“You’ve never even been here before,” answered another. “I was at the funeral. How the hell would you know where his grave was?”
I heard Fitz let out a sigh front-loaded with so much drama that only a teenager could have managed it without hurting himself. “Is it the gaping hole in the ground over there, with the big pentacle on the headstone?”
There was a brief, miffed pause, and Butters answered, “Okay. Maybe it is.”
Footsteps crunched through wet, melting snow. Fitz and Butters appeared at the edge of my grave and peered down.
“Well?” Butters asked. “Is he there?”
“How the hell should I know?” Fitz replied. “I don’t see dead people. I hear them. And I don’t hear anything.”
“Hey, Fitz,” I said.
The kid jumped. He was wearing his newly laundered clothes and had added one of Forthill’s old coats over the top of everything. “Christ. Yeah, he’s there.”
“Oh, fantastic,” Butters said. “Hi, Harry. Here, man. Help me down.”
“Help you down? It’s, like, five feet to the bottom, if that. Just jump down.”
“Jump into an open grave? What kind of idiot are you?” Butters replied. “I might as well put on a red shirt and volunteer for the away team. There’s snow and ice and slippery mud down there. That’s like asking for an ironically broken neck.”
“Are all doctors whiny girls like you?” Fitz asked.
“Hey. This whiny girl is still alive because he doesn’t do stupid crap.”
Fitz snorted. “So I help you down, my foot slips, we both fall in and die.”
Butters lifted an eyebrow and grunted. “Huh. True.”
I pinched at the bridge of my nose. “Oh, Hell’s bells, guys. Either get a room or stop flirting and get down here.”
“Ha-ha,” Fitz said toward me crossly. “He just called us gay.”
Butters blinked. “For not jumping into a hole we might not be able to climb out of? That’s kind of insensitive.”
“Not for that, for . . .” Fitz let out a sigh of vintage teenage impatience. “Christ, just give me your hand, okay? I’ll swing you down.”
Butters fussed for a moment more, making sure that Fitz had a solid place to plant his feet, and then he swung down into my grave. He was wearing his winter gear again and carrying the gym bag. Once he was down, he made sure he was out of direct sunlight and started opening the bag.
“What’s up?” I asked Fitz.
“Trouble,” Fitz said.
“We need your help, Harry,” Butters said.
“Hey, wait,” I said, scowling. “How did Butters find you, Fitz?”
“He asked,” Fitz said to Butters.
The little ME nodded. “Harry, I got from Murphy that you were apparently going into social work. It wasn’t hard to figure out who you’d ask for help, so I went over to the church to talk to Forthill about the situation—except he wasn’t there.”
Fitz bit his lip. “Look, Dresden. The father and I talked. And he decided he was going to go talk to Aristedes on my behalf.”
I blinked and pushed away from the grave wall. “What?”
“I tried to tell him,” Fitz said. “He wouldn’t listen. He was . . . I think he was angry. But he said he was going to resolve this before it came to some kind of bloodshed.”
Hell’s bells. I’d known Aristedes’ type in the past. If it suited him, he’d kill Forthill without an instant’s hesitation. The good father was in danger.
“Murphy would go in guns blazing,” Butters said. “She’s going to break my arm when she finds out I didn’t tell her. We need you to help talk us through this.”
“That’s crazy,” I said. “Go in guns blazing!”
“It’s too late for that,” Fitz said. “Look, Forthill is already there. I just met the guy but . . . but . . . I don’t want him to get hurt for me. We have to move now.”
“I can’t,” I said. “I can’t move around in broad daylight.”
“We thought of that,” Fitz said. “Butters said you needed a shielded vessel.”
“Butters said that, did he?” I asked wryly.
Butters rose from the bag, holding the plastic flashlight case holding Bob’s skull. He winked at me, held it out, and said, “Hop in.”
I blinked.
Then I said, “Right. Let’s go.”
I took a deep breath and willed myself forward, into the staring eye sockets of the skull.
Chapter Thirty-five
There was a very, very odd swirling sensation as my spirit-self leapt forward, and then I was standing . . .
. . . In an apartment.
Okay, when I say apartment, I don’t mean it like my old place. I lived in a mostly buried box that was maybe twenty by thirty total, not including the subbasement where my lab had been. Apartment Dresden had been full of paperback books on scarred wooden shelves, and comfortable secondhand furniture.
This was more like . . . Apartment Bond, James Apartment Bond. Penthouse Bond, really. There was a lot of black marble and mahogany. There was a fireplace the size of a carport, complete with a modest—relatively modest—blaze going in it. The furniture all matched. The rich hardwoods from which it had been made were hand-carved in intricate designs. It wasn’t until the second glance that I saw some of the same rune and sigil work I’d used on my own staff and blasting rod. The cushions on the couches (plural, couches) and recliners and sedans and chaises (plural, chaises), were made of rich fabric I couldn’t identify, maybe some kind of raw silk, and embroidered with more of the same symbols in gold and silver thread. A nearby table boasted what looked like a freshly roasted turkey, along with a spread of fruits and vegetables and side dishes of every kind.
It was sort of ridiculous, really. There was enough food there to feed a small nation. But there weren’t any plates to fill up, and there weren’t any utensils to eat it with. It looked gorgeous and it smelled incredible, but . . . there was something inert about it, something lifeless. There was no nourishment on that table, not for the body or for the spirit.
One wall was covered in a curtain. I started to pull it aside and found it responding to the touch, spreading open of its own accord to reveal a television the size of billboard, a high-tech stereo system, and an entire shelf lined with one kind of video-game console after another, complicated little controls sitting neatly next to each one. I can’t tell a PlayBox from an X-Station, but who can keep track of all of them? There are, like, a thousand different kinds of machines to play video games on. I mean, honestly.
“Um,” I said. “Hello?” My voice echoed quite distinctly—more than it should have, huge marble cavern or not. “Anybody home?”
There was, I kid you not, a drumroll.
Then, from a curtained archway there appeared a young man. He looked . . . quite ordinary, really. Tall, but not outrageously so; slender without being rail thin. He had decent shoulders and looked sort of familiar. He was dressed like James Dean—jeans, a white shirt, a leather biker’s jacket. The outfit looked a little odd on him, somehow forced, except for a little skull embroidered in white thread on the jacket, just over the young man’s heart.
Cymbals crashed and he spread his arms. “Ta-da.”
“Bob,” I said. I felt one side of my mouth curling up in amusement. “This? This is the place you always wanted me to let you out of? You could fit five or six of mine in here.”
His face spread into a wide grin. “Well, I admit, my crib is pretty sweet. But a gold cage is still a cage, Harry.”
“A gold fallout shelter, more like.”
“Either way, you get stir-crazy every few decades,” he said, and flopped down onto a chaise. “You get that this isn’t literally what the inside of the skull is like, right?”
“It’s my head interpreting what I see into familiar things, yeah,” I said. “It’s getting to be kind of common.”
“Welcome to the world of spirit,” Bob said.
“What’s with the food?”