Ghost Story (The Dresden Files, #13)

by Jim Butcher

I stood in a circle of silent, staring, hollow-eyed spirits. Now that I knew what they were—the insane, dangerous ghosts of Chicago, the ones that killed people—they looked different. Those two little kids? My goodness, spooky now, a little too much darkness in their sunken eyes, expressions that wouldn’t change if they were watching a car go by or pushing a toddler’s head under the surface of the water. A businessman, apparently from the late-nineteenth century, I recognized as the shade of Herman Webster Mudgett, an American trailblazer in the field of entrepreneurial serial murder. I spotted another shade from a century earlier who could only have been Captain William Wells, a cold and palpable fury radiating from him still. There were more—many more. Chicago has an intense history of violence, tragedy, and sheer weirdness that really can’t be topped this side of the Atlantic. I couldn’t put names to a third of them, but I knew now, looking at them, exactly what they were—lives that had ended in misery, in fury, in pain, or in madness. They were pure energy of destruction given human form, smoldering like coals that could still sear flesh long after they ceased to give off light. They were a loaded gun.

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.

Pain isn’t a lot of fun, at least not for most folks, but it is utterly unique to life. Pain—physical, emotional, and otherwise—is the shadow cast by everything you want out of life, the alternative to the result you were hoping for, and the inevitable creator of strength. From the pain of our failures we learn to be better, stronger, greater than what we were before. Pain is there to tell us when we’ve done something badly—it’s a teacher, a guide, one that is always there to both warn us of our limitations and challenge us to overcome them. For something no one likes, pain does us a whole hell of a lot of good.