Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

the place was locked on Molly. A waitress stood with wide eyes and a telephone against her ear.

Molly looked around at them for a moment and then said, “God, you people have it good. You don’t know. You wouldn’t know if one of them walked up to you and tore the thoughts out of your skull.”

She rose, grabbed the tuning fork, and left a pile of wadded bills on the table. She pointed at the waitress and said, “Put the phone down. Or you won’t get a tip.”

The telephone dropped from the woman’s fingers and clattered on the floor.

“See?” she said, glancing back in my general direction. “It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good for.”

I sat there, stunned and heartbroken, unable to think of anything to say or do to help Molly.

I watched my mad apprentice stalk out of the silent restaurant and into the frozen night.

Chapter Twenty-four

I walked the shadowy streets, thinking. Or, at least, trying to think.

When I’d been alive, walking was something I did when I needed to chew something over. Engage the body in effort and activity and the purely physical manifestations of a mental problem stop being distractions. I didn’t have a body anymore, but I didn’t know how else to cope with so many overwhelming troubles.

So I walked, silent and invisible, my head down, and I thought furiously as I went.

A single fact glared out at me, blazing in front of my mind’s eye in stark reality illuminated by all the lives that were on fire around me:

In the end, when it had mattered most, I’d blown it.

I grew up an orphan with nothing but a few vague memories of my father before he’d died. My childhood hadn’t been the kind of thing I’d wish on anyone. I had run into some bad people. Justin was the worst—a true monster.

When I was sixteen or seventeen, still agonized by his betrayal, and certain that I would never know anything like a home, friends, or family, I made myself a promise: I would never allow a child of mine to grow up as I had—driven from home to home, an easy victim with no protector, never stable, never certain.

Never.

When Susan had asked me to help her recover Maggie, I went all-in without a second thought. The child was my daughter. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t known about her or that I had never seen her with my own eyes. There was a child of my blood who needed my help and protection. I was her father. I would die to protect her if need be.

End of story.

I may have had good reasons. I may have had the best of intentions.

But intentions aren’t enough, no matter how good they are. Intentions can lead you to a place where you’re able to make a choice.

It’s the choice that counts.

To get my daughter back, I’d crossed a line. Not just crossed it; I’d sprinted at it and taken a flying freaking leap over it. I made a pact with the Queen of Air and Darkness, giving away my free will, my very self, to Mab in exchange for power enough to challenge the Red King and his monstrous Court. That was stupid.

I’d had excuses at the time. My back had been against the wall. Actually, it had been broken and against a wall. All the help I’d been able to call upon, all the allies and tricks and techniques in my arsenal, had not been enough. My home had been destroyed. So had my car. I couldn’t even get up and walk, much less fight. And the forces arrayed against me had been great—so great that even the White Council of Wizards was terrified of confronting them.

In that bleak hour, I had chosen to sell my soul. And after that, I had led my closest friends and allies out on what I knew was practically a suicide mission. I’d known that such a battle would put a savage strain on Molly’s psychic senses, and that even if she did manage to survive, she might never be the same. I’d risked the two irreplaceable Swords of the Cross in my keeping, sending them into the battle even though I knew that if we fell, some of the world’s mightiest weapons for good would be captured and lost.

And when I saw that the sacrificial blood rite the Red King had intended to destroy me could be turned back on the Red Court, I had used it without hesitation.

I murdered