Ghost Story (55 page)

And Mort's eyes snapped open in sudden, startled shock.

“Get 'em!” I howled.

The dead protectors of Chicago's resident ectomancer let out a bloodcurdling chorus of battle cries and blurred toward the foe.

You hear a lot of stories of honor and chivalry from soldiers. Most people assume that such tales apply primarily to men who lived centuries ago. But let me tell you something: People are people, no matter which century they live in. Soldiers tend to be very practical and they don't want to die. I think you'd find military men in any century you cared to name who would be perfectly okay with the notion of shooting the enemy in the back if it meant they were more likely to go home in one piece. Sir Stuart's guardians were, for the most part, soldiers.

Spectral guns blazed. Immaterial knives, hatchets, and arrows flew. Ectoplasm splashed in buckets.

Half the lemurs got torn to shreds of flickering newsreel imagery before I was finished shouting the command to attack, much less before they could recover from the stunning force of our combined voices.

The Corpsetaker shrieked something in a voice that scraped across my head like the tines of a rusty rake, and I twisted aside on instinct. One of the Lecters took the hit, and a gaping hole the size of a bowling ball appeared in the center of his chest.

“With me!” I shouted. I vanished and reappeared at the bottom of the staircase that led down to the chamber. A streamer of urine yellow lightning erupted from the Corpsetaker's outstretched hand, but I'd had my shield bracelet at the ready, and I deflected the strike into a small knot of stunned enemy lemurs. When it hit them, there was a hideous, explosive cascade of fire and havoc, and they were torn to shreds as if they'd been made of cheesecloth.

Holy crap.

Either one of those spells would have done the same to me if I'd been a quarter second slower. Dead or alive, Kemmler's disciples did
not
play for funsies.

The Lecter Specters appeared in a cloud around me, even as I sent a slug of pure force out of the end of my staff, forcing the Corpsetaker to employ her own magical counter, her wrists crossed in front of her body. The energy of my strike splashed off an unseen surface a few inches in front of her hands, and gobbets of pale green light splattered out from the impact.

“Dresden!” screamed Mort. He stared at me—or, more accurately, at the Lecters all around me—with an expression of something very like terror. “What have you done? What have you
done
?”

“Come on!” I shouted, and vanished from the bottom of the stairs to the top, just as the Corpsetaker appeared halfway up the stairway and sent another torrent of ruinous energy down toward the position the Lecters and I had just vacated.

At the top of the stairs, the tunnel was like I remembered it—decorated in miniature shrines with very real sigils of power concealed within splatters of gibberish. Candles glowed at each position—ward flames that accompanied the activation of the mystic defenses.

“The shrines!” I shouted to the Lecters. “Manifest and destroy them!”

I brought my shield up again, an instant before Corpsetaker sent a slew of dark, gelatinous energy up the stairs. I caught the spell in time, but it instantly began wrenching at my shield as if it had been some kind of living being, chewing away at it, devouring the energy I was using to hold the shield firm.

Crap. I was not going to fare well in a magical duel with someone who had clearly been doing this kind of thing for a long, long time—not when I had the Lecters to protect. The Corpsetaker would tear them apart if she could to stop us from bringing the wards down. She—I always thought of her as a she, for some reason, even though she could grab any kind of body she wanted, male, female, or otherwise—was far more experienced than I was, with what was probably a much broader range of nasty memories upon which to draw.

On top of that, I was already winded, so to speak. The fight with Evil Bob had been a job of work. If I stood there trading punches, she had an excellent chance of wearing me down enough to kill me. If all I did was keep shielding the Lecters, she'd be free to throw her hardest punches, and I felt certain that anyone from Kemmler's crew could hit like a truck.

Time to get creative.

I dropped the shield and simultaneously thrust my staff at the black jelly stuff, snarling,
“Forzare!”
Pure force tore the dark energy to shreds and continued on down the stairs to strike the Corpsetaker. My aim was bad. The strike only spun her in place and sent her sprawling back into open air.

I took a quick look back at the Lecters and immediately wished I hadn't. The flames of the candles in the hall had burned down to pinpoints of cold blue light. Once again, the ghosts had assumed forms from nightmares—and they were going totally ballistic on the Big Hoods' hideout. Something that looked like a blending of a gorilla and a Venus flytrap smashed apart a wooden crate supporting one shrine. A giant caterpillar, its segmented body made of severed human heads, their faces screaming, their tongues functioning as legs, rippled up a wall and began tearing out chunks of concrete where a ledge had been worn, destroying another shrine.

Right. It was working. I just had to keep the Corpsetaker busy until the wild rumpus got finished tearing apart the defenses.

I called up my Sight and vanished to a point twenty feet below the Corpsetaker's position, reappearing inside solid stone. My eyes couldn't see a thing, but my Sight wasn't impaired. I could see dark, violent energy swirling around where I'd last seen the Corpsetaker; nasty stuff. I felt my lips stretch into a snarl as I hefted my staff again and growled,
“Fuego!”

Ghost fire roared up through solid matter. In an instant, the dark energy had gathered to oppose my spell, but I sensed more than heard a cry of surprise and pain. The psycho hadn't expected that one.

Then the dark energy vanished.

I scanned around me wildly and found it reappearing behind and above me. I vanished again, flicking out another strike at the Corpsetaker's location—only to find that the Corpsetaker had blinked to a new one.

The next sixty seconds or so was a nauseating blur of motion and countermotion. We exchanged spells in solid stone, parried each other hovering in open air above the wraith pit, and leapfrogged each other's positions throughout the sleeping quarters of the Big Hoods. It was all but impossible to aim, since it required us to correctly guess the next position of the opponent and then hit it with a spell, but I clipped her once more, and she landed a strike of pure kinetic force that slammed into my hip and missed my ghostly genitals by about an inch.

Twice she darted into the hallway to attack the Lecters, but I stayed on her, forcing her to keep moving, keep defending, allowing her only time enough to throw quick jabs of power back at me.

I wasn't her match in a straight-up fight, but this was more like some kind of hallucinatory variant of Whac-a-Mole. Maybe I couldn't take her out, but I could damned well keep her from stopping the Lecters. If she turned her attention from me, I was wizard enough to take her out, and she knew it. If she went all-out on me, I could stand up to her long enough to let the Lecters finish their project—and she knew that, too.

I could feel her rage building, lending her next near-miss a hammering edge that jolted my teeth right through my shield—and I laughed at her in reply, making no effort whatsoever to hide my scorn.

I shrugged off another jab, letting it roll off my shield. And then Corpsetaker vanished and reappeared at the far end of the hallway, at the door to the old electrical-junction room. The very last of the ward flames burned there, at one final, unspoiled shrine. The Corpsetaker faced the Lecters, who were already moving toward her, lifted her hand, and spoke a single word filled with ringing power: “Stop.”

And the Lecters did. Completely. I mean, like, statue-still.

“Screw that!” I called out and raised my staff, drawing upon my own will. “Go!”

There was a sudden strain in the air between the Corpsetaker and me, and I felt it as a physical pressure against my right hand, in which I brandished my staff. Corpsetaker's upraised palm wavered slightly as our wills contended down the length of the hallway. I pushed hard, grinding my teeth and simply
willing
the Lecters to finish the job. I leaned forward a little and shoved out my staff, envisioning the Lecters tearing down the last of the little shrines.

My will lashed down the hallway and blew the hood back from the Corpsetaker's face. Maybe she was wearing the form of one of her victims. Maybe I was getting a look at the real Corpsetaker. Either way, she wasn't a pretty woman. She had a face shaped like a hatchet, only less gentle and friendly. Both cheeks were marked with what looked like ritual scars in the shape of spirals. Her hair was long and white, but grew in irregular blotches on her scalp, as if portions of it had been burned and scarred. Her skin was tanned leather, covered in fine seams and wrinkles, and there was a lizardlike quality to the way it loosened around her neck.

But her eyes were gorgeous. She had eyes a shade of vibrant jade like I had never seen this side of the Sidhe, and her eyelashes were long, thick, and dark as soot. As a young woman, she must have been a lean stunner, dangerously pretty, like a James Bond villainess.

Our eyes met and I braced myself for the soulgaze—but it didn't happen. Hell's bells, I had my Sight wide-open, enough to let me see the flow of energy straining between our outstretched hands, and it still didn't happen. Guess the rules change when you're all soul and nothing else.

The Corpsetaker watched me for a moment, apparently not particularly straining to hold my will away. “Again you meddle in what is not your concern.”

“Bad habit,” I said. “But then, it's pretty much what wizards do.”

“This will not end well for you, boy,” she replied. “Leave now.”

“Heh, that's funny,” I said. I
was
straining. I tried to keep it out of my voice. “For a second there, it sounded like you were telling me to go away. I mean, as if I would just go away.”

She blinked twice at me. Then, in a tone of dawning comprehension, she murmured, “You are not brilliant. You are
ignorant
.”

“Now you done it. Them's fightin' words,” I drawled.

The Corpsetaker tilted her head back and let out an eerie little screech. I think that, to her, it was laughter.

Then she turned, swiped a hand at the last shrine, and demolished it herself.

The wards came down all around us, energy fading, dispersing, settling abruptly back down to earth. I could see the massive currents of power begin to unravel and disperse back out into the world. Within seconds, the protective wards were gone, as if they'd never existed.

The Corpsetaker made that shrieking sound again and vanished, and in the sudden absence of her will I almost fell flat on my face. I caught myself by remembering that I could now officially scoff at gravity, stopped falling halfway to the floor, and righted myself again.

The wards were down. Murphy and company would be crashing the party at any moment.

And . . . for some reason, the Corpsetaker now
wanted
them to do it.

Right.

That couldn't be good.

I
let go of my Sight and went up the final flight of stairs, the ones that led from the junction room up to the street entrance—and found them stacked with Big Hoods. I blinked for a fraction of a second when I saw them. I'd practically forgotten the real-world thugs under the Corpsetaker's control. All the power we'd been throwing around in the duel had been ghostly stuff. The Big Hoods had no practical way to be aware of it.

How odd must the past couple of minutes have been from their point of view? They'd have felt the wave of cold, seen candles burning suddenly low, and then heard lots of boards and candles and paints being smashed and clawed down, while the concrete and stone walls were raked by invisible talons and the candles were smacked up and down the halls and stairways.

There were at least a dozen of them on the stairs, and they had guns, and there wasn't a whole lot I could do about it. For a second, I entertained notions of setting the Lecters on them, but I rejected the idea in a spasm of nausea. I'd seen what the killer spooks had done to the wolfwaffen. If I turned them loose, they'd deal with the Big Hoods the same way—and the Big Hoods, at the end of the day, were as much the Corpsetaker's victims as her physical muscle—and once you turned loose a force that elemental, you almost had to expect collateral damage. I didn't want any of it to splash onto Murphy and company.

“Okay,” I told the Lecters. “Go back downstairs and help Sir Stuart and his boys out against those lemurs. After that, defend Mort.” The Lecters' only response was to vanish, presumably to the main chamber. Good. Mort had still been conscious the last time I'd seen him. He could tell them what to do if they needed any further direction.

Meanwhile, I'd do the only thing I could to take on the Big Hoods. I'd play superscout for Karrin's team.

I vanished to outside the door to the stronghold and found several forms crouched there. Evening traffic was rumbling by on the bridge overhead, though the street running below it was deserted, and the space beneath the bridge was entirely shadowed. I ignored the darkness and saw Murphy next to the door, rummaging in a black nylon backpack. She was wearing her tactical outfit—black clothing and boots, and one of Charity Carpenter's vests made of Kevlar and titanium. Over that was a tactical harness, and she had two handguns and her teeny assault rifle, a little Belgian gun called a P-90. It packed one hell of a punch for such a compact package—much like Murphy herself.