Ghost Story (7 page)

“You!”
the ghost hissed. Its hands formed into arching clawlike shapes, and it hissed in rage—and in fear.

Click-clack,
went the hammer of Sir Stuart's gun.

The Grey Ghost let out a scream of frustration and simply flew apart into thousands of tiny wisps of mist, taking the floating skull along with it. The wisps swarmed together into a vortex like a miniature tornado, and streaked down the road and out of sight, leaving a hundred voices screaming a hundred curses in its wake.

I looked around. The lasts of the wraiths were dying or had fled. The house's defenders, most of them wounded and bleeding pale ectoplasm and flickering memory, were still in their positions. Sir Stuart was holding one hand to his side, and with the other held the pistol pointed at the empty air where the Grey Ghost had been.

“Ahhhh,” he said, sagging, once it became clear that the fight was over. “Bloody hell. That's going to leave a mark.”

I moved to his side. “Are you okay, man?”

“Aye, lad. Aye. What the hell were you trying to do? Get yourself killed?”

I glowered at him and said, “You're welcome. Glad I could help.”

“You nearly got yourself destroyed,” he replied. “Another second and that creature would have blasted you to bits.”

“Another second and you'd have put a bullet in its head,” I said.

Sir Stuart idly pointed the gun at me and pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a flash of sparks as flint struck steel . . . and nothing happened.

“You were
bluffing
?” I asked.

“Aye,” Sir Stuart said. “'Tis a muzzle-loading pistol, boy. You have to reload them like a proper weapon.” Idly, he reached out a hand toward the last remnants of a deceased wraith, and flickers of light and memory flowed across the intervening space and into his fingertips. When he had it all back, Sir Stuart sighed and shook his head, seeming to recover a measure of strength. “Very well, then, lad. Help me up.”

I did so. Sir Stuart's midsection on the right side was considerably more translucent than before, and he moved as if it pained him.

“When will they be back?” I asked him.

“Tomorrow night, by my reckoning,” he said. “With more. Last night they had four lemurs along. Tonight it was six. And that seventh . . .” He shook his head and started reloading the pistol from the powder horn he carried on a baldric at his side. “I knew something stronger had to be gathering all those shades together, but I never considered a sorcerer.” He finished reloading the weapon, put the ramrod back into its holder, and said, “Pass me my ax, boy.”

I got it for him and handed it over. He slipped its handle through a ring on his belt and nodded. “Thank you.”

A thumping sound made me turn my eyes back toward the house.

A man, burly, wearing a dark, hooded sweater and old jeans, was holding a long-handled crowbar in big, blocky hands. He shoved one hand into the space between the door and the frame, and with a practiced, powerful motion, popped the door from its frame and sent it swinging open.

Without an instant's hesitation, Sir Stuart fired. So did the house's spectral defenders. A hurricane of ghostly power hurtled down upon the man—and passed harmlessly through him. Hell, the guy looked like he hadn't noticed anything at all.

“A mortal,” Sir Stuart breathed. He took a step forward, let out a sound of pain, and clutched at his side. His teeth were clenched, his jaw muscles standing out sharply. “Dresden,” he gasped. “I cannot stop a mortal man. There is nothing I can do.”

The hooded intruder took the crowbar into his left hand and drew a stubby revolver from his sweater with his right.

“Go,” Stuart said. “Warn Mortimer. Help him!”

I blinked. Mortimer had made it clear that he didn't want to get involved with me—and some childish part of my nature wanted to snap that turnabout was fair play. But a wiser, more rational part of me reminded my inner child that without Mort, I might never be able to get in touch with anyone else in town. I might never find my own killer. I might never be able to protect my friends.

And besides. You don't just let people kick down other people's doors and murder them in their own home. You just don't.

I clapped Stuart on the shoulder and sprinted back toward the little house and its little owner.

T
he gunman had a big lead on me, but I had an advantage he didn't. I'd already been inside the house. I knew the layout, and I knew where Mort was holed up.

Oh. Plus I could
run through freaking walls
.

Granted, I think it would have been more fun to be Colossus than Shadowcat. But you take what you can get, and any day you've merely got the powers of an X-Man can't be all that bad. Right?

I gritted my teeth and plunged through the wall into Mort's kitchen and ran for the study, several steps ahead of the gunman.

“Mort!” I shouted. “Mort, they brought a hitter with them this time! There's a gunman running around your house!”

“What?” demanded Mort's voice from the far side of the ghost-dusted door. “Where's Stuart?”

“Dammit, Mort, he's hurt!” I called.

There was a brief pause, and then Mort said, as if baffled, “How did that happen?”

I was getting impatient. “Focus, Mort! Did you hear me? There's a frigging gunman loose in your house!”

Real alarm entered his voice for the first time. “A what?”

The gunman had heard Mort shouting at me. He came toward the door to the study, moving lightly for a big man. I got a better look at him, and noted that his clothing was ragged and unwashed, and so was he. He stank, enough that it carried through to me even given my condition, and his eyes were wide and wild, rolling around like those of a junkie who is hopped up on something that makes him pay too much attention to his surroundings. That didn't seem to have affected his gun hand, though. The semiautomatic he clutched in one big fist seemed steady enough to get the job done.

“Mort!” I called. “He's coming toward your study door right now! Look, just get your weapon and aim at the door and I'll tell you when to shoot!”

“I don't have one!” Mort screamed.

I blinked. “You don't
what
?”

“I am an ectomancer, not an action hero!” I heard him moving around in the office for a moment, and then he said, “Um. They cut the phone.”

The gunman let out a low, rumbling chuckle. “You are wanted, little man.” His voice sounded rotted, clotted, like something that hadn't been alive in a long time. “It is commanded. You can come with me and it won't hurt. Or you can stay in there and it will.”

“Dresden!” Mort called. “What do I do?”

“Oh,
now
you want to talk to me!” I said.

“You're the one who knows about this mayhem bullshit!” Mort shrieked.

“Gonna count, little man,” said the gunman. “Five.”

“Surviving mayhem is about being prepared!” I shouted back. “Little things like
having a gun
!”

“I'll get one in the morning!”

“Four!”

“Mort, there's gotta be something you can do,” I said. “Hell's bells, every time I've run into a ghost it's tried to rip my lungs out! You're telling me none of your spooks can do something?”

“They're
sane
,” Mort shouted back. “It's crazy for a ghost to interact with the physical world. Sane ghosts don't go around acting
crazy
!”

“Three!” chanted the gunman.

“Go
away
,” Mort shouted at him.

“There's gotta be something I can do!” I yelled.

“I don't make the rules, okay?” Mort said. “The only way a ghost can manifest is if it's insane!”

“Two!” the gunman screamed, his voice rising to an excited pitch.

I jumped in front of the lunatic and shrieked, “Boo!” I flapped my hands in his face, as if trying to slap him left and right on the cheeks.

Nothing happened.

“Guess that was too much to hope for, huh?” Mort called lamely.

“One,” the gunman purred. Then he leaned back and drove a heavy boot at the door. It took him three kicks to crack the frame and send the door flying inward.

Mort was waiting on the other side of the door, a golf club in hand. He swung it at the gunman's head without any preamble, a grimly practical motion. The gunman put an arm up, but the wooden head of the club got at least partly around it, and he reeled back a pace.

“This is your
fault
, Dresden,” Mort snarled, swinging the club again as he spoke.

He hit the gunman full-on in the chest, and then again in one big arm. The gunman caught the next blow on his forearm, and swung wildly at Mort. He connected, and Mort got knocked on his can.

The gunman pressed one hand to a bleeding wound on his head and screamed, a howl of agony that was somehow completely out of proportion with the actual injury. His wild eyes rolled again and he lifted the gun to aim at the little man.

I moved on instinct, throwing myself uselessly between the weapon and the ectomancer. I tripped on a fragment of the ghost-dust-painted door and wound up falling in a heap on top of Mort and . . .

. . . sunk
into
him.

The world suddenly hit me in full Technicolor. It was so
dark
in here, the gunman an enormous, threatening shadow standing over me. His voice was hideous and so loud that my ears ached. The stench—unwashed body and worse things—was enough to turn my stomach, filling my nose like hideous packing peanuts. I saw the gunman's hand tighten on the trigger and I threw my arm up. . . .

My black-clad, thick, rather short arm.

“Defendarius!”
I barked, faux Latin, the old defense spell I'd first learned from Justin DuMorne, my first teacher. I felt the magic surge into me, down through my arm, out into the air, just as the gun went off, over and over, as some kind of restraint in the gunman's head snapped.

Sparks flew up from a shimmering blue plane that formed in front of my outspread fingers, bullets and fragments of bullets shattering and bouncing around the room. One of them stayed more or less in one piece and smacked into the gunman's calf, and he pitched abruptly to one side, still jerking the trigger until the weapon was clicking on empty.

I felt my mouth move as Mort's voice—a voice that rang with a resonance and authority I had seldom encountered before, said, “Get
off
of me!”

If I'd been hurtled from a catapult, I don't think I'd have been thrown away any faster. I flew off at an upward angle—and slammed painfully into the ghost-dust-painted ceiling of the study. I bounced off it and fell to the equally hard floor. I lay there, stunned, for a second.

The gunman got to his feet, breathing hard and fast, slobber shooting out from slack lips as he did. He picked up the golf club that had fallen from Mort's fingers and took a step toward him.

Mort fixed hard eyes on the intruder and spoke, his voice ringing with that same unalterable authority. “To me!”

I felt the tug of some sudden force, as subtle and inarguable as gravity, and I had to lean against it to stop myself from sliding across the floor toward him.

Other spirits appeared, drawn in through the shattered door as if sucked into a tornado. Half a dozen Native American shades flew into Mort, and as the gunman swung the golf club, he let out a little yipping shout, ducked the swing more nimbly than any man his age and condition should have been able to, caught the gunman's wrist, and rolled backward, dragging the man with him. He planted his heels in the gunman's midsection and heaved, a classic fighting technique of the American tribes, and sent the man crashing into a wall.

The gunman rose, seething, eyes entirely wild, but not before Mort had crossed the room and taken an ancient, worn-looking ax down from a rack attached to one wall. It took my stunned brain a second to register that the weapon looked exactly like the one Sir Stuart had wielded, give or take a couple of centuries.

“Stuart,” Mort called, and his voice rang in my chest as if it had come from a bass-amplified megaphone. There was a flicker of motion, and then Sir Stuart's form flew in through the doorway as if propelled by a vast wind, overlaying itself briefly onto Mort's far smaller body.

The gunman swung the club, but Mort caught it with a deft, twisting move of the ax's haft. The gunman leaned into it, using his far greater weight and strength in an attempt to simply overbear the smaller man and push him to the floor.

But he couldn't.

Mort held him off as if he'd had the strength of a much larger, much younger, much healthier man. Or maybe men. He held the startled intruder stone-still for the space of five or six seconds, then heaved, twisting with the full power of his shoulders, hips, and legs, and used the ax's head to rip the club from the intruder's paws. The gunman threw an enraged punch at his face, but Mort blocked it with the flat of the ax's head, and then snapped the blunt upper edge of the ax into the gunman's face with an almost contemptuous precision.

The intruder reeled back, stunned, and Mort followed up with the instincts and will of a dangerous, trained fighting man. He struck the intruder's knee with the weapon's haft, sending a sharp, crackling pop into the air, and swung the flat of the blade into the intruder's jaw as the bigger man began to fall. The blow struck home with a meaty
thunk
and another crackling noise of impact, and the gunman dropped like a proverbial stone.

Mortimer Lindquist, ectomancer, stood over the fallen madman in a wary crouch, his eyes focusing on nothing as he turned his head left and right, scanning the room around him.