“Here,” said the second lemur. “Come take his legs. My turn.”
The female bared her bloodied teeth at him and tore another, smaller piece from my arm. She snapped it up and then leaned on my legs, pinning them. The second lemur looked me over like a man perusing a side of beef. Then he ripped a handful of flesh from my right thigh.
It went like that for several minutes, with the three of them taking turns ripping meat from my body.
I won’t bore you with the details. I don’t like to think about it. They were stronger than me, better than me, more experienced than me when it came to spiritual conflict.
They got me. The monsters got me. And it hurt.
Until footsteps crunched toward us through the snow.
The lemurs never took notice. I was in too much agony to care very much, but I wasn’t exactly busy, either. I looked up and saw a lone figure slogging my way through the thick snow. He wasn’t very big, and he was dressed in a white parka and white ski pants, with one of those ninja capmask things, also white, covering his face. In his right hand he carried a big, old-style, heavy, portable spotlight, the kind with a plastic carrying handle on top. Its twin incandescent bulbs shone a garish orange over the snow.
I sniggered to myself. He was a person. He sank into the snow with every step. He wouldn’t be able to see what was happening right in front of him. No wonder the lemurs paid him no mind.
But ten feet away from me, he abruptly froze in his tracks and blurted, “Holy crap!”
He reached up and ripped off the ninja hood, revealing the thin, fine features of a man of somewhere near forty. His hair was dark, curly, and mussed from the hood; he had glasses perched askew on his beak of a nose; and his dark eyes were wide with shock. “Harry!”
I stared at him and said, through the blood, “Butters?”
“Stop them,” Butters hissed. “Save him! I release you for this task!”
“On it, sahib!” shouted another voice.
A cloud of campfire sparks poured out of the two sources of light in the spotlight, rushing out by the millions, and congealed into a massive, manlike shape. It let out a lion’s roar and blurred toward the lemurs.
Two of them were sharp enough to realize something dangerous was coming, and they promptly vanished. The third, the young woman, was in the middle of another bite—and she didn’t look up until it was too late.
The light form hit the lemur and simply disintegrated it. As I watched, skin and clothing and flesh were ripped away from the evil spirit, as swiftly and savagely as if peeled off with a sandblaster. A heartbeat later, there was nothing left but a gently drifting cloud of sparks, speckled here and there with the floating shapes of somewhat larger, prismatic gemstones.
The light being looked up and then promptly split into two parts, each one becoming a comet that hurtled into the night sky. There was an explosion almost at once—and the raining bits and pieces of a second lemur came drifting lazily down through the night air, along with more multicolored gems.
There was a terrible howling sound in the night sky above. I heard the flap of heavy robes snapping with rapid motion. The second comet of light darted back and forth, evidently engaged in some kind of aerial combat, and then lemur and comet both came hurtling back down. They struck earth with a thunder that shook the ground while leaving the snow untouched.
The orange lights flowed together into a manlike shape again, this time straddling the lemur’s prone form. The being of light rained blows down on the lemur’s head, over and over, striking with the speed and power of a motor’s pistons. Within ten or twelve seconds, the head of the lemur had been crushed into ectoplasmic guck, and his sparkles of light—his memories—and the same odd, tiny gems began to well up from his broken form.
The light being rose from the form of the fallen lemur and scanned the area around us, his featureless face turning in a slow, alert scan.
“What the hell!” Butters said, his eyes wide. “I mean, what the hell was that, man?”
“Relax, sahib,” said a young man’s voice. It was coming from the fiery figure, which nodded and made hand- dusting motions of unmistakable satisfaction. “Just taking out the trash. Scum like that are all over these old mortal cities. Part of the posthuman condition, you might say.”
I just watched. I didn’t feel like doing anything else.
“Yeah, yeah,” Butters said. “But he’s safe now?”
“For now,” the being said, “and as far as I know.”
Butters crunched through the snow and stared down at me. The little guy was one of Chicago’s small number of medical examiners, a forensic investigator who analyzed corpses and found out all sorts of details about them. A few years ago, he’d analyzed corpses of vampires that had burned to death in a big fire someone started. He’d asserted that they obviously were not human. He’d been packed off to an institution for half a year in response. Now he treaded carefully in his career—or at least he had when I was last alive.
“Is it really him?” Butters asked.
The being of light scanned me with unseen eyes. “I can’t spot anything that would suggest he was anything else,” he said cautiously. “Which ain’t the same as saying it’s Harry’s ghost. It has . . . more something than other ghosts I’ve encountered.”
Butters frowned. “More what?”
“Something,” the being said. “Meaning I’m not sure what. Something I’m not expert in, clearly.”
“The, uh, the ghost,” Butters said. “It’s hurt?”
“Quite severely,” the being said. “But it’s easily mended—if you wish to do it.”
Butters blinked at him. “What? Yes, yes, of
“Very good, sahib,” the being said. And then it whipped and darted through the night air, gathering up all the floating, glittering gems from the vanishing remains of the lemurs. It brought them together into a single mass and then knelt down next to my head.
“Bob,” I said quietly.
Bob the Skull, formerly my personal assistant and confidant, hesitated beside me as I said his name. Once again, I became aware of his intense regard, but if he saw anything, it didn’t register on his featureless face.
“Harry,” he said. “Open up. You need to restore these memories to your essence.”
“Restore what?” I asked.
“Eat ’em,” Bob said firmly. “Open your mouth.”
I was tired and confused, so it was easier to just do as he said. I closed my eyes as he dropped the mass of gems into my open mouth. But instead of feeling hard gems, fresh, cool water flowed into my mouth, swirling over my parched tongue and throat as I eagerly swallowed it down.
Pain vanished instantly. The disorientation began to fade and disappear. My confusion and weariness followed those others within a moment, and a deep breath later, I was sitting up in place, feeling more or less as sane and together as I had been when I had woken up that evening.
Bob offered me a hand and I took it. He pulled me to my feet as if I’d weighed less than nothing. “Well,” he said. “At least you don’t seem to be a bad copy. I was half-afraid you’d be some kind of demented Winter Knight wannabe with an eye patch and a goatee or something.”
“Um,” I said. “Thank you?”
“Bob,” Butters said in a firm voice. “You’ve fulfilled your task.” Bob the Skull sighed and turned to bow in a florid gesture of courtesy toward Butters, before dissolving into a cloud of orange sparks again and flowing back toward the flashlight. I saw then that the spotlight casing hadn’t contained lightbulbs and batteries and such—just Bob’s skull, a human-bone artifact of a long-dead enchanter who had built it as a haven that could harbor the essence of a spiritual being.
“Hey, Bob,” I said. “Could you relay my voice to Butters?”
“Don’t have to, former boss,” Bob said cheerfully. “On account of the fact that Butters is a whole heck of a lot more talented at magical theory than you.”
I frowned. “What?”
“Oh, he doesn’t have a lick of magical talent,” Bob assured me. “But he’s got a
“Bob,” Butters said in a scolding tone. Then he fumbled in his parka’s pocket and produced a small, old radio. “Here, see? I had Bob go over your notes from the Nightmare case, Harry. Bob said you created a radio that he could communicate through. So . . .”
