My blood. It scattered through the air in lazy globules that, once they were a few feet from me, fell like raindrops to the surface of the snow.

It hurt. I screamed.

All three lemurs screamed with me, as if triggered into a response by my own cries. The female lemur lifted the gobbet of flesh aloft in triumph, then held it over her open mouth and squeezed. More blood pattered out onto her lips and tongue, and she let out a gasp of unadulterated ecstasy before shoving the raw flesh into her mouth as though she hadn’t eaten in weeks.

Her eyes rolled back into her head. She shuddered. “Oh,” she breathed. “Pain. He’s felt so much pain. And rage. And joy. Oh, this one lived.”