“Why?” I asked, feeling somewhat exasperated.
Sir Stuart wasn’t rattled by my tone. “It’s something every new shade goes through. It will pass.”
“Huh,” I said. I thought about it for a minute and said, “Well. It beats the hell out of acne.”
From the front seat, Mort let out an explosive little snicker.
Stars and stones, I hate being the new guy.
Chapter Eight
Murphy inherited her house from her grandmother, and it was at least a century old. Grandma Murphy had been a notorious rose gardener. Murphy didn’t have a green thumb herself. She hired a service to take care of her grandmother’s legacy. The flower garden in front would have fit a house four times as large, but it was a withered, dreary little place when covered in heavy snow. Bare, thorny branches, trimmed the previous fall, stood up from the blanket of white in skeletal silence.
The house itself was a compact colonial, single story, square, solid, and neat-looking. It had been built in a day when a ten-by-ten bedroom was considered a master suite, and when beds were routinely used by several children at a time. Murphy had upgraded it with vinyl siding, new windows, and a layer of modern insulation when she moved in, and the little house looked as if it could last another hundred years, no problem.
There was a sleek, expensive, black town car parked on the street outside Murphy’s home, its tires on the curbside resting in several inches of snow. It couldn’t have looked more out of place in the middle-class neighborhood if it had been a Saint Patrick’s Day Parade float, complete with prancing leprechauns.
Sir Stuart looked at me and then out at our surroundings, frowning. “What is it, Dresden?”
“That car shouldn’t be there,” I said.
Mort glanced at me and I pointed out the black town car. He studied it for a moment before he said, “Yeah. Kind of odd on a block like this.”
“Why?” asked Sir Stuart. “It is an automatic coach, is it not?”
“An expensive one,” I said. “You don’t park those on the street in weather like this. The salt-and-plow truck comes by, and you’re looking at damage to the finish and paint. Keep going by, Morty. Circle the block.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Mort said, his tone annoyed. “I’m not an idiot.”
“Stay with him,” I told Sir Stuart.
Then I took a deep breath, remembered that I was an incorporeal spirit, and put my feet down through the floorboards of the car. I dug in my heels on the snowy street as the solid matter of the vehicle passed through me in a cloud of uncomfortable tingles. I’d meant to simply remain behind, standing, when the car had passed completely through me. I hadn’t thought about things like momentum and velocity, and instead I went into a tumble that ended with me making a whump sound as I hit a soft snowbank beside the home next to Murphy’s. It hurt, and I pushed myself out of the snowbank, my teeth chattering, my body blanketed in cold.
“N-n-no, H-Harry,” I told myself firmly, squeezing my eyes shut. “Th-that’s an illusion. Your mind created it to match what it knows. But you didn’t hit the snowbank. You can’t. And you can’t be covered in snow. And therefore you can’t be wet and cold.”
I focused on the words, putting my will behind them, in the same way I would have to attract the attention of a ghost or spirit. I opened my eyes.
The snow clinging to my body and clothes was gone. I was standing, dry and wrapped in my leather duster, beside the snowbank.
“Okay,” I said. “That’s bordering on cool.”
I stuck my hands in my pockets, ignored the snow and the steady, gentle northern wind, and trudged across Grandma Murphy’s rose garden to Murphy’s door. I raised my hand and knocked as I’d done so often before.
A couple of things happened.
First, my hand stopped above the door, close enough that you could have slid one or two pieces of paper between my knuckles and the wood, but definitely not three. There was a dull, low thud of solid impact, even though I hadn’t touched the door itself. Second, light flashed, and something like a current of electricity swarmed up my arm and down my spine, throwing my body into a convulsion that left me lying on the ground, stunned.
I just lay there on the snow for a moment. I tried the whole “there is no spoon” thing again, but apparently there was perception of reality and then there was hard-core, undeniable, real reality. It took me several seconds to recover and sit up again, and several more seconds to realize that I had been hit by something specifically engineered to stop intruding spirits.
Murphy’s house had been warded, its natural defensive threshold used as a foundation for further, more aggressive defenses. And while I was only a shade of my former self, I was still wizard enough to recognize my own damned wards—or at least wards that were virtually identical to my own.
The door opened and Murphy appeared in it. She was a woman of well below average height, but built of spring steel. Her golden hair had been cut into a short brush over her scalp, and the stark style showed off the lines of muscles and tendons in her neck, and the pugnacious, stubborn set of her jawline. She wore jeans and a plaid shirt over a blue tee, and held her SIG in her right hand.
Something stabbed me in the guts and twisted upon seeing her.
A rush of memories flooded over me, starting with our first meeting, on a missing-persons case years ago, when I’d still been doing my time as an apprentice PI and Murphy had been a uniform cop working a beat. Every argument, every bit of banter and repartee, every moment of revelation and trust that had been built up between us, came hammering into me like a thousand major-league fastballs. The last memory, and the sharpest, was of facing each other in the hold of my brother’s boat, trembling on the edge of a line we hadn’t ever allowed ourselves to cross before.
“Karrin,” I tried to say. It came out a whisper.
Murphy’s brow furrowed and she stood still in the doorway, despite the cold wind and falling snow, her eyes scanning left and right.
Her eyes moved over me, past me, through me, without stopping. She didn’t see me. She couldn’t hear me. We weren’t a part of the same world anymore.
It was a surprisingly painful moment of realization.
Before I could get my thoughts clear of it, Murphy, still frowning, closed the door. I heard her close several locks.
“Easy, lad,” said Sir Stuart in a gentle, quiet voice. He hunkered down to put a hand on my shoulder. “There is no need to rush regaining your feet. It hurts. I know.”
“Yeah,” I said quietly. I swallowed and blinked away tears that couldn’t really be real. “Why?”
“As I told you, lad. Memories are life here. Life and power. Seeing the people you care for most again is going to trigger memories much more strongly than they would in a mere mortal. It can take time to grow accustomed to it.”
I wrapped my arms around my knees and rested my chin on my kneecap. “How long?”
“Generally,” Sir Stuart said very softly, “until those loved ones pass on themselves.”
I shuddered. “Yeah,” I said. “Well. I don’t have time for that.”
“You have nothing but time, Dresden.”
“But three of my people don’t,” I said, my voice harsh. “They’re going to get hurt if I don’t make things right. If I don’t find my killer.” I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths. I wasn’t actually breathing air. I didn’t need to breathe. Habit. “Where’s Mort?”
“Waiting around the corner,” Sir Stuart said. “He’ll come in once we’ve given him the all clear.”
“What? I’m the little chicken’s personal Secret Service now?” I grumbled. I pushed myself up to my feet and eyed Murphy’s house. “Do you see anything threatening around here?”
“Not at the moment,” Sir Stuart said, “other than the allegedly suspicious auto coach.”