Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

happened several times to either side in the war with the Red Court. It’s a fairly standard tactical maneuver. It requires a certain amount of intestinal fortitude to pull off, as Evil Bob had demonstrated with his Normandy defenses.

But I am dead certain—ba-dump-bump-ching—that I’m the first guy to lead an army of spirits in an assault from the spirit-world side . . . and had them start off by screaming, “BOO!”

The spooks all stood in the same space I did, which felt weird as hell—but I hadn’t wanted to take a chance with the rickety Way collapsing and leaving some of the squad behind. When I shouted, they all did, too—and I got a whole hell of a lot more than I bargained for.

The sound that came out of all those spirit throats, including mine, seemed to feed upon itself, wavelengths building and building like seas before a rising storm. Our voices weren’t additive, bunched so closely like that, but multiplicative. When we shouted, the sound went out in a wave that was almost tangible. It hit the backs of the gathered lemurs and bumped them forward half a step. It slammed into the walls of the underground chamber and brought dust and mold cascading down.

And Mort’s eyes snapped open in sudden, startled shock.

“Get ’em!” I howled.

The dead protectors of Chicago’s resident ectomancer let out a bloodcurdling chorus of battle cries and blurred toward the foe.

You hear a lot of stories of honor and chivalry from soldiers. Most people assume that such tales apply primarily to men who lived centuries ago. But let me tell you something: People are people, no matter which century they live in. Soldiers tend to be very practical and they don’t want to die. I think you’d find military men in any century you cared to name who would be perfectly okay with the notion of shooting the enemy in the back if it meant they were more likely to go home in one piece. Sir Stuart’s guardians were, for the most part, soldiers.

Spectral guns blazed. Immaterial knives, hatchets, and arrows flew. Ectoplasm splashed in buckets.

Half the lemurs got torn to shreds of flickering newsreel imagery before I was finished shouting the command to attack, much less before they could recover from the stunning force of our combined voices.

The Corpsetaker shrieked something in a voice that scraped across my head like the tines of a rusty rake, and I twisted aside on instinct. One of the Lecters took the hit, and a gaping hole the size of a bowling ball appeared in the center of his chest.

“With me!” I shouted. I vanished and reappeared at the bottom of the staircase that led down to the chamber. A streamer of urine yellow lightning erupted from the Corpsetaker’s outstretched hand, but I’d had my shield bracelet at the ready, and I deflected the strike into a small knot of stunned enemy lemurs. When it hit them, there was a hideous, explosive cascade of fire and havoc, and they were torn to shreds as if they’d been made of cheesecloth.

Holy crap.

Either one of those spells would have done the same to me if I’d been a quarter second slower. Dead or alive, Kemmler’s disciples did not play for funsies.

The Lecter Specters appeared in a cloud around me, even as I sent a slug of pure force out of the end of my staff, forcing the Corpsetaker to employ her own magical counter, her wrists crossed in front of her body. The energy of my strike splashed off an unseen surface a few inches in front of her hands, and gobbets of pale green light splattered out from the impact.

“Dresden!” screamed Mort. He stared at me—or, more accurately, at the Lecters all around me—with an expression of something very like terror. “What have you done? What have you done?”

“Come on!” I shouted, and vanished from the bottom of the stairs to the top, just as the Corpsetaker appeared halfway up the stairway and sent another torrent of ruinous energy down toward the position the Lecters and I had just vacated.

At the top of the stairs, the tunnel was like I remembered it—decorated in miniature shrines with very real sigils of power concealed within splatters of gibberish. Candles glowed at each position—ward flames that accompanied the activation of the mystic defenses.

“The shrines!” I shouted to the Lecters. “Manifest and destroy them!”

I brought my shield up again, an instant before Corpsetaker sent a slew of dark, gelatinous energy up the stairs.