Ghost Story by Jim Butcher

indecision.
    â€œCoward,” Stuart snarled. “If you can’t finish, don’t start.”
    All things considered, I thought Stuart might be being a little hard on the thing. It wasn’t cowardly to not rush a juggernaut when you’d just seen your buddies get thrashed by it. Maybe the thing was just smarter than the others.
    I never got a chance to find out. In the space of an instant, Sir Stuart crossed the lawn to the final lemur, only his rush ended not in front of his foe, but six feet past it. The lemur jerked in the twisting, surprised reaction I had just engaged in a moment before.
    Then its head fell from its shoulders, hood and all, dissolving into flickering memory embers as it went. Its headless body went mad, somehow letting out a scream, thrashing and kicking and falling to the ground, where grey-and-white fire poured from its truncated neck.
    A shout of triumph went up from the home’s defenders as they continued their own fight, and the suddenly listless wraiths began to be torn apart in earnest, the tide of battle shifting rapidly. Sir Stuart lifted his ax above his head in response and turned to almost casually step up behind a wraith and take its head from its shoulders with the ax.
    Then, in the street, about ten feet behind him, a figure, one every bit as solid and real as Sir Stuart himself, appeared out of nowhere, a form shrouded in a nebulous grey cloak with eyes of green-white fire. It lifted what looked like a clawed hand, and sent a bolt of lightning sizzling into Sir Stuart’s back.
    Sir Stuart cried out in sudden agony, his body tightening helplessly, muscles convulsing just as they would on an electrocuted human being. The bolt of lightning seemed to attach itself to his spine, then burned a line down to his right hip bone, burning and searing and blowing bits of the tattered, flaming substance of his ghostly flesh into the air.
    â€œNo!” I screamed, as he fell. I started running toward him.
    The marine rolled when he hit the ground and came up with that ridiculously huge old horse pistol in his hand. He leveled it at the Grey Ghost and fired, and once again his gun sent out a plume of ethereal color and a tiny, bright sun of destruction.
    But the cloudy grey figure lifted its hand, and the bullet bounced off the air in front of it smoothly, catching a luckless, wounded wraith who had been attempting to retreat. The wraith immediately dissolved as the first one had—and Sir Stuart stared up at the Grey Ghost with his mouth open in shock.
    Magic. The Grey Ghost was using magic. Even as I ran forward, I could feel the humming energy of it in the air, smell it on the cold breeze coming off the lake. I didn’t move at ghostly superspeed. I mostly just ran across the hard ground, hurdled the little fence, went right through a car parked on the street (ow, grrrrrr!), and threw my best haymaker of a right cross at a point I nominated to be the Grey Ghost’s chin.
    My fist connected with what felt like solid flesh, a refreshingly familiar smack-thump of impact that immediately flashed red pain through my wrist to the elbow. The Grey Ghost reeled, and I didn’t let up. I put a couple of left hooks into its midsection, gave it one hell of an uppercut with my right hand, and drove a hard reverse punch into its neck.
    I am not a skilled martial artist. But I know a little, picked up in training with Murphy and some of the other SI cops over the years at Dough Joe’s Hurricane Gym. Real fighting is only slightly about form and technique. Mostly it’s about timing, and about being willing to hurt somebody. If you know more or less when to close the distance and throw the punch, you’re most of the way there. But having the right mind-set is even more important. All the technique in the world isn’t going to help you if you come to the fight without the will to wreak havoc on the other guy.
    The Grey Ghost staggered back, and I kicked one leg