Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

Hell.”

“I can’t talk to you about that,” he said. “What comes next is about faith, Harry. Not knowledge.”

I folded my arms. “What if I dig the ghost routine?”

“You don’t,” Uriel replied. “But even if you did, I would point out to you that your spiritual essence has been all but disintegrated. You would not last long as a shade, nor would you have the strength to aid and protect your loved ones. Should you lose your sanity, you might even become a danger to them—but if that is your desire, I can facilitate it.”

I shook my head, trying to think. Then I said, “It . . . depends.”

“Upon?”

“My friends,” I said quietly. “My family. I have to know that they’re all right.”

Uriel watched me for a moment and then opened his mouth to speak, shaking his head a little as he did.

“Stop,” I said, pointing a finger at him. “Don’t you dare tell me to make this choice in the dark. Captain Jack gave me a half-truth that sent me running around Chicago again. Another angel told me a lie that got me killed. If you really care so much about my free will, you’ll be willing to help me make a free, informed choice, just as if I was a grown-up. So either admit that you’re trying to push me in your own direction or else put your principles where your mouth is and make like the Ghost of Christmas Present.”

He stared at me for a long moment, his brow furrowed. “From your perspective . . . yes, I suppose it does look that way.” Then he nodded firmly and extended his arm toward me. “Take my hand.”

I did.

The white expanse gave way to reality once more. Suddenly, I stood with Uriel inside the Corpsetaker’s hideout, on the stairs where that final confrontation had come. Molly was at the top of the stairs, leaning back against the wall. Her body was twisting and straining, her chest heaving with desperate breaths. Blood ran from both nostrils and had filled the sclera of her eyes, turning them into inhuman-looking blue-and-red stones. She let out little gasps and choked screams, along with whispered snatches of words that didn’t make any sense.

Uriel did that thing with his hand again, and suddenly I could see Molly even more clearly—and saw that some kind of hideous mass was wound around her, like a python constricting its prey. It consisted of strands of some kind of slimy jelly, purple and black and covered with pulsing pustules that reeked of corruption and decay.

Corpsetaker.

Molly’s duel with the Corpsetaker was still under way.

Butters’s body lay at Molly’s feet, empty of life and movement. And his shade—now I could see that it was bound into near immobility by threads of the Corpsetaker’s dark magic—stood exactly as he had when I last saw him, staring down at his own body in horror. Down here in the electrical-junction room, Murphy and the wolves were bound with threads of the same dark magic as Butters—a sleeping spell that had compelled them all into insensibility.

Molly whimpered, drawing my gaze back to the top of the stairs as her legs gave way. She slid slowly down the wall, her eyes rolling wildly. Her mouth started moving more surely, her voice becoming stronger. And darker. For about two seconds, one of the Corpsetaker’s hate-filled laughs rolled from Molly’s lips. That hideous, slimy mass began to simply ooze into the young woman’s skin.

“Do something,” I said to Uriel.

He shook his head. “I cannot interfere. This battle was Molly’s choice. She knew the risks and chose to hazard them.”

“She isn’t strong enough,” I snapped. “She can’t take on that thing.”

Uriel arched an eyebrow. “Were you under the impression that she did not know that from the beginning, Harry? Yet she did it.”

“Because she feels guilty,” I said. “Because she blames herself for my death. She’s in the same boat I was.”

“No,” Uriel said. “None of the Fallen twisted her path.”

“No, that was me,” I said, “but only because one of them got to me.”

“Nonetheless,” Uriel said, “that choice was yours—and hers.”

“You’re just going to stand there?” I asked.

Uriel folded his arms and tapped his chin with one fingertip. “Mmmm. It does seem that perhaps she deserves some form of aid. Perhaps if I’d had the presence of mind to see to it that some sort of agent had been sent to balance the scales, to give her that one tiny bit of encouragement, that one flicker of inspiration