Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

went in all fat and happy and confident, I could wander right into serious trouble.

Fact six: There were all kinds of spiritual beings in the wide universe, and ghosts were only a tiny cross section of them. I had to be ready for anything. Another entity of some sort might well wander in, drawn by the conflict. Or, hell, for all I knew, one might already be taking a hand.

“No closed minds, Dresden,” I ordered myself. “Don’t get suckered into thinking this is one limited, small-scale problem. There’s every chance it might be part of a much, much larger problem.”

If my afterlife went anything like my life had, that seemed a safe bet.

Fact seven: Sooner or later, dammit, I was going to start laying out a little chastisement where it was long overdue.

I flashed back to several vivid memories of when I had done exactly that. Images of violence and flame and hideous foes flickered through my head, sharp and nearly real. The emotions that accompanied those memories came along for the ride, but they were one step removed, distant enough to let me process them, identify them.

Rage, of course. Rage at the creatures who were trying to harm the innocent or my friends or me. That rage had been both a weapon and armor to me in moments of mortal peril. It was always there, and I always welcomed its arrival—being filled with anger was infinitely preferable to being filled with terror. But seeing it in my heightened memories, it made me feel a little sick. Rage was a word we used for anger when it was being used in the cause of right—but that didn’t sanctify it or make it somehow laudable. It was still anger. Violent, dangerous anger, as deadly as a flying bullet. It just happened to be a bullet that was aimed in a convenient direction.

Fear next: always fear. It doesn’t matter how personally courageous you are. When something is trying to kill you and you know it, you’re afraid. It’s a mindless, lizard-brain emotion. There’s no way to stop it. Courage is about learning how to function despite the fear, to put aside your instincts to run or give in completely to the anger born from fear. Courage is about using your brain and your heart when every cell of your body is screaming at you to fight or flee—and then following through on what you believe is the right thing to do.

The White Council blamed me for causing trouble with various supernatural evils, and while I’m not quite arrogant enough to blame all the world’s problems on my mistakes, they probably had a point. I have issues with bullies and authority figures. And I refuse to stand by and do nothing when those too weak to defend themselves become victims.

But how much of that had been courage, and how much of it had been me embracing my probably righteous anger so that I wouldn’t feel the fear? As the memories flipped by, I saw myself again and again throwing myself into the fire—sometimes literally—to help someone who needed it or to kill something that needed killing. The tidal surges of my emotion had propelled me, fueled my magic, and many times they had made it possible to survive when I wouldn’t have otherwise.

But when I’d been running on adrenaline, I’d rarely stopped to consider the extended consequences of my actions. By saving Susan from Bianca of the Red Court, I had offered a high-profile insult to the entire vampire nation. When Duke Ortega had shown up to challenge me to a duel, to restore the honor of the Red Court and forestall a war, it had ended in a bloodbath—and it had never occurred to me to attempt to ensure any other outcome. As a result of the disastrous duel, a wizard named Ebenezar McCoy, my grandfather, had brought an old Soviet satellite down from its orbit, right on top of Ortega’s stronghold. No one survived. Then Arianna, Ortega’s wife, the daughter of the Red King, had sought her own vengeance even as the Red Court launched a fullscale war.

Arianna’s vengeance had materialized in the form of murdering my daughter’s foster family and abducting her. Once Susan heard about it, she got in touch. And again I flung myself into fire without a thought.

None of those things had to happen. I mean, I wasn’t the only guy in the world who had driven that course of events. I knew that. But I had