Ghost Story (63 page)

“No,” I said, barely louder than a whisper. “Tell him later, if you want. After. If you tell him before that, he won't stand for it. He'll try to stop it.”

“And maybe he'd be right to do it.”

“No,” I said quietly. “He wouldn't. But he'd do it anyway. This is my choice, Molls.”

She turned to go and paused. “You've never called me Molls before today.”

“Was saving it,” I said. “For when you weren't my apprentice anymore. Wanted to try it out.”

She smiled at me. She shed one more tear.

Then she left.

It took me a moment to gather myself. Then I dialed an international number on the rotary phone.

“Kincaid,” answered a flat voice.

“It's Dresden,” I said.

The voice warmed very slightly. “Harry. What's up?”

I took a deep breath. “You owe me a favor,” I said quietly. “For that thing with Ivy on the island.”

“Damn right,” he said.

“I'm calling it in.”

“Okay,” he said. “You want some backup on something?”

“I have a target for you.”

There was a silence from the other end of the phone. Then he said, “Tell me.”

“The new Winter Knight,” I said.

“There's a new one?”

“There's going to be,” I said.

“How do you . . .” More silence. Then he said, “It's like that.”

“There's a good reason,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“There's a little girl.”

More silence. “You'll know it's coming.”

“No,” I said. “I won't. I'll see to it.”

“Okay,” he said. “When?”

They were going to kill my daughter sometime before the next sunrise. I figured it might take me some time to get her home, assuming I didn't die trying.

“Anytime after noon tomorrow,” I said. “The sooner, the better.”

“Okay.”

“You can find me?”

“Yeah.”

“Be sure,” I said.

“I pay my debts.”

I sighed again. “Yeah. Thanks.”

He let out a soft chuckle. “Thanking me,” he said. “That's new.”

He hung up. I did the same. Then I called for Molly.

“Okay,” I said. “Let's do this.”

Molly took the phone and put it back in the cabinet. Then she picked up a slender, new white candle in a holder and a small box of matches. She came over and set the candle on a folding table nearby, where I could see it without moving my head. She struck a match and lit it.

“All right,” she said. “Harry, this has to be a smooth, gentle job. So focus on the candle. I need you to still your mind so that I can work.”

It felt odd, letting the grasshopper take the lead—but I guess that was what I'd been training her to do. I focused on the candle and began to quiet my thoughts.

“Good,” Molly said quietly after a moment, her voice soft velvet. “Relax. Take a nice, slow, deep breath. Good . . . Listen to my voice and let me guide you. Another deep breath now . . .”

And together with my accomplice, I finished arranging my murder.

I
surfaced from the memory, shivering, and looked around in confusion. I was still in Molly's mindscape, on the cheesy bridge. It was silent. Completely silent. Nothing moved. The images on the screen and the various Mollys were all frozen in place like mannequins. Everything that had been happening in the battle had been happening at the speed of thought—lightning fast. There was only one reason that everything here would be stopped still like this, right in the middle of the action.

“So much for that linear-time nonsense, eh?” My voice came out sounding harsh and rough.

Footsteps sounded behind me, and the room began to grow brighter and brighter. After a moment, there was nothing but white light, and I had to hold up a hand to shield my eyes against it.

Then the light faded somewhat. I lifted my eyes again and found myself in a featureless expanse of white. I wasn't even sure what I was standing on, or if I was standing on anything at all. There was simply nothing but white . . .

. . . and a young man with hair of dark gold that hung messily down over silver blue eyes. His cheekbones could have sliced bread. He wore jeans, old boots, a white shirt, and a denim jacket, and no youth born had ever been able to stand with such utter, tranquil stillness as he.

“You're used to linear time,” he said. His voice was resonant, deep, mellow, with the almost musical timbre you hear from radio personalities. “It was the easiest way to help you understand.”

“Aren't you a little short for an archangel?” I asked him.

Uriel smiled at me. It was the sort of expression that would make flowers spontaneously blossom and babies start to giggle. “Appropriate. I must confess to being more of a
Star Wars
fan than a
Star Trek
fan, personally. The simple division of good and evil, the clarity of perfect right and perfect wrong—it's relaxing. It makes me feel young.”

I just stared at him for a moment and tried to gather my thoughts. The memory, now that I had it again, was painfully vivid. God, that poor kid. Molly. I'd never wanted to cause her pain. She'd been a willing accomplice, and she'd done it with her eyes open—but, God, I wished it hadn't had to happen to her. She was hurting so much, and now I could see why—and I could see why the madness she was feigning might be a great deal more genuine than she realized.

That had to have been why Murphy distrusted her so strongly. Murph had excellent instincts for people. She must have sensed something in Molly, sensed the pain and the desperation that drove her, and it must have sent up a warning flag in Murphy's head. Which would have hurt Molly badly, to be faced with suspicion and distrust, however polite Karrin might have been about it. That pain would, in turn, have driven her further away, made her act stranger, which would earn more suspicion, in an agonizing cycle.

I'd never wanted that for her.

What had I done?

I'd saved Maggie—but had I destroyed my apprentice in doing so? The fact that I'd gotten myself killed had no relative bearing on the morality of my actions, if I had. You can't just walk around picking and choosing which lives to save and which to destroy. The inherent arrogance and the underlying evil of such a thing runs too deep to be avoided—no matter how good your intentions might be.

I knew why Molly had tried to get me to tell Thomas. She'd known, just as I had, that Thomas would try to stop me from killing myself, regardless of my motivations. But she'd been right about something else, too: He was my brother. He'd deserved more than I'd given him. That was why I hadn't thought of him, not once since returning to Chicago. How could I possibly have remembered my brother without remembering the shame I felt at excluding him from my trust? How could I think of Thomas without thinking of the truth of what I had done?

Normally, I would never have believed that I was the sort of man who could make himself forget and overlook something rather than facing a harsh reality, no matter how painful it might be.

I guess I'm not perfect.

The young man facing me waited patiently, apparently giving me time to gather my thoughts, saying nothing.

Uriel. I should have known from the outset. Uriel is the archangel who most people know little about. Most don't even know his name—and apparently he likes it that way. If Gabriel is an ambassador, if Michael is a general, if Rafael is a healer and spiritual champion, then Uriel is a spymaster—Heaven's spook. Uriel covered all kinds of covert work for the Almighty. When mysterious angels showed up to wrestle with biblical patriarchs without revealing their identities, when death was visited upon the firstborn of Egypt, when an angel was sent into cities of corruption to guide the innocent clear of inbound wrath, Uriel's hand was at work.

He was the quietest of the archangels. To my way of thinking, that probably indicated that he was also the most dangerous.

He'd taken notice of me a few years back and had bestowed a measure of power known as soulfire on me. I'd done a job or three for him since then. He'd dropped by with annoying, cryptic advice once in a while. I sort of liked him, but he was also aggravating—and scary, in a way that I had never known before. There was the sense of something . . . hideously absolute about him. Something that would not yield or change even if the universe itself was unmade. Standing in his presence, I always felt that I had somehow become so fragile that I might fly to dust if the archangel sneezed or accidentally twitched the wrong muscle.

Which, given the kind of power such a being possessed, was probably more or less accurate.

“All of this?” I asked, waving a hand generally, “was to lead me
there
? To that memory?”

“You had to understand.”

I eyed him and said wearily, “Epic. Fail. Because I have no idea what you're talking about.”

Uriel tilted back his head and laughed. “This is one of those things that was about the journey, not the destination.”

I shook my head. “You . . . you lost me.”

“On the contrary, Harry: You found yourself.”

I eyed him. Then tore at my hair and said, “Arrrgh! Can't you give me a straight answer? Is there some law of the universe that compels you to be so freaking mysterious?”

“Several, actually,” Uriel said, still clearly amused. “All designed for your protection, but there are still some things I can tell you.”

“Then tell me why,” I said. “Why do all this? Why sucker me into going back to Chicago? Why?”

“Jack told you,” Uriel said. “They cheated. The scale had to be balanced.”

I shook my head. “That office, in Chicago Between. It was yours.”

“One of them,” he said, nodding. “I have a great deal of work to do. I recruit those willing to help me.”

“What work?” I asked.

“The same work as I ever have done,” Uriel said. “I and my colleagues labor to ensure freedom.”

“Freedom of what?” I asked.

“Of will. Of choice. The distinction between good and evil is meaningless if one does not have the freedom to choose between them. It is my duty, my purpose in Creation, to protect and nourish that meaning.”

I narrowed my eyes. “So . . . if you're involved in my death . . .” I tilted my head at him. “It's because someone forced me to do it?”

Uriel waggled a hand in a so-so gesture and turned to pace a few steps away. “
Force
implies another will overriding your own,” he said over his shoulder. “But there is more than one way for your will to be compromised.”

I frowned at him, then said, with dawning comprehension, “Lies.”

The archangel turned, his eyebrows lifted, as though I were a somewhat dim student who had surprised his teacher with an insightful answer. “Yes. Precisely. When a lie is believed, it compromises the freedom of your will.”

“So, what?” I asked. “Captain Jack and the Purgatory Crew ride to the rescue every time someone tells a lie?”

Uriel laughed. “No, of course not. Mortals are free to lie if they choose to do so. If they could not, they would not be free.” His eyes hardened. “But others are held to a higher standard. Their lies are far deadlier, far more potent.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“Imagine a being who was
there
when the first mortal drew the first breath,” Uriel said. Hard, angry flickers of light danced around us, notable even against formless white. “One who has watched humanity rise from the dust to spread across and to change the very face of the world. One who has seen, quite literally, tens of thousands of mortal lives begin, wax, wane, and end.”

“Someone like an angel,” I said quietly.

“Someone like that,” he said, showing his teeth briefly. “A being who could know a mortal's entire life. Could know his dreams. His fears. His very thoughts. Such a being, so versed in human nature, in mortal patterns of thought, could reliably predict precisely how a given mortal would react to almost anything.” Uriel gestured at me. “For example, how he might react to a simple lie delivered at precisely the right moment.”

Uriel waved his hand and suddenly we were back in the utility room at St. Mary's. Only I wasn't lying on the backboard on a cot. Or, rather, I was doing exactly that—but I was also standing beside Uriel, at the door, looking in at myself.

“Do you remember what you were thinking?” Uriel asked me.

I did remember. I remembered with perfect clarity, in fact.

“I thought that I'd been defeated before. That people had even died because I failed. But those people had never been my own flesh and blood. They hadn't been my child. I'd lost. I was beaten.” I shook my head. “I remember saying to myself that it was all over. And it was all your fault, Harry.”

“Ah,” Uriel said as I finished the last sentence, and he lifted his hand. “Now look.”

I blinked at him and then at the image of me lying on the cot. “I don't . . .” I frowned. There was something odd about the shadows in the room, but . . .

“Here,” Uriel said, lifting a hand. Light shone from it as though from a sudden sunrise. It revealed the room, casting everything in stark relief—and I saw it.

A slender shadow crouched beside the cot, vague and difficult to notice, even by Uriel's light—but it was there, and it was leaning as though to whisper in my ear.

The thought, the memory, resonated in my head for a moment, and I shivered.