“I might have mentioned something about it,” Jack said. “Sure. Guy’s got a lot of friends. Friends are running around fighting monsters. I figure at least three of them are going to get hurt if he isn’t there to back them up. Seemed reasonable.”
“Collin,” Uriel said, his voice touched with an ocean of disappointment and a teaspoon of anger. “You lied.”
“I speculated,” Captain Jack replied. “I got him to do the right thing, didn’t I?”
“Collin, our purpose is to defend freedom—not to decide how it should be used.”
“Everything I told him was technically true, more or less, and I got the job done,” Jack said stubbornly. “Look, sir, if I were perfect, I wouldn’t be working here in the first place. Now, would I?”
And then he hung up. On speakerphone. On a freaking archangel.
I couldn’t help it. I let out a rolling belly laugh. “I just got suckered into doing this by . . . Stars and stones, you didn’t even know that he . . . Big bad angel boy, and you get the wool pulled over your eyes by . . .” I stopped trying to talk and just laughed.
Uriel eyed the phone, then me, and then tucked the little device away again, clearly nonplussed. “It doesn’t matter how well I believe I know your kind, Harry. They always manage to find some way to try my patience.”
It took me a moment to get the laughter under control, but I did. “Look, Uri, I don’t want to say . . .”
The archangel gave me a look so cold that my words froze in my throat.
“Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden,” he said quietly—and he said it exactly right, speaking my Name in a voice of that same absolute power that had so unnerved me before. “Do not attempt to familiarize my name. The part you left off happens to be rather important to who and what I am. Do you understand?”
I didn’t. But as he spoke, I knew—not just suspected, but knew—that this guy could obliterate me, along with the planet I was standing on, with a simple thought. In fact, if what I’d read about archangels was right, Uriel could probably take apart all the planets. Like, all of them. Everywhere.
And I also knew that what I had just done had insulted him.
And . . . and frightened him.
I swallowed. It took me two tries, but I managed to whisper, “Aren’t we just Mr. Sunshine today.”
Uriel blinked. He looked less than certain for a moment. Then he said, “Mr. Sunshine . . . is perfectly acceptable. I suppose.”
I nodded. “Sorry,” I said. “About your name. I didn’t realize it was so, um . . .”
“Intimate,” he said quietly. “Sensitive. Names have tremendous power, Dresden. Yet mortals toss them left and right as though they were toys. It’s like watching infants play with hand grenades sometimes.” The ghost of a smile touched his face as he glanced at me. “Some more so than others. And I forgive you, of course.”
I nodded at him. Then, after a quiet moment, I asked, “What happens now?”
“That’s up to you,” Uriel said. “You can always work for me. I believe you would find it challenging to do so—and I would have considerable use for someone of your talents.”
“For how long?” I asked. “I mean . . . for guys like Captain Jack? Is it forever?”
Uriel smiled. “Collin, like the others, is with me because he is not yet prepared to face what comes next. When he is, he’ll take that step. For now, he is not.”
“When you say what comes next, what do you mean, exactly?”
“The part involving words like forever, eternity, and judgment.”
“Oh,” I said. “What Comes Next.”
“Exactly.”
“So I can stay Between,” I said quietly. “Or I can go get on that train.”
“If you do,” Uriel said, his eyes intent and serious, “then you accept the consequences for all that you have done while alive. When judged, what you have done will be taken into account. Your fate, ultimately, will be determined by your actions in life.”
“You’re saying that if I don’t work for you, I’ll just have to accept what comes?”
“I am saying that you cannot escape the consequences of your choices,” he said.
I frowned at him for a minute. Then I said, “If I get on the train, it might just carry me straight to Hell.”
“I can’t talk to you about that,” he said. “What comes next is about faith, Harry. Not knowledge.”
I folded my arms. “What if I dig the ghost routine?”
“You don’t,” Uriel replied. “But even if you did, I would point out to you that your spiritual essence has been all but disintegrated. You would not last long as a shade, nor would you have the strength to aid and protect your loved ones. Should you lose your sanity, you might even become a danger to them—but if that is your desire, I can facilitate it.”
I shook my head, trying to think. Then I said, “It . . . depends.”
“Upon?”
“My friends,” I said quietly. “My family. I have to know that they’re all right.”
Uriel watched me for a moment and then opened his mouth to speak, shaking his head a little as he did.
“Stop,” I said, pointing a finger at him. “Don’t you dare tell me to make this choice in the dark. Captain Jack gave me a half-truth that sent me running around Chicago again. Another angel told me a lie that got me killed. If you really care so much about my free will, you’ll be willing to help me make a free, informed choice, just as if I was a grown-up. So either admit that you’re trying to push me in your own direction or else put your principles where your mouth is and make like the Ghost of Christmas Present.”
He stared at me for a long moment, his brow furrowed. “From your perspective . . . yes, I suppose it does look that way.” Then he nodded firmly and extended his arm toward me. “Take my hand.”
I did.
The white expanse gave way to reality once more. Suddenly, I stood with Uriel inside the Corpsetaker’s hideout, on the stairs where that final confrontation had come. Molly was at the top of the stairs, leaning back against the wall. Her body was twisting and straining, her chest heaving with desperate breaths. Blood ran from both nostrils and had filled the sclera of her eyes, turning them into inhuman-looking blue-and-red stones. She let out little gasps and choked screams, along with whispered snatches of words that didn’t make any sense.
Uriel did that thing with his hand again, and suddenly I could see Molly even more clearly—and saw that some kind of hideous mass was wound around her, like a python constricting its prey. It consisted of strands of some kind of slimy jelly, purple and black and covered with pulsing pustules that reeked of corruption and decay.
Corpsetaker.
Molly’s duel with the Corpsetaker was still under way.
Butters’s body lay at Molly’s feet, empty of life and movement. And his shade—now I could see that it was bound into near immobility by threads of the Corpsetaker’s dark magic—stood exactly as he had when I last saw him, staring down at his own body in horror. Down here in the electrical-junction room, Murphy and the wolves were bound with threads of the same dark magic as Butters—a sleeping spell that had compelled them all into insensibility.
Molly whimpered, drawing my gaze back to the top of the stairs as her legs gave way. She slid slowly down the wall, her eyes rolling wildly. Her mouth started moving more surely, her voice becoming stronger. And darker. For about two seconds, one of the Corpsetaker’s hate-filled laughs rolled from Molly’s lips. That hideous, slimy mass began to simply ooze into the young woman’s skin.
“Do something,” I said to Uriel.
He shook his head. “I cannot interfere. This battle was Molly’s choice. She knew the risks and chose to hazard them.”
“She isn’t strong enough,” I snapped. “She can’t take on that thing.”
Uriel arched an eyebrow. “Were you under the impression that she did not know that from the beginning, Harry? Yet she did it.”