Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

took her several seconds to let out a little choking sound.

Then she shuddered and turned away from me. She lifted her arm and wiped her eyes on her coat sleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” I said, trying to keep my voice gentle. “I know . . . I know things haven’t been easy for you lately. Bound to bring on the waterworks once in a while.”

“God,” she said, both bitterness and amusement in her voice. “Harry. How can you be so completely clueless and still be you?” She took a deep breath, then straightened her back and squared her shoulders. “Okay. We’re burning time.”

“Yeah,” I said.

She walked toward the door to the Big Hoods’ hideout. She planted her feet firmly, withdrew the amethyst-tipped wand from her belt, and held it firmly in her right hand. I saw her gather her focus and do it rapidly. She was very nearly operating on the level of a full member of the White Council. After less than five seconds, she looked up, lifted the wand, drew it in a long, vertical line through the air and murmured, “Rokotsu.”

For a second, nothing happened. Then the air seemed to split and fall open, as if reality had been nothing more than a curtain suddenly stirred by an outside breeze. The opening widened until it was the size of the front door of a home, and odd, aqua green light poured out from the other side.

Molly rolled her neck a little, as if the effort had pained her. It probably had. Opening a Way takes a serious energy investment, and Molly had never been a high-horsepower practitioner. She stepped back and said, “All yours, boss.”

“Thanks, grasshopper,” I said quietly. Then I turned to the spook squad and said, “All right, everybody. Let’s go knock some heads together.”

I turned and plunged through the Way into the Nevernever, and the deadliest spirit-predators of the concrete jungle came with me.

Chapter Forty-two

Before I died, I went to a lot of movies.

Movie theaters were totally useless for me, especially as more and more of them went with increasingly advanced technology for their sound and projection systems. The way I tended to foul up technology, especially electronics, just by standing around meant that it was tough to see a movie all the way through without something going horribly wrong with the sound, the picture, or both. Magic draws a lot of its power from emotion, and at the movies that meant that things would tend to go bad at the parts of the movie that were the most gripping and interesting.

So I could see a movie that sucked at a theater. Usually. But if I wanted to see a good movie, there was only one solution: a drive-in.

There are still a few of them up and running. I went down to the one in Aurora. There, I could be far enough from the projector not to interfere with it. The sound system of the movie consisted of hundreds of little car speakers and car radios, mostly turned up loud. Yeah, the place was full of kids who were basically at the drive-in in order to make out, wander around in giggling groups, sneak friends in for free in their trunks, and drink smuggled alcohol. That never bothered me. I could park up front, sit on the hood of my car with my back leaning against the windshield, my hands behind my head, and enjoy the whole movie all the way through.

(I usually took Bob along. He sat on the dashboard. I always thought I’d been doing him a favor, although when I thought back, it made me think he’d been doing it for the sake of shared experience. For company.)

Anyway, the point is, I’ve seen a lot of movies. So I know whereof I speak when I say that I went through the Way my apprentice opened and landed in the first act of a movie.

Cold water engulfed the lower half of my body, and a second later a wave slapped me in the middle of the back, nearly throwing me off my feet. After the past days of muted physical stimuli, I staggered and gasped against the sudden shock of pure sensation. Salt spray filled my mouth.

I should have expected that. This was the spirit world, where the immaterial wasn’t. Gravity, heat, cold, light—they were all just as real as I was now. I was a civilian again. There wouldn’t be any fun ghost tricks like vanishing out