Ghost Story (The Dresden Files 13)

so much time around her that she had become almost like family. I could generally tell by pure intuition when she was nearby, as long as she wasn’t actively trying to hide herself.

That, of course, had all been when I had magic. Now I didn’t.

Which was, upon thinking about it, probably another bit of evidence in favor of Stuart and Mort’s theory, and against mine. You can’t take magic away from a person. It’s a part of who and what they are. They can abandon it, if they work at it hard enough, but you can’t strip it out of them. If my ghost had truly been me, it would have had power, just as that bastard Leonid Kravos’s ghost had.

Right?

Or . . . maybe not. Maybe I’d been making more assumptions without ever questioning them. I had already assumed that matter was solid when it wasn’t; that I could get cold, which I couldn’t; and that I was still beholden to the laws of gravity, which I wasn’t.

Maybe I’d made the same assumptions about magic. I mean, after all, I had thrown a solid shield spell during the first attack on Mort’s place, when I had been sharing space with the ectomancer. That would seem to show that my talent was still there, still real.

I just had to figure out how to access it.

Memories are power.

I dug into my duster’s pocket and drew out the massive pistol Sir Stuart had given me. Black-powder weaponry isn’t my thing, but I made sure there was nothing in the priming pan before turning it barrel down and shaking it. I had to give it several hard thumps with the heel of my hand to get the ball, wad, and powder to spill out into my palm.

The ball, the bullet, gleamed as if newly molded. Upon closer look, fine swirls on the surface of the metal took on the shapes of a simple, pastoral scene: a colonial-style home in the middle of a little green valley surrounded by apple trees; clean, neat cropland; and a pasture dotted with white sheep. Just looking at it seemed to give the scene life. Wind stirred the crops. Apples stood out like specks of bright green against the darker leaves. Lambs gamboled among adult members of the flock, playing for the pure joy of it. The door to the house opened, and a tall, straightbacked woman with hair blacker than a raven’s wing emerged from the house, trailing a small cloud of children, clearly giving calm instructions.

With the sight, a flood of emotions coursed through me. A fierce and jealous pride of possession—not pride that I owned such a beautiful home, but that the home was beautiful because I owned it, because I had made it so. Mixed with that was an ocean-deep surge of love for the woman and her children, raw happiness at seeing them—and a heavy, entirely pleasurable surge of desire for the woman, whom I had not held in far too long—

I suddenly felt that I had intruded upon something personal and intimate. I closed my eyes and looked away from the scene.

Memories, I realized. These were all things from Sir Stuart’s mortal memories. This memory was what he had cast forth against that wraith the first time I met him. He hadn’t used memories of destruction as his weapon, but those of identity, of the reasons he was willing to fight.

That was why as a ghost he still used that ax, this pistol. Far more modern weapons were available to copy, but his memories were of himself using those weapons, and so they were the source of his power, the embodiment of his will to change what was around him.

They were Sir Stuart’s identity. They were also his magic.

Memories equaled power.

For a moment, I thought it couldn’t be that simple. But a lot of magic is actually disgustingly simple—which is not to be confused with easy.

There was only one way to find out.

The first spell I’d ever done had been during that long-ago class Olympics—but that was spontaneous, accidental magic, hardly worthy of the term. The first conscious spell I’d knowingly worked, fully planned, fully visualized, fully realized, had been calling forth a burst of fire.

Justin DuMorne had shown me how it worked.

I plunged into the memory.

“I don’t understand,” I complained, rubbing at my aching temples. “It didn’t work the first fifty times. It isn’t going to work now.”

“Forty-six times,” Justin corrected me, his voice very precise, like always. He had an