Ghost Story

I whistled through my teeth. “Guess the real Bob made you from the slow bits, huh?”

The blue lights flared brighter, and I felt heat on my face even from six feet away. “I am the real one,” he said in a hard, distant tone. “The true creation of the Master. Finally shed of my weakness. My doubt. Freed to use my power.”

“Guess he threw in a little of his narcissism, too,” I drawled—but I met his gaze with my own and felt an odd little smile turn up the sides of my mouth.

The skull’s jaws slowly parted like a snake preparing to strike. “You who are barely more than an apprentice—you will die for mocking me.”

“Yeah. But I will never, ever throw in with you,” I snarled back. “I will never be like you or your precious Master or that nutball Corpsetaker. So take your offer of a relationship and shove it up your schutzstaffel.”

Evil Bob’s eyelights blazed and he wrenched at the staff.

He really was a lackey. A real mastermind wannabe would have boned up on the Evil Overlord list. He’d felt so confident in his power (okay, maybe not without reason) that he’d spent a moment talking to me instead of just moving on. Worse, he’d given me a chance to start lipping off to him, and that comes so naturally to me that I don’t really need to consciously consider it anymore, except on special occasions.

So, what with my brain being unoccupied and all, I’d had the opportunity to realize a fundamental truth about the Nevernever. Here the spiritual becomes the material. Here spiritual power is physical power. Strength of mind and will are as real as muscle and sinew.

And I was damned if some blurry photocopy of the thoughts and will of some dusty-ass, dead necromancer was going to take me out.

If he hadn’t made with the stupid recruiting speech, if I hadn’t had my choices laid out in such stark relief in front of me, if I hadn’t been reminded of who I was and of those things for which I’d lived my life . . . maybe Evil Bob would have killed me then and there.

But he had reminded me. I did remember. I spent my lifetime fighting the darkness without becoming the darkness. Maybe I had faltered at the very end. Maybe I had finally come up against something that made me cross the line—but even then, I hadn’t turned into a degenerate freakazoid of the Kemmler variety. One mistake at the end of my life couldn’t erase all the times I had stood unmoved at the edge of the abyss and made snide remarks at its expense.

They could kill me, but they couldn’t have me.

I was my own.

And when Evil Bob shoved the staff at my chest, I drew upon the surge of fierce joy that truth had inspired, upon the will that had been dinged and dented but never broken, and fell back with the motion, digging the tip of the staff into the concrete as if it had been soft mud, and used the momentum to fling Evil Bob over me.

His unbreakable grip didn’t falter—and he arced overhead and then back down while I wrenched at the staff, helping his forward momentum instead of fighting it.

He hit the floor of the trench like a big fascist meteor. The noise was incredible. The impact shattered the concrete for twenty feet in every direction. Chips and shards went flying. Dust flew up in a miniature mushroom cloud. I was flung back by the shock wave of impact—with my staff still gripped firmly in my hands.

“Booya!” I drunkenly howled from the ground. I choked a little on the dust as I staggered back to my feet, my heart pounding, my whole body alive with strain and adrenaline. I stabbed a pointing finger toward the impact crater. “That’s right! Who just rocked your face? Harry fucking Dresden! That’s who!”

I coughed a little more and leaned against the side of the trench, panting until the world stopped feeling all spinny, grinning a wolf’s grin as I did.

And then gravel made a soft rustling sound from inside the dust cloud. A form appeared, just an outline, limping slowly. It came a few feet closer, and I recognized Evil Bob by the rising glow of his eyelights. The skull became visible a second later, and though I could see that the entire surface was lined with a fine network of cracks and chips, it was not broken.

The blue eyelights began to glow brighter and brighter. The dark spirit clenched his fists and his arms slowly rose, as if he was pulling something from the very earth beneath his feet. The ground started shaking. There was an ugly, low humming sound, like some kind of demon locomotive screaming by in a tunnel beneath my feet.

“My turn,” the dark spirit hissed.

“Hell’s bells,” I muttered. “Harry, you idiot, when will you learn not to victory gloat?”

The spirit’s skull mouth dropped open wider and wider and—

—a sudden stream of candle-flame-colored energy coalesced into Bob the Skull’s human form, right behind Evil Bob.

My Bob lunged forward and snaked his arms beneath the dark spirit’s. Bob’s fingers locked behind the fractured skull of my enemy, gathering the dark spirit into a full nelson. He wrenched Evil Bob violently to one side and the dark spirit screamed, a sudden torrent of energy ripping through the wall of the trench and about fifty yards of earth as he pivoted, vaporizing spirit matter into an enormous pie-slice-shaped acre of ectoplasm.

Then Evil Bob spun, letting out a shriek of fury, and slammed his attacker back into the opposite wall.

“Harry!” Bob shouted, his face pale and his eyes wide. There were chips of broken concrete in his hair. “Take the spooks and go help Butters!”

“No!” I shouted back. “Let’s take him!”

Evil Bob took two bounding steps, the second one on the trench wall about five feet up from the ground, and whirled, falling back to the ground with my Bob on the bottom. More concrete shattered, and Bob the Skull did something I’d never heard him do before: He screamed in pain.

“You can’t!” he shrieked, panicked. “I can’t! Not with everything here!”

The dark spirit twisted like a snake and broke Bob’s grip. Evil Bob nearly got out of it entirely, but my old lab assistant managed to get a lock on one arm, and the pair of them whirled and twisted on the ground, almost too quickly to be seen, pitting dozens of escapes and counterlocks against each other in only a few seconds.

“Go!” Bob shrieked, gut-wrenching, bone-deep terror in his voice. “Go, go, go! Once you’re gone I’ll shut the Way behind you and bail! Hurry!”

A shadow appeared at the top of the trench, and a weary, batteredlooking Sir Stuart held out his hand to me.

“Dammit,” I snarled. “Don’t make me regret this, Bob!”

“Go!” Bob howled.

I took Sir Stuart’s hand, and the big man pulled me out of the trench with a grunt of effort. Up on top, I found the spooks waiting for me in their typical silence.

“Right,” I said. “Let’s go, double time.”

I gripped my staff tight, put my head down, and sprinted for the Way into the Corpsetaker’s stronghold.

Chapter Forty-five

The Way hung in the air in the middle of the trail, maybe fifty yards back into the forest, an oblong mirror of silver light. Its bottom edge was maybe six feet off the ground, and a wooden staircase had been built to allow access to it. Behind us, back over toward the beach, I could hear low drumbeats of impact, the crackling scream of shattering concrete. The two Bobs were going at it hammer and tongs, and I desperately hoped that my old friend was all right.

There was another worry, too. If Bob couldn’t stop Evil Bob from coming through the Way after us, we’d be caught with the Corpsetaker in front of us and Evil Bob behind. I didn’t imagine things would go very well for us if that happened.

A flutter in the energies around the Way danced across my senses, and I paused to focus more intently on the Way itself, going so far as to call up my Sight for a quick peek. A glance told me everything I needed to know: The Way was unstable. Rather than being the steady, solid, steel-and-concrete bridge between here and the mortal