Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

know, either. Hey, did you see what happened?”

“It came back again tonight. Then men came with fire. They burned the house. They took the little man away.”

I stiffened. “The Grey Ghost took Mort?”

“No, men took him,” the boy said.

The girl said, in a soft little voice, “We used to play with other children by the river. But he brought us here. He was always nice to us.” Her facial expression never changed. It was flat, empty.

The boy sighed, touched the little girl’s shoulder, and turned back to stare at the dwindling flames. I stood there watching them for a moment, and could see them growing more visibly transparent. I checked the other shades. It was happening to them, too, to a greater or lesser degree.

“Hey,” I said, to the boy. “Do you know Sir Stuart?”

“The big man. The soldier,” the boy said, nodding. “He’s in the garden. Behind the house.”

“Thank you,” I said, and went to look, vanishing to the side of Mort’s house and then jumping again, to the garden.

Mort’s backyard was like his front—sculpted, carefully maintained, decorated with Japanese sensibilities, spare and elegant. There was what looked like a koi pond, now filled with snow. There were trees, and more of the little bonsai pieces, delicate and somehow vulnerable. The fire had been close enough and hot enough to melt any coating of snow from their little branches.

What was left of Sir Stuart lay in a circle in the snow.

They’d used fire.

A perfect circle was melted in the show, out toward the back of the yard. They’d used gasoline, it looked like—the snow was melted down all the way to the scorched grass. Alcohol burns about three times as hot as gas, and faster, and it melts the snow fast enough for water to drown the flame. Someone had used the fire as part of a circle trap—pretty standard for dealing with spirits and other heavily supernatural entities. Once trapped in a circle, a spirit was effectively helpless; unable to leave, and unable to exercise power through its barrier.

The devilish part of the trap was the fire. Fire’s real, even to spirits, and brings pain to the immaterial as fast as it does to flesh-and-blood creatures. That’s one huge reason I always used fire in my mortal career. Fire burns, period. Even practically invulnerable things don’t like dealing with fire.

There was maybe half of Sir Stuart left. Most of his upper body was there and part of his right arm. His legs were mostly gone. There wasn’t any blood. What was left of him looked like a roll of papers rescued from a fire. The edges were blackened and crumbling slowly away.

The horrible part was that I knew he was still alive, or what passed for being alive among ghosts. Otherwise, he would simply be gone.

Did he feel pain? I knew that if I were in his condition, I would. Sure, maybe I knew that there was no spoon, but when it came down to it, I wasn’t sure I could deny that much apparent reality. Or maybe the memory of pain wasn’t an issue. Maybe the weird form of pain Eternal Silence had showed me had some sort of spiritual analogue. Or maybe, fire being fire, he was just in very real, very familiar agony.

I shuddered. Not that I could do anything about it. The circle that trapped him would keep me out as easily as it kept him in. In theory, I could take it down, but only if I could physically move something across it to break its continuity. I looked around quickly and spotted a twig standing out of the snow a few feet away. All I would need to do was move it about three feet.

It was like trying to eat broth with a fork. I just couldn’t get hold of the stick. My hand went through it time and time again, no matter what I tried. I couldn’t even get the damned thing to wiggle.

I wasn’t ghost enough to help Sir Stuart. Not like that, anyway.

“Sir Stuart?” I asked quietly.

I could see only one of his eyes. It half opened. “Hmmmm?”

I squatted down on my heels next to the circle. “It’s Harry Dresden.”

“Dresden,” he slurred, and his mouth turned up in a faint smile. “Pardon me if I don’t rise. Perhaps it was something I ate.”

“Of course,” I said. “What happened?”

“I was a fool,” he said. “Our attacker came at the same time every night. I made the mistake of assuming that