Ghost Story

Augh. Better, maybe, to focus on the immediate problems first.

I had to find Morty, whose plight had clearly been low on Murph’s priority list.

I had to help Fitz and the rest of his clueless, teenage pals.

And for all of it, I needed the help of someone I could trust.

I took a deep breath and nodded.

Then I walked until I had passed through an exterior wall of the Bright Future house, and set off to find my apprentice before the night got any deeper.

Chapter Twenty

I always considered myself a loner.

I mean, not like a poor-me, Byron-esque, I-should-have-broughta-swimming-buddy loner. I mean the sort of person who doesn’t feel too upset about the prospect of a weekend spent seeing no one, and reading good books on the couch. It wasn’t like I was a people hater or anything. I enjoyed activities and the company of friends. But they were a side dish. I always thought I would also be happy without them.

I walked the streets of a city of nearly three million people and, for the first time, there was nothing that connected me to any of them. I couldn’t speak to them. I couldn’t touch them. I couldn’t get in an argument over a parking space, or flip the bird to a careless driver who ran a light while I was crossing. I couldn’t buy anything in one of the stores, making polite chitchat with the clerk while paying. Couldn’t pick up a newspaper. Couldn’t recommend a good book to someone browsing the shelves.

Three million souls went about their lives around me, and I was alone.

Now I understood Captain Murphy’s shadow Chicago. The actual town had already begun to feel like the shadow version. With enough time, would the real city look that way to me, too? Dark? Empty? Devoid of purpose and vaguely threatening? I’d been here for barely a day.

What would I be like if I was here for a year? Ten years? A hundred years?

I was starting to get why so many ghosts seemed to be a couple of French fries short of a Happy Meal.

I had to wonder, too, if maybe Sir Stuart and Morty were right about me. What if I really was the deluded spirit they thought I was? Not the true Harry Dresden, just his image in death, doing what the lunatic had always done: setting out to help his friends and get the bad guy.

I didn’t feel like a deluded spirit, but then, I wouldn’t. Would I? The mad rarely know that they are mad. It’s the rest of the world, I think, that seems insane to them. God knew it had always seemed fairly insane to me. Was there any way I could be sure I was anything other than what Sir Stuart and Mort thought?

More to the point, Mort was the freaking expert on ghosts. I mean, I knew my way around the block, but Mort had been a specialist. Normally, on purely technical matters regarding spirits and shades, I would give his opinion significant weight, probably a little more than I would my own. Morty had never been a paragon of courage and strength, but he was smart, and clearly tough enough to survive a long career that had been a lot more dangerous than I thought.

Hell. For all I knew, while I had been busy saving Chicago from things no one knew were there, Mort might have been saving me from things I never knew were there. Funny world, isn’t it?

I stopped in my tracks and shook my head as if to clear water from my eyes. “Dresden, have your personal existential crisis later. The bad guys are obviously working hard. Get your ass in gear.”

Good advice, that.

The question was, How?

Normally, I would have tracked Molly down with a fairly simple piece of thaumaturgy I’d done a thousand times. After her unplanned vacation to Arctis Tor, in Faerie, I had always been sure to keep a fairly recent lock of her hair handy. And more recently, I’d found I could get a fix on all the energy patterns she used to make her first few independent magical tools—like the hair, they were something specific and unique to her and her alone. A signature. I could be pretty sure to find her when I needed to do so. Hell, for that matter, I’d spent so much time around her that she had become almost like family. I could generally tell by pure intuition when she was nearby, as long as she wasn’t actively trying to hide herself.

That, of course, had all been when I had magic. Now I didn’t.

Which was, upon thinking about it, probably another bit of evidence in favor of Stuart and Mort’s theory, and against mine. You can’t take magic away from a person. It’s a part of who and what they are. They can abandon it, if they work at it hard enough, but you can’t strip it out of them. If my ghost had truly been me, it would have had power, just as that bastard Leonid Kravos’s ghost had.

Right?

Or . . . maybe not. Maybe I’d been making more assumptions without ever questioning them. I had already assumed that matter was solid when it wasn’t; that I could get cold, which I couldn’t; and that I was still beholden to the laws of gravity, which I wasn’t.

Maybe I’d made the same assumptions about magic. I mean, after all, I had thrown a solid shield spell during the first attack on Mort’s place, when I had been sharing space with the ectomancer. That would seem to show that my talent was still there, still real.

I just had to figure out how to access it.

Memories are power.

I dug into my duster’s pocket and drew out the massive pistol Sir Stuart had given me. Black-powder weaponry isn’t my thing, but I made sure there was nothing in the priming pan before turning it barrel down and shaking it. I had to give it several hard thumps with the heel of my hand to get the ball, wad, and powder to spill out into my palm.

The ball, the bullet, gleamed as if newly molded. Upon closer look, fine swirls on the surface of the metal took on the shapes of a simple, pastoral scene: a colonial-style home in the middle of a little green valley surrounded by apple trees; clean, neat cropland; and a pasture dotted with white sheep. Just looking at it seemed to give the scene life. Wind stirred the crops. Apples stood out like specks of bright green against the darker leaves. Lambs gamboled among adult members of the flock, playing for the pure joy of it. The door to the house opened, and a tall, straightbacked woman with hair blacker than a raven’s wing emerged from the house, trailing a small cloud of children, clearly giving calm instructions.

With the sight, a flood of emotions coursed through me. A fierce and jealous pride of possession—not pride that I owned such a beautiful home, but that the home was beautiful because I owned it, because I had made it so. Mixed with that was an ocean-deep surge of love for the woman and her children, raw happiness at seeing them—and a heavy, entirely pleasurable surge of desire for the woman, whom I had not held in far too long—

I suddenly felt that I had intruded upon something personal and intimate. I closed my eyes and looked away from the scene.

Memories, I realized. These were all things from Sir Stuart’s mortal memories. This memory was what he had cast forth against that wraith the first time I met him. He hadn’t used memories of destruction as his weapon, but those of identity, of the reasons he was willing to fight.

That was why as a ghost he still used that ax, this pistol. Far more modern weapons were available to copy, but his memories were of himself using those weapons, and so they were the source of his power, the embodiment of his will to change what was around him.

They were Sir Stuart’s identity. They were also his magic.

Memories equaled power.

For a moment, I thought it couldn’t be that simple. But a lot of magic is actually disgustingly simple—which is not to be confused with easy.

There was only one way to find out.

The first spell I’d ever done had been during that long-ago class Olympics—but that was spontaneous, accidental magic, hardly worthy of the term. The first conscious spell I’d knowingly worked, fully planned, fully visualized, fully realized, had been calling forth a burst of fire.

Justin DuMorne had shown me how it worked.