Ghost Story (The Dresden Files, #13)

by Jim Butcher

Life is hard. Dying’s easy. So many things must align in order to create life. It has to happen in a place that supports life, something approximately as rare as hen’s teeth, from the perspective of the universe. Parents, in whatever form, have to come together for it to begin. From conception to birth, any number of hazards can end a life. And that’s to say nothing of all the attention and energy required to care for a new life until it is old enough to look after itself. Life is full of toil, sacrifice, and pain, and from the time we stop growing, we know that we’ve begun dying. We watch helplessly as year by year, our bodies age and fail, while our survival instincts compel us to keep on going—which means living with the terrifying knowledge that ultimately death is inescapable. It takes enormous effort to create and maintain a life, and the process is full of pitfalls and unexpected complications. Ending a life, by comparison, is simple. Easy, even. It can be done with a relatively minor effort, a single microbe, a sharp edge, a heavy weight…or a few ounces of lead. So difficult to bring about. So easy to destroy. You’d think we would hold life in greater value than we do. I died in the water.

“Ye’ve the look of a scoundrel!” boomed the man. “And a dandysprat and a ragamuffin. Though I’ll admit, for all that, ye could yet be a congressman.”

Stu slid his readied pistol back into his belt. “For shades, memories are life, sustenance, and power. We are memories now, wizard.”

a ghost was simply a remainder, a reminder, an impression of the person who died. They might share similar personalities, emotions, memories, but they weren’t the same being. When a person died and left a ghost behind, it was as if some portion of his dying life energy was spun out, creating a new being entirely—though

Boobs are near the center of the universe, until you turn twenty-five or so. Which is also when young men’s auto insurance rates go down. This is not a coincidence.

“Excalibur, Durendal, and Kusanagi, yes, yes,” Sir Stuart said, his tone a little impatient. “Of course I know the Swords of the Cross. And the little blond woman has two of them?”

Paranoid? Probably. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean there isn’t a wizard’s ghost standing beside you with tears in his eyes.

Even though rule number one for dealing with supernatural beings—never show fear—is simple, it sure as hell isn’t easy. I know the kinds of things that are out there.

Case in point: you. You aren’t working with a lot of horsepower in the brains department, yet you manage to get to the bottom of things sooner than most.”

“Destroying things is easy,” Bob said. “Hell, all you really have to do to destroy something is wait. Creation, now. That’s hard.”

But at the end of the day, she was just one person, standing in defiance of powers that would regard her with the same indifference as might an oncoming tsunami, volcanic eruption, or earthquake. Life is precious, fragile, fleeting—and Murphy’s life was one of my favorites.

Memories equaled power. For a moment, I thought it couldn’t be that simple. But a lot of magic is actually disgustingly simple—which is not to be confused with easy.

Although discussing a problem with yourself is almost never a good way to secure a divergent viewpoint. “In fact, talking to yourself is often considered a sign of impending insanity,” I noted aloud. Which hardly seemed encouraging.

“Mortals prattle on about lonely impulses of delight and the gift of knowledge, and think that teaching is a trade like metalsmithing or healing or telling lies on television. It is not. It is the dissemination of power unto a new generation and nothing less. For her, as for you, lessons demand real risk in order to attain their true rewards.”

Maybe the White Council needed an Eighth Law of Magic: the law of unintended consequences. How do you measure one life against another? Can thousands of deaths be balanced by a single life?

What do you do to make up for failing everyone in your life? How do you make it right? How do you apologize for hideous things you never intended to happen?

My job hadn’t changed: When demons and horrors and creatures of the night prey on this city, I’m the guy who does something about it. “Time to start doing,” I whispered.

Abusers like to isolate their victims. People who feel that they are completely alone tend not to fight back.

who had been there to catch her? The freaking Leanansidhe, deputy of Her Wickedness, with her Nietzsche and Darwin Were Sentimental Pansies outlook on life.

a magazine?”

Wolves in general get underestimated in the modern world—after all, humans have guns. And helicopters. But back in the day, when things were more muscle powered, wolves were a real threat to humans, possibly the number-two predator on the planet. People don’t remember that wolves are far stronger, far faster, and far more dangerous than human beings. That humanity taught wolves to fear and avoid them—and that without that fear and advanced weaponry, a human being was nothing more than a possible threat and a potential meal. A wolf with no fear could tear several human beings apart. A wolf with no fear and an intelligent mind directing it to work in close concert with teammates was a force of freaking nature, more or less literally.

For a wizard running around as a lost soul, expending his very essence in an attempt to rescue a guy who hadn’t even really been his friend was definitely of questionable rationality. Grabbing the leashes of several dozen maniac ghosts and leading them on a banzai charge against a far stronger foe was probably less than stable, too. Hell, even the last few major choices of my life—murdering Susan in order to save our child, giving myself to Mab so that I could save little Maggie—were not the acts of a stable, sane man. Neither had been my entire career, really, given the options that had been available to me. I mean, I don’t mean to brag, but I could have used my abilities to make money if I’d wanted to. A lot of money. Instead? A little basement apartment. A job catering to clientele who hadn’t merely needed help—they’d needed a miracle. Money? Not much. The occasional good deed, sure, but you can’t eat sincere thanks. Girls don’t flock to the guy who drives the old car, reads a lot of books, and kicks down the doors of living nightmares. My own people in the White Council had persecuted me my whole life, mostly for trying to do the right thing. And I’d kept on doing it anyway. Hell. I was pretty much crazy already.

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.

The screen came up to light again, showing a devastated section of the city grid. No, not decimated. Had that part of the city been decimated, one out of every ten buildings would be destroyed. That’s what decimated means. Personally, I think some early-years, respected television personality got decimated and devastated confused at some point, and no one wanted to point it out to him, so everyone started using them interchangeably. But dammit, words mean what they mean, even if everyone thinks they ought to mean something else.

You run in the circles I do, you get more than a few offers of power. It always comes with a price, usually a hidden one, but you get the offers. I’d had more than a few chances to advance myself, provided I was willing to set aside anything like integrity to do so. I hadn’t been. Not until today.

“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.”

“Intimate,” he said quietly. “Sensitive. Names have tremendous power, Dresden. Yet mortals toss them left and right as though they were toys. It’s like watching infants play with hand grenades sometimes.”

Uriel’s smile blossomed again. “You’ve got it backward, Harry,” he said. “You are a soul. You have a body.”

“Told me…I was dead,” I muttered. “Dead is a grey word,” Mab hissed. “Mortals fear it, and so they wish it to be black—and they have but few words to contain its reality. It escapes from such constraints. Death is a spectrum, not a line. And you, my knight, had not yet vanished into the utter darkness.”