by Butcher, Jim
I left my mother’s amulet and the glittering ruby sitting on my worktable so that the glue could dry, and padded up the stepladder.
I had hefted Susan up onto the sofa and fetched a pillow for her head, and a blanket. Molly had managed to roll Martin onto a strip of camping foam, and given him a pillow and a blanket, too. Mouse had settled down on the floor near Martin to sleep. Even though his eyes were closed and he was snoring slightly, his ears twitched at every sound.
While I had been in the lab, Molly had been cleaning up. She probably knew where all the dishes went better than I did. Or she was reorganizing them completely. Either way, I was sure that the next time I just wanted to fry one egg, I wouldn’t be able to find the little skillet until after I had already used the big skillet and cleaned it off.
I hunkered down next to Susan, and as I did she stirred and muttered softly. Then she jerked in a swift breath through her nose, her eyes suddenly opening wide, as if she were panicked.
“Easy,” I said at once. “Susan. It’s Harry. You’re safe.”
It seemed to take several seconds for my words to sink in. Then she relaxed again, blinked a few times, and turned her head toward me.
“What happened to me?” she asked.
“You were mistaken for an intruder,” I said. “You were hit with a form of magic that made you sleep.”
She frowned tiredly. “Oh. I was dreaming. . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I was dreaming that the curse was gone. That I was human.” She shook her head with a bitter little smile. “I thought I was done having that one. Martin?”
“Here,” Martin slurred. “I’m all right.”
“But maybe not for long,” I said. “The apartment’s wards are down. We’re naked here.”
“Well,” Martin said in an acidic voice. “I think we learned our lesson about where that leads.”
Susan rolled her eyes, but the look she gave me, a little hint of a smile and a level stare with her dark eyes, was positively smoldering.
Yeah. That had been pretty good.
“Did you guys find out about our tail?” I asked.
“Tails, as it turns out. Three different local investigative agencies,” Martin supplied. “They were paid cash up front to follow us from the time we arrived. They all gave a different description of the woman who hired them. All of them were too beautiful to believe.”
“Arianna?” I asked.
Martin grunted. “Probably. The oldest of them can wear any flesh mask they wish, and go abroad in daylight, hidden from the sun in the shadow of their own mask.”
I lifted my eyebrows. That was news. I wasn’t even sure the Wardens had that kind of information. Martin must have been a little groggy from his naptime.
“How long were we out?” Susan asked.
“I got here about five hours ago. Sun’s down.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, as if bracing herself for something, and nodded. “All right. Martin and I need to get moving.”
“Where?” I asked.
“The airport,” Martin said. “We should be able to be in Nevada by very late tonight or early tomorrow morning. Then we can move on the warehouse and look for more information.”
“We discussed it, Harry,” Susan said quietly. “You can’t take a plane, and we’re counting the minutes. A jet will get us there in about seven hours. The car will take two days. There’s no time for that.”
“Yeah, I can see your reasoning,” I said.
Martin stood up creakily and stretched. “Entering the facility may require a reconnaissance period. We’ll have to determine its weaknesses, patrol pacing, and so on before we—”
I interrupted him by slapping a piece of notebook paper down on the coffee table. “The storage facility is set into the side of a stone hill. There are some portable units stored outside in a yard with a twelve-foot razor-wire fence. A road leads into the hill and down into what I presume to be caverns either created for storage space or appropriated after a mining operation closed.” I pointed at the notebook paper, to different points on the sketch, as I mentioned each significant feature.
“There is a single watchtower with one guard armed with a longbarreled assault rifle with a big scope. There are two men and a dog walking a patrol around the perimeter fence with those little assault rifles—”
“Carbines,” Molly said brightly, from the kitchen.
“—and fragmentation grenades. They aren’t in a hurry. Takes them about twenty minutes; then they go inside for a drink and come back out. There are security cameras here, here, and here, and enough cars in the employee parking lot to make me think that the underground portion of the facility is probably pretty big, and probably has some kind of barracks for their security team.”
I nodded. “That’s about it on the surface, but there’s no way we can get inside to scout it out ahead of time. Looks pretty straightforward. We move up to it under a veil; I shut down the communications. We use a distraction to draw everyone’s attention, and when the reinforcements come running out, we’re in. Hopefully we can find a way to lock them outside. After that, it’s just a matter of . . .”
I trailed off as I looked up to find Martin and Susan staring at me, their jaws kind of hanging limply.
“What?” I said.
“How . . .” Martin began.
“Where . . .” Susan said.
Molly burst out into a fit of giggles she didn’t even try to hide.
“How do I know?” I reached over to the table and held up an old set of binoculars I’d left sitting there. “I went over to take a look. Took me about fifteen minutes, one way. I could bring you, if you want, but it’s cool if you guys want to take the plane. I’ll wait for you.”
Martin stared hard at me.
“You . . .” Susan began, something like anger in her tone. Then she threw back her head and laughed. “You insufferable, arrogant pig,” she said fondly. “I shouldn’t have underestimated you. You don’t always perform gracefully when everything is on the line—but you’re always there, aren’t you.”
“I hope so,” I said quietly. I stood up again. “Better eat something. I’ve got some things finishing up in the lab that might help us. We’ll go in one hour.”
Chapter Seventeen
We rolled out in fifty-five minutes.
The Blue Beetle was full, but we weren’t going more than a half dozen blocks. The entry into the proper Way was in an alleyway behind a brownstone apartment building in a fairly typical Chicago neighborhood. It was getting late, so there wasn’t much traffic, and Mouse ghosted along behind us, staying mostly in the shadows and easily keeping pace with the car.
Which speaks to my dog’s mightiness, and not to my car’s wimpiness. Seriously.
Molly pulled up to the mouth of the alley and stopped. She looked nervously around as we unloaded from the car. I gave Susan a hand out of the tiny backseat, and then held the door open as Mouse jumped up into the passenger seat.
I ruffled his ears and leaned down to speak to Molly. “Go get coffee or something. Give us about an hour, an hour and a half tops. We’ll be back by then.”
“What if you aren’t?” Molly asked. She reached one hand over to Mouse in an unconscious gesture, burying her fingers in his fur. “What do I do then?”
“If we don’t show up by then, go on back home to your folks’ place. I’ll contact you there.”
“But what if—”
“Molly,” I said firmly. “You can’t plan for everything or you never get started in the first place. Get a move on. And don’t take any lip from the dog. He’s been uppity lately.”
“Okay, Harry,” she said, still unhappily. She pulled out into the street again, and Mouse turned his head to watch us as she drove away.
“Poor kid,” Susan said. “She doesn’t like being left behind.”
I grunted. “That kid’s got enough power to take all three of us down if she caught us off guard,” I said. “Her strength isn’t an
issue.”
“I’m not talking about that, obviously.”
I grunted. “What do you mean?”
Susan frowned at me briefly, and then her eyebrows rose. “Dear God. You don’t realize it.”
“Realize what?”
She shook her head, one corner of her mouth crooked into the same smile I remembered so well. It made my heart twitch, if such a thing is possible. “Molly has it bad for you, Harry.”
I frowned. “No, she doesn’t. We settled that early on. Isn’t happening.”
Susan shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe you settled it, but she didn’t. She’s in love.”
“Is not,” I said, scowling. “She goes on dates and stuff.”
“I said she was in love. Not dead.” Her expression went neutral. “Or half-dead.” She stared after the vanished car for a moment and said, “Can I share something with you that I’ve learned in the past few years?”
“I guess.”
She turned to me, her expression sober. “Life is too short, Harry. And there’s nowhere near enough joy in it. If you find it, grab it. Before it’s gone.”
It cost Susan something to say that. She hid it well, but not as well as I knew her. Giving breath to those thoughts had caused her very real pain. I was going to disagree again, but hesitated. Then I said, “I never stopped loving you. Never wanted you to be gone.”
She turned a little away from me, letting her hair fall across her face as a curtain. Then she swallowed thickly and said, her voice trembling slightly, “Same here. Doesn’t mean we get to be together.”
“No,” I said. “I guess not.”
She suddenly balled her fists and straightened her spine. “I can’t do this. Not right now. We’ve got to focus. I . . .” She shook her head and started walking. She went to the end of the block, to stand there taking deep, slow breaths.
I glanced at Martin, who stood leaning against the wall of a building, his expression, of course, bland.
“What?” I snapped at him.
“You think what you’re feeling about your daughter is rage, Dresden. It isn’t.” He jerked his chin at Susan. “That is. She knew the Mendozas, the foster parents, and loved them like family. She walked into their house and found them. She found their children. The vampires had quite literally torn them limb from limb. One of the Mendozas’ four children was three years old. Two were near Maggie’s age.”
I said nothing. My imagination showed me terrible pictures.
“It took us half an hour to find all the pieces,” Martin continued calmly. “We had to put them back together like a jigsaw puzzle. And the whole time, the blood thirst was driving us both mad. Despite the fact that she knew those people. Despite her terror for her daughter. Imagine that for a moment. Imagine Susan standing there, filled with the urge to rip into the bloody limb with her teeth, even though she knew that little dismembered leg might have been her daughter’s. Picture that.”
At that point, I didn’t think I could avoid it.
“It was only when the puzzle was finished that we realized that Maggie had been taken,” Martin continued, his words steady and polite. “She’s barely holding on. If she loses control, people are going to die. She might be one of them.” Martin’s eyes went hard and absolutely cold. “So I would take it as a fucking courtesy if you wouldn’t torture her by stirring up her emotions five minutes before we kick down the door of a high-security facility.”
I looked over my shoulder at Susan. She was still facing away from us, but she was in the act of briskly pulling her hair back into a tail.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“In this situation, your emotions are liabilities,” Martin said. “They won’t help Rodriguez. They won’t help the little girl. I suggest you postpone indulging them until this is all over.”
“Until what is all over?” Susan asked, returning.
“Uh, the trip,” I said, turning to lead them into the alley. “It won’t take us long—about thirty seconds of walking down a level hallway. But it’s dark and you have to hold your breath and nose the whole way.”
“Why?” Susan asked.
“It’s full of methane gas and carbon monoxide, among others. If you use a light source, you run the risk of setting off an explosion.”
Susan’s eyebrows rose. “What about your amulet?”
I shook my head. “The light from that is actually . . . Glah, it’s more complicated than you need to know. Suffice it to say that I feel there would be a very, very small possibility that it might make the atmosphere explode. Like those static electricity warnings at the gas stations. Why take the chance?”
“Ah,” Susan said. “You want us to walk blind through a tunnel filled with poisonous gases that could explode at the smallest spark.”
“Yeah.”
“And . . . you’re sure this is a good idea?”
“It’s a terrible idea,” I said. “But it’s the fastest way to the storage facility.” I lifted my fingertips to touch the red stone on my amulet as I neared the location of the Way. It was an old, bricked-over doorway into the ground level of the apartment building.
A voice with no apparent source began to speak quietly—a woman’s voice, throaty and calm. My mother’s voice. She died shortly after my birth, but I was certain, as sure as I had been of anything in my life: It was her voice. It made me feel warm, listening to it, like an old, favorite piece of music that you haven’t heard for years.
“The hallway on the other side is full of dangerous levels of methane and carbon monoxide, among other gases. The mixture appears to be volatile, and in the other side you can never be sure exactly which energies might or might not trigger an explosion. Forty-two walking steps to the far end, which opens on a ridge outside Corwin, Nevada.” There was a moment of silence, and then the same voice began to speak again, panting, shaking, and out of breath. “Notation: The hallway is not entirely abandoned. Something tried to grab me as I came through.” She coughed several times. “Notation secundus: Don’t wear a dress the next time you need to go to Corwin, dummy. Some farmer’s going to get a show.”
“Maybe it was a grue,” I murmured, smiling.
“What did you say?” Susan asked.
“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.” I put a hand on the doorway and immediately felt a kind of yielding elasticity beneath my fingertips. The separation between the world of flesh and spirit was weak here. I took a deep breath, laid out a fairly mild effort of will, and murmured, “Aparturum.”
A circle of blackness began to expand from the center of my palm beneath my hand, rapidly swelling, overlaying the wall itself. I didn’t let it get too big. The gate would close on its own, eventually, but smaller gates closed more quickly, and I didn’t want some poor fool going through it.
Present company excluded, of course.
I glanced back to Susan and Martin. “Susan, grab on to my coat. Martin, you grab hers. Take a deep breath and let’s get this done fast and quiet.”
I turned to the Way, took a deep breath, and then strode forward.
Mom’s gem hadn’t mentioned that it was flipping hot in there. When I’d stepped into the hallway on the first trip, I felt like I was inside about three saunas, nested together like those Russian dolls. I found the righthand wall and started walking, counting my steps. I made them a bit shorter than normal, and nailed the length of Mom’s stride more accurately this time. I hit the Way out at forty-three.
Another effort of will and a whispered word, and I opened that gate as well, emerging into a cold mountain wind, and late twilight. Susan and Martin came out with me, and we all spent a moment letting out our pent-up breaths. We were in desert mountains, covered with tough, stringy plants and quick, quiet beasts. The gate behind me, another circle, stood in the air in front of what looked like the entrance to an old mine that had been bricked over a long time ago.
“Which way?” Martin said.
“Half mile this way,” I said, and set out overland.
It was an awfully good hidey-hole, I had to admit. We were out so far in the desert hills that the commute to nowhere was a long one. The facilities had been cut into a granite shelf at the end of a box canyon. There was a single road in, and the floor of the canyon was wide and flat and empty of any significant features, like friendly rocks that one might try to take cover behind. The walls of the canyon had been blasted sheer. No one was coming down that way without a hundred yards of rope or a helicopter.
Or a wizard.
“All right,” I said. The night was growing cold. My breath steamed in the air as I spoke. “Take these. Drink half of ’em. Save the rest.” I passed out test tubes filled with light blue liquid to Martin and Susan.
“What is it?” Susan asked.
“A parachute,” I said. “Technically a flight potion but I watered it down. It should get us to the valley floor safely.”
Martin eyed his tube, and then me.
“Harry,” Susan began. “The last time I drank one of your potions, it became . . . awkward.”
I rolled my eyes. “Drop into a roll at the end.” Then I drank away half of my potion and stepped off the edge of the cliff.
Flight is a difficult thing for a wizard to pull off. Everyone’s magic works a little differently, and that means that, when it comes to flying, the only way to manage it is by trial and error. And, since flying generally means moving very quickly, a long way above the ground, would-be aeromancers tended to cut their careers (and lives) short at the first error.
Flying is hard—but falling is easy.
I dropped down, accelerating for a second, then maintaining a pace of somewhere around fifteen miles an hour. It didn’t take long to hit the desert floor, and I dropped into a roll to spread out the impact energy. I stood up, dusting myself off. Susan and Martin landed nearby and also rose.