Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

find some way to do it without her knowledge, and that seemed like something that would be more than a little slimy to do to a friend. Augh. Better, maybe, to focus on the immediate problems first.

I had to find Morty, whose plight had clearly been low on Murph’s priority list.

I had to help Fitz and the rest of his clueless, teenage pals.

And for all of it, I needed the help of someone I could trust.

I took a deep breath and nodded.

Then I walked until I had passed through an exterior wall of the Bright Future house, and set off to find my apprentice before the night got any deeper.

Chapter Twenty

I always considered myself a loner.

I mean, not like a poor-me, Byron-esque, I-should-have-broughta-swimming-buddy loner. I mean the sort of person who doesn’t feel too upset about the prospect of a weekend spent seeing no one, and reading good books on the couch. It wasn’t like I was a people hater or anything. I enjoyed activities and the company of friends. But they were a side dish. I always thought I would also be happy without them.

I walked the streets of a city of nearly three million people and, for the first time, there was nothing that connected me to any of them. I couldn’t speak to them. I couldn’t touch them. I couldn’t get in an argument over a parking space, or flip the bird to a careless driver who ran a light while I was crossing. I couldn’t buy anything in one of the stores, making polite chitchat with the clerk while paying. Couldn’t pick up a newspaper. Couldn’t recommend a good book to someone browsing the shelves.

Three million souls went about their lives around me, and I was alone.

Now I understood Captain Murphy’s shadow Chicago. The actual town had already begun to feel like the shadow version. With enough time, would the real city look that way to me, too? Dark? Empty? Devoid of purpose and vaguely threatening? I’d been here for barely a day.

What would I be like if I was here for a year? Ten years? A hundred years?

I was starting to get why so many ghosts seemed to be a couple of French fries short of a Happy Meal.

I had to wonder, too, if maybe Sir Stuart and Morty were right about me. What if I really was the deluded spirit they thought I was? Not the true Harry Dresden, just his image in death, doing what the lunatic had always done: setting out to help his friends and get the bad guy.

I didn’t feel like a deluded spirit, but then, I wouldn’t. Would I? The mad rarely know that they are mad. It’s the rest of the world, I think, that seems insane to them. God knew it had always seemed fairly insane to me. Was there any way I could be sure I was anything other than what Sir Stuart and Mort thought?

More to the point, Mort was the freaking expert on ghosts. I mean, I knew my way around the block, but Mort had been a specialist. Normally, on purely technical matters regarding spirits and shades, I would give his opinion significant weight, probably a little more than I would my own. Morty had never been a paragon of courage and strength, but he was smart, and clearly tough enough to survive a long career that had been a lot more dangerous than I thought.

Hell. For all I knew, while I had been busy saving Chicago from things no one knew were there, Mort might have been saving me from things I never knew were there. Funny world, isn’t it?

I stopped in my tracks and shook my head as if to clear water from my eyes. “Dresden, have your personal existential crisis later. The bad guys are obviously working hard. Get your ass in gear.”

Good advice, that.

The question was, How?

Normally, I would have tracked Molly down with a fairly simple piece of thaumaturgy I’d done a thousand times. After her unplanned vacation to Arctis Tor, in Faerie, I had always been sure to keep a fairly recent lock of her hair handy. And more recently, I’d found I could get a fix on all the energy patterns she used to make her first few independent magical tools—like the hair, they were something specific and unique to her and her alone. A signature. I could be pretty sure to find her when I needed to do so. Hell, for that matter, I’d spent