Changes df-12

by Jim Butcher

  “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.

  “Nice,” Susan said. She bounced up in the air experimentally, and smiled when her descent was slowed. “Very cool. Then we drink more to climb out?”

  “Should make that slope a piece of cake,” I said. “But we’ll need to move fast. Potion will last us maybe twenty minutes.”

  Susan nodded, adjusting the straps on the small pack she wore. “Got it.”

  “Get close to me,” I said. “I can’t veil all three of us unless we’re all within arm’s reach.”

  They did, and after a few seconds of focus and concentration, I brought up a veil around us that should hide us from view and disperse our heat signature as well. It wouldn’t be perfect. We’d still show up on a night-vision scope, to one degree or another. I was counting on the fact that men guarding a building that isolated could not possibly deal with problems on a regular basis. They’d have a very comfortable, reliable routine, which was exactly the sort of thing to take the edge off a sentry’s wariness. That’s just human nature.

  I beckoned, and the three of us began approaching the facility. There was no fluttering from shadow to shadow, or camouflage face paint. The veiling spell took care of that. We just walked over the uneven ground and focused on staying close together. That part may have been more fun if Martin weren’t there.

  We got to within thirty yards of the fence, and I paused. I lifted my staff, pointed it at the first sentry camera, and whispered, “Hexus.”

  I wasn’t used to holding something as demanding as a veil in one hand while performing another working with the other—even such an easy spell as a technology hex. For a second, I thought I’d lose the veil, but then it stabilized again. The lights on the camera had gone out.

  We moved around the perimeter while I hexed the other two cameras into useless junk, but just as I’d taken down camera number three, Susan gripped my arm and pointed. The foot patrol was moving by on their sweep.

  “The dog will get our scent,” Susan said.

  Martin drew a short pistol from beneath his jacket, and screwed a silencer to its end.

  “No,” I half growled. I fished in the pocket of my duster and found the second potion I’d made while preparing for the trip. It was in a delicate, round globe of glass about as thick as a piece of paper. I flipped the globe toward the path of the oncoming dog and heard it break with a little crackle.

  The two patrolmen and the dog went by the area where I’d left my surprise, and the dog snuffled the new scent with thorough interest. At a jerk of the lead, the dog hurried to catch up to the guards, and all three of them went by without so much as glancing at us.

  “Dog’ll have his senses of smell and hearing back in the morning,” I murmured. “These guys are just doing a job. We aren’t going to kill them for that.”

  Martin looked nonplussed. He kept the pistol in his hand.

  We circled around to where the fence met the canyon wall, opposite the large parking lot. Susan got out a pair of wire cutters. She opened them and prepared to cut through when Martin snatched her wrist, preventing her from touching the fence. “Electricity,” he whispered. “Dresden.”

  I grunted. Now that he’d pointed it out, I thought I could feel it, too—the almost inaudible hum of current on the move, making the hairs on my arms stand up. Hexing something with a microchip in it is simple. Impeding the flow of electricity through a conductive material is considerably more difficult. I pitched my best hex at the wiring where it connected to a power line and was rewarded with the sudden scent of burned rubber. Martin reached out and touched the fence with the back of his hand. No electricity burned him.

  “All right,” Susan whispered, as she began clipping us a way in, cutting a wire only when the gusting wind reached a crescendo and covered the sound of the clippers at work, then waiting for the next gust. “Where’s that distraction?”

  I winked at her, lifted my blasting rod, thrust it between links of fence in front of us, and aimed carefully. Then I checked the tower guard, to be sure he was looking away, and whispered, “Fuego, fuego, fuego, fuego.”

  Tiny spheres of sullen red light flickered out across the compound and into the parking lot opposite. My aim had been good. The little spheres hissed and melted their way through the rear quarter panel of several vehicles and burned on into the fuel tanks beneath.

  The results were predictable. A gas tank explosion isn’t as loud as an actual bomb going off, but when you’re standing a few yards away from it, it could be hard to tell. There were several hollow booming sounds, and light blazed up from the cars that had been hit as flames roared up and consumed them.

  The guard in the tower started screaming into a radio, but apparently could get no reply. No surprise. The second camera had been positioned atop his tower, and the hex that took it out probably got his radio, too. While he was busy, Susan, Martin, and I slipped through the opening in the fence and made our way into the shadows at the base of one of the portable storage units.

  A car, parked between two flaming vehicles, went up with another whump of ignition, and it got even brighter. A few seconds later, red lights started to flash at several points around the facility, and a warning klaxon began to sound. The giant metal door to the interior of the facility began to roll upward, just like a garage door.

  The two pa
trollers and their temporarily handi-capable German shepherd came running out first, and were followed, in a moment, by nearly a dozen other guys in the same uniforms, or at least in portions of them. It looked like some of them had hopped out of bed and tossed on whatever they could reach. Several were dragging fire extinguishers, as if they were going to be useful against fires that large. Good luck with that, boys.

  The moment the last of them was past our position and staring agog at the burning automobiles, I hurried forward, putting everything I had into the veil, trusting that Martin and Susan would stay close. They did. We went through the big garage door and down a long ramp into the facility.

  “Go ahead,” Martin said. He hurried to a control panel on the wall and whipped out some kind of multitool. “I’ll shut the door.”

  “As long as we can get it open on the way out,” I muttered.

  “Yes, Dresden,” Martin said crisply. “I’d been doing this for sixty years before you were born.”

  “Better drop the invisibility thing, Harry,” Susan said. “What we’re looking for might be on a computer, so . . .”

  “So I’ll hold off on the magic until we know. Got it.”

  We went deeper into the facility. The caves ran very deep back into the stone, and we’d gone down maybe a hundred yards after moving about four hundred yards forward on a spiraling ramp. The air grew colder, to the ambient underground average.

  More than that, though, it gained a definite spiritual chill. Malevolent energy hovered around us, slow and thick like half- frozen honey. There was a gloating, miserly quality to it, bringing to my mind images of old Smaug lying in covetous slumber upon his bed of treasure. That, then, was the reason the Red Court had hidden its dark treasures here. Ambient energy like this wasn’t directly dangerous to anyone—but with only the mildest of efforts it would protect and preserve the magical implements jealously against the passing of time.

  The ramp opened up into a larger area that reminded me of the interior corridors of a sports stadium. Three doors faced us. One was hanging slightly open, and read, QUARTERS. The other was shut and read, ADMINISTRATION.