Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

squeeze through.

I went through the doors ghost style and tried to ignore the discomfort, the way Sir Stuart did. It hurt anyway—not enough to make me howl in agony or anything, but way too much to simply lose track of. Maybe it just took time for your “skin” to toughen. At least there hadn’t been a threshold, which would have stopped me cold. This place had never been meant to be anyone’s home, and evidently nobody who lived there thought of it as anything special. The exact process that formed a threshold had never been fully explained or documented, but it might be a good idea for me to get a better idea of the exact why and how, given my circumstances.

“No, it is not a good idea. Focus, Dresden,” I muttered. “The idea is for you to take care of business so you never have to learn all about the environmental factors of long-term ghostosity.”

Fitz stopped long enough to do a head count, out loud, as the ragged troop of would-be gangsters moved deeper into the building. It was an industrial structure and it had been built for economy, not beauty. There weren’t a lot of windows, and it was definitely on the shady side—even with dawn almost here and the lights of the city and sky reflecting from fresh snow. Cold, too, judging from the way the breath was congealing into fog every time the young men exhaled.

Fitz broke out a camping light and flicked it on. It was a red one, and didn’t so much light the way as clarify the difference between utter darkness and not-quite darkness. It was enough for them to move by.

“I wonder,” I mused aloud. After all, I was immaterial. Ghosts and the material universe didn’t seem to have a completely one-way relationship, the way mortals and physics did. I didn’t actually have pupils to dilate anymore. Hell, for that matter, light apparently passed right through me—how else was I invisible to everyone, otherwise? Which meant that, whatever it might seem like, I wasn’t really seeing the world, in the traditional sense. My perceptions were something different, something more than light reflecting onto a chemically sensitive surface in my eyes.

“There’s no real reason I should need the light to see, is there?” I asked myself.

“No,” I said. “No, there isn’t.”

I closed my eyes for a few steps and focused on a simple memory—when, as a kid in a foster home, I’d first found myself in a dark room when a storm knocked out the power. It was a new place, and I had fumbled around blindly, searching for a flashlight or matches or a lighter, or any other source of light, for almost ten minutes before I found something—a decorative snow globe commemorating the Olympics at Lake Placid. A small switch turned on a light that made the red, white, and blue snowflakes drifting in the liquid gleam in sudden brilliance.

The panic in my chest had eased as the room became something I could navigate safely again, my fear fading. I could see.

And when I opened my ghostly eyes, I could see the hallway through which we walked with perfect clarity, as plainly as if the long-dead fluorescents overhead had been humming along at full glow.

A quick, pleased laugh escaped me. Now I could see in the dark. “Just like . . . uhhh . . . I can’t think of an X-Man who I’m sure could see in the dark. Or was that a Nightcrawler thing . . . ? Whatever. It’s still another superpower. There is no spoon. I am completely spoonless over here.”

Fitz stopped in his tracks, turning suddenly, and lifted the camping light in my direction, his eyes wide. He suddenly sucked in a deep breath.

I stopped and blinked at him.

Everyone around Fitz had gone quiet and completely still, reacting to his obvious fear with the instant, instinctive stillness of someone who had good reason to fear predators. Fitz stared down the hall uncertainly, moving the light as if it might help him see a few inches farther.

“Hell’s bells,” I said. “Hey, kid. Can you hear me?”

Fitz reacted, his body twitching a little, his head cocked to one side, then the other, as if trying to trace a faint whisper of sound.

“Fitz?” whispered the little kid with the knife.

“Quiet,” Fitz said, still staring.

I cupped my hands over my mouth and shouted. “Hey! Kid! Can you hear me?”

The color had already drained out of his face, but the second