Ghost Story

Chapter Forty-one

The Corpsetaker’s stronghold hadn’t changed.

But it had awakened.

I felt the difference as soon as I approached, and a quick effort to invoke the memory of my Sight brought the changes into sharp, clear view. A column of lurid light, all shades of purple and scarlet, rose into the night sky over the entrance to the stronghold. I could see the magical energy involved, my gaze piercing the ground as if it had been slightly cloudy water. There, beneath the ground, where I had seen them on the stairs and in the tunnels, were formulas of deadly power, full of terrible energy, now awakened and burning bright.

All of that shoddy, nonsensical, quasimagical script hadn’t been anything of the sort. Or, rather, it had been only apparent nonsense. The true formulas, strongly burning wards built on almost the same theory and system I had once used to protect my own home, had been concealed within the overt insanity.

“Right in front of me and I missed it,” I breathed.

I should have known better. The Corpsetaker had once been part of the White Council, sometime back before the French and Indian War. We’d gone to the same school, even if we’d graduated in very different years. Not only that, but she was getting assistance from a being that had been created from part of my own personal arcane assistant. Evil Bob had probably given her similar advice on constructing wards.

Wards weren’t like a lot of other magic. They were based on a threshold, the envelope of energy around a home. Granted, the loonies currently inhabiting the tunnels were hair-on-fire bonkers, but they were still human, and they still had the same need for a home that everyone else did. Thresholds don’t care about sunrise, not when a living, breathing mortal fuels them every moment, just by living within them. Build a spell onto a threshold and it doesn’t easily diminish. As a result, you can slowly, over time, pump more and more and more energy into spells based upon it.

The Corpsetaker hadn’t needed access to a wizard-level talented body to create the wards. She’d just used tiny talents regularly over months and months, and built up the wards to major-league defenses a little at a time, preparing for the night when she would need them.

Obviously, she’d decided that since she was torturing a world-class ectomancer in order to make her big comeback from beyond the grave, tonight was a great night not to be interrupted.

“I hate fighting competent people,” I growled. “I just hate it.”

“Formidable defenses,” said a quiet voice behind me.

I looked over my right shoulder. Sir Stuart studied the wards as well. He’d become a tiny bit more solid-looking, and there was distant, distracted interest in his eyes.

“Yeah,” I said. “Got any ideas?”

“Mortal magic,” he replied. “Beyond our reach.”

“I know that,” I replied grumpily. “But we’ve got to get in.” I looked around at the crew of lunatic ghosts I’d mentally dubbed the Lecter Specters. “What about those guys? Breaking the rules is kind of what they do. Are they crazy enough to get in?”

“Threshold. Inviolable.”

Which again made sense. I’d gotten into the fortress the night before because the door had been open and the ghost-summoning spell had essentially been a big old welcome mat, a standing invitation. Clearly, tonight was different. “Well,” I muttered, “nothing worth doing is easy, is it?”

There was no response.

I turned to find that Sir Stuart’s shade had faded out again and his eyes were lost in the middle distance.

“Stu? Hey, Stu.”

He didn’t respond except to face forward again, his expression patient, ready to follow orders.

“Dammit,” I sighed. “Okay, Harry. You’re the big-time wizard. Figure it out by yourself.”

I vanished and reappeared at the doorway. Then I leaned on my staff and studied the active wards. That did me limited good. I knew them. I’d used constructions much like them on my own home. You’d need to throw several tons of bodies at them, literally, to bring them down—which was what had happened to my first-generation wards. Wave after wave of zombies had eventually gotten through.

I mean, go figure. You prepare your home for an assault and you don’t take zombies into consideration. I’d fallen victim to one of the other classic blunders, along with not getting involved in a land war in Asia and never going in against a Sicilian when death was on the line.

My second generation of wards had planned for zombies. So had these. So even if I had zombies, which I didn’t, I wasn’t going to be able to go through them.

“So,” I said. “Don’t go through them. Go around them.”

Yeah, smart guy? How?

“There’s an open Way between the heart of the fortress and the Nevernever,” I said. “That’s like a permanently open door with an all-day invitation, or they wouldn’t need fortifications on the other side. All you have to do is get to it, assault Evil Bob’s defenses and Evil Bob and whatever the Corpsetaker recruited from God only knows what kind of dark hellhole, smash them up, and blast through from the spirit world.”

Well. That plan did have a lot of words like assault and smash and blast in it, which I had to admit was way more my style. One problem, though: I couldn’t open a Way to the Nevernever. Once I was through, I could probably find Evil Bob’s fortress—it would perforce have to be nearby. But, like the mortal-world lair, I couldn’t open the door.

“Other than that, though, it’s genius,” I assured myself.

A direct assault against a fortress that had undoubtedly been designed to defeat direct assaults? Brilliant. Uncomplicated, do-or-die suicidal, and there’s the minor issue that you aren’t capable of actually implementing it. But genius—absolutely.

Gandalf never had this kind of problem.

He had exactly this problem, actually, standing in front of the hidden Dwarf door to Moria. Remember when . . .

I sighed. Sometimes my inner monologue annoys even me.

“Edro, edro,” I muttered. “Open.” I rubbed at the bridge of my nose and ventured, “Mellon.”

Nothing happened. The wards stayed. I guessed the Corpsetaker had never read Tolkien. Tasteless bitch.

“I hate this depending-on-others crap,” I muttered. Then I vanished and reappeared at the head of my horde. “Okay, everybody,” I said. “Huddle up.”

I got a lot of blank looks. Which was probably only reasonable. Most of those spirits predated football.

“Okay,” I said. “Everyone get to where you can see and hear me clearly. Gather in.”

The ghosts understood that. They huddled—in three dimensions. Some crowded around me in a circle on the ground. The rest took to the air and arranged themselves overhead.

“Christ,” I muttered. “It’s like Thunderdome.” I held out my hand, palm up, and closed my eyes for a moment. I called up my most recent memories of Molly, both of her physical appearance and of her evident state of mind. Then I focused on projecting those memories, following my newly developing instincts with the whole ghost routine. When I opened my eyes, a small, three-dimensional image of Molly hovered above the surface of my palm, rotating slowly.

“This young woman is somewhere in Chicago,” I said. “Maybe nearby. We need her help to get to Mort. So, um. Soldier boys, stay here with me. The rest of you guys, go locate her. Appear to her. Tell her that Harry Dresden sent you, and lead her back here. Do not reveal yourselves to anyone else. Harm no one.” I looked around at them. “Okay?”

Before I’d finished the last word, half of the crowd—the crazy half—was gone.

I just hoped that they would listen to me, that my beckoning spell and the mantle of authority Sir Stuart had passed to me would help ensure their cooperation. I felt fairly confident in my instinct that nutty killer ghosts were not terribly good at following orders.

“This could turn out bad in so many ways,” I muttered.

But it mostly didn’t.

Maybe ten minutes after I’d dispatched them, the Lecter Specters reappeared among the ranks of the quiet guardians with no sound, no flash, no fanfare. One second, nothing; the next, there they all were. All but two.

A moment later, the twins came walking toward us. Molly limped along between the two little spirits, holding hands with each of them. She was moving with her back perfectly rigid, her steps cautious, and she looked a little green around the gills. Like I said, she’s a sensitive. She must have figured out the true nature of the child ghosts immediately upon meeting them, and she clearly did not relish the idea of being in skin contact with them. It said a lot about her intestinal fortitude that she had accompanied them at all.

It probably said even more about her trust in me.

It was no coincidence that the ghosts had found her so quickly, either. She’d already been on the way; Molly was dressed for battle.

There were still bloodstains on the front of her long coat, where she’d taken a bullet through the muscle of her thigh. It was based on the design of a fireman’s coat and, like Daniel’s vest, Molly’s coat contained an armored lining of titanium rings sandwiched between layers of ballistic fabric. She still wore her ragged clothing beneath the coat, but she’d added a nylon-web tactical belt to her ensemble. It bore several potions, which she’d always been good at making, and a pair of wands covered in rows of runes and sigils like those on my own staff. One was tipped in a crystal of white quartz, the other with an amethyst.

Once the twins had led her to me, they vanished, reappearing in their previous spaces in the ranks. Molly blinked and looked around for a moment. She took her cane from under one arm and leaned on it, taking some of the weight off her wounded leg. Then she took out the little tuning fork, rapped it once against the cane, and held it up in front of one of her eyes, so that she was looking through the tines.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” she breathed, her eyes widening as she took in the spook squad. “Harry, is that you in there?”

“Two ghosts enter; one ghost leaves,” I replied. Then I vanished from the Spookydome and reappeared in front of her. “Hi.”

Molly shook her head a little. She looked tired still, but some of the strain I’d seen in her the night before seemed to have drained out of her. “Who are they?”

“Morty’s friends,” I said. I gestured at her. “You wore your party dress, I see.”

She smiled for a second, enough to show her dimples. Then it was gone. “Butters got in touch with me. He told me what was going on.”

I nodded. “Murphy?”

Molly looked away. “She’s on the way with whoever she can get.”

“Marcone’s guys?”

She shook her head. “Marcone is in Italy or something. Childs is in charge.”

“Let me guess. He’s just supposed to mind the store until the boss gets back, and he didn’t get chosen for his daring and ambition.”

Molly nodded. “Pretty much.”

I grimaced. “How’s your brother?”

“More stitches. More scars,” Molly said, looking away—but not in time to hide the flash of pure, murderous rage I saw in her eyes. “He’ll live.”

“The padre?”

“Stable. Unconscious. He was beaten badly.”

“What about Fitz and his gang?” I asked.

“With my father for now,” she said. “Mom makes battalion-sized meals already. Eight or ten more mouths isn’t bad. Just until there’s enough time to figure out what to do with them.”

I snorted quietly. “And Murph would just call in the kids’ location and tell the cops to round them up for that hit if they’d gone anywhere else. She wouldn’t do that to Michael.”

“I thought the same thing.”

“Your idea?”

Molly shrugged.

“Very good, grasshopper,” I said, smiling.

She smiled, but only with the corners of her eyes. “Thanks.”

I shook my head. Crap. It was easy to get distracted when talking about memories. The ghost thing must have been slowly congealing my brain. “Okay, chitchat’s over. Here’s the short version.”

I told her about the Big Hood hideout, the wards, and what the Corpsetaker was up to. As I spoke, Molly took a moment to open her Sight and take a quick glance at the wards. She shuddered and closed it again. “Are you sure we can’t just hammer through them?”

“If we studied the layout for a day or two, maybe,” I said. “We don’t have that kind of time.”

“What’s the plan, then?”

“Me and my army go in through the back door in the Nevernever,” I said. “Once I’m in, I’ll wreck those formulae and take down the wards. Team Murphy comes storming in like they do on TV. I need you to open the Way.”

Molly bit her lip and then nodded. “I can do that. Are you sure that when I do, the other side will be close enough?”

The Nevernever isn’t subject to normal geography. It attaches to the physical world by means of symbols and ideas. Open a Way in a happy place, and odds are you’ll get a happy place in the Nevernever. Open a Way in a bad place, and the spirit world near it will be the same flavor of bad. Sometimes Ways that opened only ten or twenty feet apart from each other go to radically different portions of the Nevernever. Molly was concerned that if a Way was opened anywhere but in the basement of the stronghold, it might lead to the spiritual version of Timbuktu, rather than where I wanted to go.

“There’s seriously bad juju infesting this whole area,” I said. “We’ll get as close as we can to the entrance. It should get me somewhere in the same neighborhood—and I’mpretty light on my feet these days.”

“Ha-ha,” Molly said, and thumped her cane gently on the ground. “I’m not. What if I can’t keep up?”

I pressed my lips together and tried to keep from wincing.

Her mouth tightened. “You don’t want me to go with you.”

“It isn’t about what I want,” I said. “They’ll need you on this side. If Murphy tries to go in before the wards are down, people are going to die. Horribly. You’re the only one who can tell when the wards fall. So you stay.”

Molly looked away again. She swallowed. Then she nodded. “Okay.”

I looked at her for a moment. She was clearly hurting in all kinds of ways. She was just as clearly in control of herself. She didn’t like the role I’d asked her to play, but she had accepted its necessity.

“You’re one hell of a woman, Molly,” I said. “Thank you.”

She flinched as if she’d just been shot. Her eyes widened as she jerked her head back to me, and her face went entirely bloodless. She stared at me for a moment. Her mouth started working soundlessly. Her eyes overflowed with tears. It took her several seconds to let out a little choking sound.

Then she shuddered and turned away from me. She lifted her arm and wiped her eyes on her coat sleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said, trying to keep my voice gentle. “I know . . . I know things haven’t been easy for you lately. Bound to bring on the waterworks once in a while.”

“God,” she said, both bitterness and amusement in her voice. “Harry. How can you be so completely clueless and still be you?” She took a deep breath, then straightened her back and squared her shoulders. “Okay. We’re burning time.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She walked toward the door to the Big Hoods’ hideout. She planted her feet firmly, withdrew the amethyst-tipped wand from her belt, and held it firmly in her right hand. I saw her gather her focus and do it rapidly. She was very nearly operating on the level of a full member of the White Council. After less than five seconds, she looked up, lifted the wand, drew it in a long, vertical line through the air and murmured, “Rokotsu.”

For a second, nothing happened. Then the air seemed to split and fall open, as if reality had been nothing more than a curtain suddenly stirred by an outside breeze. The opening widened until it was the size of the front door of a home, and odd, aqua green light poured out from the other side.

Molly rolled her neck a little, as if the effort had pained her. It probably had. Opening a Way takes a serious energy investment, and Molly had never been a high-horsepower practitioner. She stepped back and said, “All yours, boss.”

“Thanks, grasshopper,” I said quietly. Then I turned to the spook squad and said, “All right, everybody. Let’s go knock some heads together.”

I turned and plunged through the Way into the Nevernever, and the deadliest spirit-predators of the concrete jungle came with me.