I felt myself tensing. “Corpsetaker.”
“You were able to manifest after all? Intriguing. You’ve a natural gift for darker magic, I think. My master would have snapped you up in an instant.”
I’d spent an afternoon with Murphy working on gun disarms, at Dough Joe’s Hurricane Gym. I tried to remember which way I had to spin to attempt to take the gun away. It depended on how it was being held—and I had no idea how Corpsetaker was holding the weapon on me. I was pretty sure Butters was a lefty, but I didn’t think that would matter to the Corpsetaker once she set up shop. “Oh, boy. I could have hung out with people like you? I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t have worked out.”
“Possibly not,” Corpsetaker said. “I accorded you far more respect than you merited, as an opponent. How much of you is left behind that body you’ve cobbled together? Scarcely more than one of those pathetic wraiths, I think. You could have made a viable move in time, but clearly you’ve no patience, no head for strategy.”
“Yeah. I guess I’ve still got a soul and a conscience where you installed that stuff.”
“Soul? Conscience?” Corpsetaker said, almost laughing. “Those are nothing but words. They aren’t even true limits—just the figments of them. Useless.”
“Just because something isn’t solid doesn’t mean it isn’t real,” I said. “If you had a brain in your head, you’d know that.”
“You’re obsessed with the fantasies of the young,” she replied with my friend’s breath. “Though I must admit that that the ironic reversal of our current state is simply delicious.”
And without a hesitation or any change in the tone of her voice, she put a bullet into the back of my head.
The pain was infinitely brief and indescribable, a massive spike of agony that felt as if it should have sent me flying. I saw a cloud of something fly forward and then splatter all over one of the wolves and the nearest Big Hood. Ectoplasm, I realized dully. My physical body had been destroyed. It had fallen back into the spirit matter from which I’d formed it.
The pain faded, and then I was back in the still, neutral absence of sensation of the ghost state. I reached for the splattered matter with an instinctive, unspoken yearning to return to it.
I could barely see my hand.
I tried to turn around, but it felt like I was submerged in something thicker and more viscous than water, and it took forever.
I stared into the Corpsetaker’s eyes within Butters’s face and watched the body-jumping lunatic smirk at me. “Not much of you now, is there?” she murmured. “You’ll be a wraith within days. I think that balances our account. Enjoy eternity, Dresden.”
I tried to snarl a curse, but I was just so tired. I couldn’t get the sound to come out of me. And by the time I had tried, Corpsetaker had taken Butters’s body back to the bottom of the stairs. She was moving so fast.
Or . . . or maybe I was just that slow.
I tried to follow, and all I could manage was to drift in the Corpsetaker’s wake, moving with grace, but slowly. So slowly.
Corpsetaker made a gesture and a veil fell away from another shade at the top of the stairs. It was Butters. He stood there dressed not in his winter gear, but in the scrubs I was far more used to seeing him wear. He was completely motionless except for his eyes, which rolled around frantically. A rapidly evaporating puddle of ectoplasm spread at his feet. An expression of pure confusion was locked onto his face.
Corpsetaker had been a big fan of body switching. When she left me and Morty in the basement, she must have come directly up here to grab a new body. She’d probably dropped some variant of a sleeping spell on Murphy and the wolves—and then Butters must have shown up.
Corpsetaker had gone with her usual trick, forcibly trading bodies with a victim—and the manifested ghost body she’d been in had fallen back into ectoplasm the moment she wasn’t there to give it energy and form. Butters’s essence, his soul, had just been booted out of his body, and now it stood there, vulnerable and unmoving—brightly colored but fading away, even as I watched. She’d tossed a quick veil over Butters’s shade so that no one who might come upon her would see him standing there, forlorn and confused, while she drove around in his hijacked body.
The thing that really got to me? Corpsetaker threw a little smirk back at me as she got to Butters’s shade. There wasn’t anything I could do to stop her, but she wanted me to see how thoroughly she’d outthought and outmaneuvered me.
But the universe has a funny sense of humor, and apparently it’s not always aimed at me. While Corpsetaker looked back at me to smirk, Molly rippled forth from under a veil of her own, on the last step between Butters’s stolen body and the explosion-chewed door. She grabbed the Corpsetaker by the front of Butters’s coat. Butters wasn’t exactly heroic in build. Molly, on the other hand, was several inches taller than he and had her mother’s genes, everything I’d been able to teach her about mixing it up, and six months of hard time under the tender guiding hand of the Leanansidhe.
Molly slammed the Corpsetaker against the wall so hard that stolen teeth slammed together. Then she seized Butters’s freaking face in a clawlike hand and thrust her head close, locking eyes with the Corpsetaker.
I wanted to scream a negation, but nothing came out. I frantically tried to move faster. If I succeeded, it didn’t show.
“You want to play head games?” Molly snarled, her blue eyes blazing. “Let’s go.”
The Corpsetaker’s face contorted into an expression somewhere between murderous rage and that of an orgasm, and she opened her stolen eyes wide.
Molly and the dark wizard went into a soulgaze, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it—except keep trying to get closer.
I could feel power flickering between them, though, like bursts of heat coming out of a furnace, as I got glacially nearer. It was an entirely invisible struggle, a simultaneous and mutual siege of the personality. Mind magic is dangerous, slippery stuff, and doing combat with another mind is all about imagination, focus, and sheer willpower. Right now, Molly was thrusting an array of images and ideas at the Corpsetaker, trying to force the other to pay attention to them. Some of the thoughts would be there to undermine defenses, others to assault them, and still others trying to slip past unnoticed to wreak havoc from within. Some of the thoughts would be simple things—whispered doubts meant to shake the other’s confidence, for example. Others would be far more complex constructions, idea demons imagined ahead of time, prepared for such an occasion and unleashed upon the thoughts and memories of the foe.
The White Council hated mind magic, generally speaking. If you beat someone’s defenses, you could do a lot of things to them, and precious few of them were good. Events, however, had forced them to acknowledge the necessity of giving all of its members lessons in psychic self-defense that were more comprehensive than the simple wall technique that I’d been briefly introduced to. A couple of old-timers who knew how to play the game had begun dispensing the basics to everyone interested in learning.
As it turned out, I had a natural fortress of personality, which explained a lot—like how hard it had always been for faerie glamour to trick me for long, and why I’d been able to grind through several forms of mental assault over the years. If someone came in after me, they had a big badass castle to contend with. They could pound on it all day, as such things were measured, without breaking the defenses, and I’d been told that it would take an extended campaign to conquer my head entirely—like any decent castle, there were multiple lines and structures where new defenses could take hold. But I didn’t have much of a forward game. For me, the best offense had to be an obstinate defense.
Molly, on the other hand . . . well. Molly was sort of scary.