Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

of my shoulders, hips, and legs as well as my arms, should have knocked Boz out—or killed him outright. I’d been aiming for his temple. He’d jerked his head back so that the end of my staff hit his left cheekbone instead. Hell, I might have broken it.

But instead of collapsing in pain, he just crouched there, silent, stony eyes looking right through me as he faced me without flinching. I began to gather my will and staggered, nearly falling on my face. I had nothing left. It was only that burning flash of irrational certainty that had driven me to attempt to manifest that was keeping me on my feet at all—and I realized with a cold little chill that I might not be able to stop Boz from killing Morty.

“Good Lord, I’m regretting this now,” I muttered. “I have never—ever—smelled BO this bad in my life. And I once had s’mores with a Sasquatch.”

“Hang out with him for a while,” Mort gasped. “Eventually it’s not so bad.”

“Wow. Really?”

“No. Not really.”

I kept my eyes on Boz, but did my best to grin at Mort. He’d been strung up and tortured by lunatics for almost twenty-four hours, and his executioner was still trying to finish the job, but he still had the guts to engage in badinage. Anyone with that kind of spirit in the face of horror is okay in my book.

Boz came at me like a predator—a smooth, swift motion that moved his whole body at once, unfettered by any kind of reluctance or hesitation. He never rose to do it, either. He flung himself forward as much with his arms as his legs, and his body’s center of mass never came much higher than my knees.

I gave him a boot to the head. I literally kicked him in the head with my hiking boot, and it was like stubbing my toe on a large rock. He just plowed on through the kick and hit me at the knees. Boz had a lot of mass. We went down, me on my ass, him lying on my lower legs. He started trying to claw his way up my body to my throat. I declined to allow him such liberties, and communicated that desire to him by thrusting the end of my staff at his neck.

He slapped at the staff with one paw and caught it in an iron grip. I tried to roll away. He got his other hand on the weapon. We wrenched and wrestled for control of it. He was stronger than me. He was heavier than me. I had slightly more leverage, but not enough to make the difference.

Then Boz surged forward, driving with tree-trunk legs, and I went down on my back. All his weight came down on the staff and he drove it toward my throat.

Temporary body or not, it still worked the same way as the one I was used to. If Boz crushed my windpipe, the body would die. If that happened, I assumed I would be left behind, immaterial again, while the false flesh collapsed into ectoplasm—the way ghosts and demons were driven back to their spirit forms when their temporary bodies were destroyed. But we were getting pretty far out of my comfort zone when it came to ghostly lore.

Boz bore down, and it was all I could do to keep him from choking me with my own staff. I couldn’t even dream of moving him. He had seventy-five or eighty pounds on me, all of them solid, stinking mass, and he was coming at me with a silently psychotic determination.

But he hadn’t realized where we had fallen.

I released the staff with my right hand, and his shoulders bunched, his back rounding out in a massive hump of trapezius muscles. My one hand wasn’t able to do much to hold him back, and I felt the harsh pain of blood trying to hammer through the arteries Boz was compressing.

With my right hand, I seized the ends of the jumper cables still attached to the heavy-duty automobile battery, the one Morty had been tortured with—and jammed the metal ends of them both against the freshly blood-soaked side of Boz’s face.

It wasn’t exactly a surgical strike. I was holding both clamps in the same hand and only a couple of seconds from being choked unconscious, after all, but it worked. The clamps touched each other and wet skin, and sparks flew. Boz convulsed and jerked away from the sudden source of agony,