Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

and picking up Daniel’s. He tested the blade’s balance and edge and said, “Serviceable.” He carefully wiped the blood from Daniel’s blade against the leg of his trousers, closed it, and slipped it into the pocket of his bathrobe. Then he fixed the young man with a nasty smile, raised his own blade over his head, so that Daniel’s blood dripped down it and fell on his upraised arm.

And he started to chant.

I felt the magic gathering at once. It wasn’t particularly powerful, but that was by my own standards. Magic doesn’t absolutely require a ton of horsepower to be dangerous. It took Aristedes maybe ten seconds to summon enough will and focus for whatever he was doing, and I stood there clenching my fists and my jaw in impotent fury. Daniel saw what was happening and found an old can in the detritus on the floor beside him. He threw it at Aristedes in an awkward, left-handed motion, but came nowhere close to striking the sorcerer.

Aristedes pointed the knife at Daniel, his eyes reptilian, hissed a word, and released the spell.

Michael’s eldest son arched his back and let out a strangled scream of agony. Aristedes repeated the word and Daniel contorted in pain again, his back bowing more than I would have thought possible.

I stifled a furious scream of my own and looked away as the sorcerer bent and twisted the energy of Creation itself into a means of torment. Looking away was almost worse: Aristedes’ young followers were watching with a sick fascination. Daniel screamed until he was out of breath, and then began to strangle himself as he tried to keep it up. One of the kids bent suddenly and began retching onto the floor.

“This is my house,” Aristedes said, his expression never changing. “I am the master here, and my will is—”

Butters appeared behind Aristedes, from around an upended vat of some kind, and swung three feet of lead pipe into the side of the sorcerer’s knee.

There was a sharp, clear crack as bone and cartilage snapped, and Aristedes screamed and went down.

“That sound you just heard,” Butters said, his voice tight with fear and adrenaline, “was your lateral collateral ligament and anterior cruciate ligament tearing free of the joint. It’s also possible that your patella or tibia was fractured.”

Aristedes just lay there in pain, gasping through clenched teeth. A line of spittle drooled out of his mouth.

Butters hefted the lead pipe like a batter at the plate. “Get rid of the knife, or I start on your cranium.”

Aristedes kept on gasping but didn’t look up. He tossed the creepy knife away.

“The one in your pocket, too,” Butters said.

The sorcerer gave him a look of pure hatred. Then he tossed away the knife he’d appropriated from Daniel.

“Sit tight, Daniel,” Butters called. “I’ll be with you in just a second.”

“ ’M fine,” Daniel groaned from the ground. He didn’t sound fine. But as I watched, I saw him winding pieces of the slashed cloak around the wound in his right arm, binding them closed and slowing the bleeding. Tough kid, and thinking under pressure.

Butters focused on Aristedes. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “I want to help you. Your knee has been destroyed. You will never walk again if you don’t get medical attention. I’ll take you to a hospital.”

“What do you want?” Aristedes growled.

“The priest. Fitz. These kids.” He bounced the lead pipe against his own shoulder a couple of times. “And this really isn’t a negotiation.”

“Yes!” I said, clenching my fist. “You go, Butters!”

Aristedes eyed Butters for a moment more. Then he sagged and let out a soft groan of pain.

Oh, crap.

“You win,” the sorcerer said. “Just . . . please . . . help me.”

“Straighten it out,” Butters said, never quite looking at the man. “Lie back and leave it straight.”

Aristedes fumbled with his leg and let out another, higher-pitched moan of pain.

Butters flinched at the sound and his eyes were tortured. In a sudden flash of insight, I realized why he cut up corpses for a living instead of treating live patients.

Butters couldn’t handle seeing people in pain.

That was what he’d always meant when he said that he wasn’t a real doctor, when he said that treating living patients was messy and disturbing compared to extracting individual organs and cataloging them in autopsies. Dead people were just a pile of meat and bones. They were beyond all suffering.

A physician needs a certain level of professional detachment if he is going to