Ghost Story

hesitation. The good father was in danger.

“Murphy would go in guns blazing,” Butters said. “She’s going to break my arm when she finds out I didn’t tell her. We need you to help talk us through this.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “Go in guns blazing!”

“It’s too late for that,” Fitz said. “Look, Forthill is already there. I just met the guy but . . . but . . . I don’t want him to get hurt for me. We have to move now.”

“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t move around in broad daylight.”

“We thought of that,” Fitz said. “Butters said you needed a shielded vessel.”

“Butters said that, did he?” I asked wryly.

Butters rose from the bag, holding the plastic flashlight case holding Bob’s skull. He winked at me, held it out, and said, “Hop in.”

I blinked.

Then I said, “Right. Let’s go.”

I took a deep breath and willed myself forward, into the staring eye sockets of the skull.

Chapter Thirty-five

There was a very, very odd swirling sensation as my spirit-self leapt forward, and then I was standing . . .

. . . In an apartment.

Okay, when I say apartment, I don’t mean it like my old place. I lived in a mostly buried box that was maybe twenty by thirty total, not including the subbasement where my lab had been. Apartment Dresden had been full of paperback books on scarred wooden shelves, and comfortable secondhand furniture.

This was more like . . . Apartment Bond, James Apartment Bond. Penthouse Bond, really. There was a lot of black marble and mahogany. There was a fireplace the size of a carport, complete with a modest—relatively modest—blaze going in it. The furniture all matched. The rich hardwoods from which it had been made were hand- carved in intricate designs. It wasn’t until the second glance that I saw some of the same rune and sigil work I’d used on my own staff and blasting rod. The cushions on the couches (plural, couches) and recliners and sedans and chaises (plural, chaises), were made of rich fabric I couldn’t identify, maybe some kind of raw silk, and embroidered with more of the same symbols in gold and silver thread. A nearby table boasted what looked like a freshly roasted turkey, along with a spread of fruits and vegetables and side dishes of every kind.

It was sort of ridiculous, really. There was enough food there to feed a small nation. But there weren’t any plates to fill up, and there weren’t any utensils to eat it with. It looked gorgeous and it smelled incredible, but . . . there was something inert about it, something lifeless. There was no nourishment on that table, not for the body or for the spirit.

One wall was covered in a curtain. I started to pull it aside and found it responding to the touch, spreading open of its own accord to reveal a television the size of billboard, a high-tech stereo system, and an entire shelf lined with one kind of video-game console after another, complicated little controls sitting neatly next to each one. I can’t tell a PlayBox from an X-Station, but who can keep track of all of them? There are, like, a thousand different kinds of machines to play video games on. I mean, honestly.

“Um,” I said. “Hello?” My voice echoed quite distinctly—more than it should have, huge marble cavern or not. “Anybody home?”

There was, I kid you not, a drumroll.

Then, from a curtained archway there appeared a young man. He looked . . . quite ordinary, really. Tall, but not outrageously so; slender without being rail thin. He had decent shoulders and looked sort of familiar. He was dressed like James Dean—jeans, a white shirt, a leather biker’s jacket. The outfit looked a little odd on him, somehow forced, except for a little skull embroidered in white thread on the jacket, just over the young man’s heart.

Cymbals crashed and he spread his arms. “Ta-da.”

“Bob,” I said. I felt one side of my mouth curling up in amusement. “This? This is the place you always wanted me to let you out of? You could fit five or six of mine in here.”

His face spread into a wide grin. “Well, I admit, my crib is pretty sweet. But a gold cage is still a cage, Harry.”

“A gold fallout shelter, more like.”

“Either way, you get stir-crazy every few decades,” he said, and flopped down onto a chaise. “You get that this isn’t literally what the inside of the skull is like, right?”

“It’s my head interpreting what I see into familiar things, yeah,” I said. “It’s getting to be kind of common.”

“Welcome to the world of spirit,” Bob said.

“What’s with the food?”

“Butters’s mom is some kind of food goddess,” Bob said, his eyes widening. “That’s the spread she’s put out over the last few holidays. Or, um, Butters’s sensory memories of it, anyway—he let me do a ride-along, and then I made this facsimile of what we experienced.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “He let you do a ride-along? In his head?” Bob . . . was not well-known for his restraint, in my experience, when he got to go on one of his excursions.

“There was a contract first,” Bob said. “A limiting document about twenty pages long. He covered his bases.”

“Huh,” I said. I nodded at the food. “And you just . . . remade it?”

“Oh, sure,” Bob said. “I can remake whatever in here.” He waggled his eyebrows. “You want to see a replay of that time Molly got the acid all over her clothes in the lab and had to strip?”

“Um. Pass,” I said. I sat down gingerly on a chair, making sure I wasn’t going to sink through it or something. It seemed to behave like a normal chair. “TV and stuff, too?”

“I am kinda made out of energy, man,” Bob said. He pointed at the wall of media equipment. “You remember me broadcasting to your spirit radio, right? I’m, like, totally tapped in now. Television, satellite imagery, broadband Internet—you name it; I can do it. How do you think I know so much?”

“Hundreds of years of assisting wizards,” I said.

He waved a hand. “That, too. But I got this whole huge Internet thing to play on now. Butters showed me.” His grin turned into a leer. “And it’s, like, ninety percent porn!”

“There’s the Bob I know and love,” I said.

“Love, ick,” he replied. “And I am and I’m not. I mean, you get that I change based on who possesses the skull, right?”

“Sure,” I said.

“So I’m a lot like I was with you, even though I’m with Butters, because he met me back then. First impression and whatnot, highly important.”

I grunted. “How long do we have to talk?”

“Not as simple to answer as you’d think,” Bob said. “But . . . you’re still pretty cherry, so let’s keep it simple. A few minutes, speaking linearly—but I can stretch it out for a while, subjectively.”

“Huh,” I said. “Neat.”

“Nah, just sort of the way we roll on this side of the street,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

“Who killed me?” I replied.

“Oooh, sorry. Can’t help you with that, except as a sounding board.”

“Okay,” I said. “Lemme catch you up on what I know.”

I filled Bob in on everything since the train tunnel. I didn’t hold back much of anything. Bob was smart enough to fill in the vast majority of gaps if I left anything out anyway, and he could compile information and deduce coherent facts as well as any mind I had ever known.