Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

humanity rise from the dust to spread across and to change the very face of the world. One who has seen, quite literally, tens of thousands of mortal lives begin, wax, wane, and end.”

“Someone like an angel,” I said quietly.

“Someone like that,” he said, showing his teeth briefly. “A being who could know a mortal’s entire life. Could know his dreams. His fears. His very thoughts. Such a being, so versed in human nature, in mortal patterns of thought, could reliably predict precisely how a given mortal would react to almost anything.” Uriel gestured at me. “For example, how he might react to a simple lie delivered at precisely the right moment.”

Uriel waved his hand and suddenly we were back in the utility room at St. Mary’s. Only I wasn’t lying on the backboard on a cot. Or, rather, I was doing exactly that—but I was also standing beside Uriel, at the door, looking in at myself.

“Do you remember what you were thinking?” Uriel asked me.

I did remember. I remembered with perfect clarity, in fact.

“I thought that I’d been defeated before. That people had even died because I failed. But those people had never been my own flesh and blood. They hadn’t been my child. I’d lost. I was beaten.” I shook my head. “I remember saying to myself that it was all over. And it was all your fault, Harry.”

“Ah,” Uriel said as I finished the last sentence, and he lifted his hand. “Now look.”

I blinked at him and then at the image of me lying on the cot. “I don’t . . .” I frowned. There was something odd about the shadows in the room, but . . .

“Here,” Uriel said, lifting a hand. Light shone from it as though from a sudden sunrise. It revealed the room, casting everything in stark relief—and I saw it.

A slender shadow crouched beside the cot, vague and difficult to notice, even by Uriel’s light—but it was there, and it was leaning as though to whisper in my ear.

And it was all your fault, Harry.

The thought, the memory, resonated in my head for a moment, and I shivered.

“That . . . that shadow. It’s an angel?”

“It was once,” he said, and his voice was gentle—and infinitely sad. “A long, long time ago.”

“One of the Fallen,” I breathed.

“Yes. Who knew how to lie to you, Harry.”

“Yeah, well. Blaming myself for bad stuff isn’t exactly, um . . . completely uncharacteristic for me, man.”

“I’m aware—as was that,” he said, nodding at the shadow. “It made the lie even stronger, to use your own practice against you. But that creature knew what it was doing. It’s all about timing. At that precise moment, in that exact state of mind, the single whisper it passed into your thoughts was enough to push your decision.” Uriel looked at me and smiled faintly. “It added enough anger, enough self-recrimination, enough guilt, and enough despair to your deliberations to make you decide that destroying yourself was the only option left to you. It took your freedom away.” His eyes hardened again. “I attempt to discourage that sort of thing where possible. When I cannot, I am allowed to balance the scales.”

“I still don’t understand,” I said. “How does me coming back to haunt Chicago for a few nights balance anything?”

“Oh, it doesn’t,” Uriel said. “I can only act in a mirror of the offending action, I’m afraid.”

“You . . . just get to whisper in my ear?”

“To whisper seven words, in fact,” he said. “What you did . . . was elective.”

“Elective?” I asked.

“I had no direct involvement in your return. In my judgment, it needed to happen—but there was no requirement that you come back to Chicago,” Uriel said calmly. “You volunteered.”

I rolled my eyes. “Well, yes. Duh. Because three of my friends were going to die if I didn’t.”

Uriel arched an eyebrow at me abruptly. Then he reached into the pocket of his jacket and withdrew a cell phone. He made it beep a couple of times, then turned on the speakerphone, and I heard a phone ringing.

“Murphy,” answered Captain Jack’s baritone.

“What’s this Dresden is telling me about three of his friends being hurt?”

“Dresden,” Jack said in an absent tone, as if searching his memory and finding nothing.

Uriel seemed mildly impatient. He wasn’t buying it. “Tall, thin, insouciant, and sent back to Chicago to search for his killer?”

“Oh, right, him,” Jack said. “That guy.”

“Yes,” Uriel said.

There was a guileless pause, and then Jack said, “What about him?”

Uriel,