by Jim Butcher
The walls had been mortared and painted white, but cracks and mineral stains from damp spots all but concealed the original color. At the bottom of the stairs was a landing maybe three feet square, and then a second set of stairs led farther down, the air getting more cramped and colder as they went.
The stale air smelled like mildew and rot. Our breathing and our movements sounded incredibly loud in the otherwise oppressive silence that followed, and I found myself pointing the paintball gun forward, over Murphy’s head and Kincaid’s shoulder, so that I could start shooting as soon as something bounded into view. For all the good it was likely to do. Against any normal thug, the weapon would do little but make them damp. Or vaguely aromatic.
The stairway ended at a half-open old door.
Kincaid nudged it slowly open with his spear, already crouched.
Murphy aimed her gun at the black doorway.
Me too. The end of my stupid paintball gun quivered involuntarily.
Nothing happened.
Silence reigned.
“Dammit,” I muttered. “I don’t have the nerves for this crap.”
“Want me to find you a Valium?” Kincaid asked.
“Kiss my ass,” I said.
He reached into his belt pouch and pulled out a couple of plastic tubes. He bent them sharply, shook them up, and they began to shine with chemical light. He edged up to the doorway and flicked one to the left, the other to the right, bouncing them off the walls so that he wouldn’t expose himself to anyone in the hall beyond. Then he waited a beat and leaned out, peeking around. “Nothing moving,” he reported. “No lights. But it looks like that map was pretty good. Hall on my right goes about ten feet, then ends at the door to that closet. Open hall on my left, twenty feet long, and opens into a room.”
“Closet first,” I said.
“Cover me.”
Kincaid flowed down the last couple of stairs and through the door. Murphy kept within a foot of his back. Kincaid peeled off to the right. Murphy dropped into a crouch, shotgun aimed down the green-lit hall to the left. I wasn’t as smooth, but I went after Kincaid, paintballs and staff ready.
The closet door was only five feet high and opened out, toward the hall. Kincaid listened at the door, then leaned aside to let me touch it first. I couldn’t feel any enchantments on it, and nodded to him. He shifted his grip on the spear so that he’d be ready to drive the tip of it into anything that came at him from the closet, and drew the door open.
The light from his spear flickered around a dank little chamber that was too big to be a proper closet and too small to be a room. Patches of moisture and mildew blotted the damp stone walls, and the smell of unwashed bodies and waste rolled out of the door.
Half a dozen children, none of them older than nine or ten, huddled against the back wall of the closet. They were dressed in castoff clothing, most of it far too big, and they wore steel cuffs on their hands. The cuffs, in turn, were locked to a larger chain attached to a heavy steel ring bolted into the floor. The children reacted in silent terror, flinching away from the doorway and from the light.
Children.
Someone was going to regret this. If I had to take this building, hell, this block apart with nothing but raw will and my bare hands, someone was going to pay. Even the monsters should draw a line somewhere.
Then again, I guess that’s why they call them monsters.
“Son of a bitch,” I snarled, and ducked my head to step into the room.
Kincaid abruptly threw his weight against me, shoving me aside from the door. “No,” he growled.
“Dammit, get out of my way,” I said.
“It’s a trap, Dresden,” Kincaid said. “There’s a trip wire. Go through that door and you’ll kill all of us.”
Murphy checked over her shoulder and returned to watching the darkness for trouble.
I frowned at Kincaid and picked up the plastic light stick, holding it out. “I don’t see a wire.”
“Not a literal wire,” Kincaid. “It’s a net of infrared beams.”
“Infrared? How did you—”
“Dammit, Dresden, if you want to know about me, wait for the autobiography like everyone else.”
He was right. It was a little late to be worrying about Kincaid’s background now. “Hey, kids,” I said. “Everybody stay really still and keep back, okay? We’re going to get you out of here.” I lowered my voice and said to Kincaid, “How do we get them out of there?”
“Not sure we can,” Kincaid said. “The beam is rigged up to an antipersonnel mine.”
“Well,” I said. “Can’t we just . . . can’t you put a weight on a land mine and leave it there? So long as the weight holds the trigger down, it doesn’t explode, right?”
“Right,” Kincaid said. “But that’s assuming we’ve gone back in time to World War Two.” He shook his head. “Modern mines are pretty good at killing people, Dresden. This one’s British, pretty recent.”
“How can you tell?”
He tapped his nose. “The Brits use a different chemical priming charge than most. It’s probably a bouncer, very nasty.”
“Bouncer?”
“Yeah. If something interrupts the beam, the charge activates. Several individual submunitions get blown up into the air, or sideways, or however they want to set it up, in a pattern. Then they explode maybe five or six feet in the air. Sends a couple of thousand steel balls out in a big cloud. Kills everything in thirty, maybe forty meters if you’re in the open, maybe a lot farther in a tight space like this. If it was me, I’d have set the charges up to get thrown straight down this hall. All these stone walls, the shrapnel would shred everything real good.”
“I could hex down whatever is sending the beam,” I said.
“Thus interrupting it,” Kincaid said. “Thus kablowie. Thus death.”
“Dammit.” I swallowed and took a step back from the doorway, hoping the presence of my magic wouldn’t screw up the device in a moment of monumentally bad timing. “I can shield us, if it’s all coming in from one direction.”
Kincaid arched an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn. But it won’t help those kids much. They’re over there.”
I scowled ferociously. “How do we disarm the device?”
“You still don’t want the Bolshevik Muppet solution, right?”
“Right.”
“Then someone has to crawl in there without setting it off, find the explosive, disable it and unhook it from the sensors.”
“Right,” I said. “Do it.”
Kincaid nodded. “Can’t.”
“What?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
He nodded at the doorway. “There are three beams set up in an asymmetrical crisscross over the doorway. There isn’t enough room for me to get through the open spaces.”
“I’m thinner than you,” I said.
“Yeah, but longer and a hell of a lot gawkier. And I know what happens to tech when nervous wizards get close.”
“Someone has to do it,” I said. “Someone small enough to . . .”
We both looked down the hall at Murphy.
Murphy didn’t look away from her vigil, and said, “How do I disarm it?”
“I’ll talk you through,” Kincaid said. “Dresden, better take her gun and cover us.”
“Hey,” I said. “I’m in charge here. Kincaid, talk her through it. Murphy, give me your gun so I can cover you.”
I tied the handle of the paintball gun into my coat where my blasting rod usually went. I winked at Murphy, who saw the gesture and did not respond to it. She just passed me the gun and turned her baseball cap around. Then she walked down the hall, slipping out of her coat and gun belt on the way.
“Better lose the Kevlar too,” Kincaid said. “I can pass it to you. Bottom left corner looks like the best bet. Stay as flat as you can and as much to the left as you can. I think you can get in.”
“You think?�
� I asked. “What if you’re wrong?”
He gave me an annoyed look. “You don’t see me telling you how to watch that goddamned doorway in case all the vampires show up at any second to kill us, do you?” Kincaid asked.
I was going to scowl at him, but he had a point. I scowled at the darkness instead, gripping Murphy’s gun. I fumbled for a second, because the riot gun must have been some kind of military-issue, and it took me a second to find the safety. I flicked it to reveal the red dot. Or at least I was thought it was red. The green chemical light made it look black.
“Stop,” Kincaid said in a calm voice. “Unclench.”
“Unclench what?” Murphy demanded.
“Unclench your ass.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re going to trip the beam. You need another quarter inch. Relax.”
“I am relaxed,” Murphy growled.
“Oh,” Kincaid said. “Damn, great ass then. Take off your pants.”
I winced and checked over my shoulder. Murphy was stretched out on the floor on her belly, her cheek on the cold floor, arms stretched above her. The small of her back was in the doorway. She managed to move her head just enough to eye Kincaid. “Once again?”
“Take off your pants,” Kincaid said, smiling. “Think of the children.”
She muttered something to herself and moved her arms, shifting slightly.
“No good,” Kincaid said. “You’re moving too far.”
“Okay, genius,” Murphy said. “What do I do?”
“Hold still,” Kincaid said. “I’ll do it.”
There was silence for a second. Murphy hissed out a breath. Or maybe it was more of a gasp.
“I don’t bite,” he said. “Be still. I want to live through this.”
“Okay,” Murphy said in a small voice a moment later.
I scowled hard at the darkness and felt myself getting irrationally angry, and fast. I glanced back again. Murphy wriggled forward, all the way through the doorway. Her legs were pale, pretty, and strong. And I had to admit that Kincaid was completely correct about her posterior.
Kincaid was bracing her legs, hands on her calves and sliding down as she moved forward, helping her to keep them from accidentally moving too far. Or at least that damn well better have been what he was doing, because if it wasn’t I would be forced to kill him.
I shook my head and returned to my vigil. Get a grip, Harry, I thought to myself. It isn’t like you and Murphy are an item. She isn’t something you own. She’s her own person. She does what she wants with who she wants. You’re not even involved with her. You’ve got no say in it.
I ran through those thoughts a couple of times, found them impeccably logical, morally unassailable, and still wanted to slug Kincaid. Which implied all kinds of things I didn’t have time to think about.
I heard them speaking quietly to each other a moment later. Murphy was describing the explosive, and Kincaid was giving her instructions.
In the darkness beyond the last chemical light, I heard something move.
I shifted my weight, reaching into my belt pouch for my own chemical light sticks. I pressed them against the floor to break the layer separating the two chemicals and shook them until they started to emit their own soft green fire. I threw them down the hall, where they landed in the room beyond. The lights revealed little beyond more stone floor and some drywall. Bob had reported that the room was essentially a storage chamber, with several smaller chambers defined by recently installed drywall that could be used for storage, emergency shelters during the odd tornado warning, or additional rooms for those in need of a place to spend the night. But all I could see was half of a door, a couple of stacks of cardboard boxes, a dressmaker’s dummy, and the glowing sticks of emerald light.
And then something large and four-legged moved in front of one of the lights for a second or two. The darkhound was a large and rangy animal, maybe a large Alsatian, and it deliberately stayed in place for a moment before vanishing into the shadows once more.
I kept the riot gun aimed down the hall and wished that Inari hadn’t broken my damned blasting rod. I would far rather have had it than the gun. Without the blasting rod to help me focus and contain the destructive energies of flame I preferred, I didn’t dare start blasting away at the bad guys with magic, especially in such tight quarters as the shelter. But then, maybe it was just as well. I had already met my quota for burning down public institutions this week.
I couldn’t see anything else, but I knew there was something there. So I lowered my eyelids almost all the way and focused my attention, Listening. There was the faint sound of something breathing, but nothing more.
It wasn’t enough. I lowered the gun a bit, relaxing my shoulders, and poured more of my focus into it, Listening more deeply than I ever had before. The sound of breathing became louder, and I picked out several other faint sources of it. A moment later I began to hear a dull throbbing, which I realized was a beating heart. More heartbeats joined it, a confused chorus of drumming beats, but I was able to identify individual rhythms into a pair of groups. One was a bit faster, lighter—smaller hearts, probably the darkhounds. There were four of them. The other group was human, and there were five hearts beating in an eager, savage cadence—pressed up against the walls on either side of the doorway, out of sight but less than twenty feet away.
And from the back of the room I heard footsteps, slow and deliberate. They slid quietly across the stone floor, and the wasted outline of an emaciated female form appeared in front of one of the glow sticks.
And no heartbeat accompanied it.
Mavra.
The darkhounds appeared, vague shapes, and paced restlessly through the shadows around the vampire. My heart lurched in sudden apprehension, and I released my attention from the Listening. I raised the gun, got to my feet, and backed away.
Again, that soft, mocking laugh drifted through the basement.
“Trouble,” I said over my shoulder. “Five Renfields, four darkhounds at least, and Mavra’s awake.”
“Indeed,” came Mavra’s dry, dusty voice. “I’ve been waiting for you, Dresden. There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Oh?” I said. I looked over my shoulder at Kincaid and mouthed, How long?
Kincaid had crouched and taken up his spear again. He glanced back and said, “Thirty seconds.”
“We take the kids and run,” I whispered.
“I’ve been admiring you for some time now, Dresden,” came Mavra’s voice. “I’ve seen you stop bullets with your power. I’ve seen you stop knives and claws and fangs.” She made a gesture with her hand. “And so I simply must know how well you will fare against your own weapon of choice.”
And two Renfields stepped out into the doorway, blocking my view of Mavra. Each of them held a long metal device in their hands, and each of them wore something that bulged out above their shoulders, gleaming shapes of rounded metal. A blue starter flame flickered at the end of the devices they held, and it hit me all at once what was happening.
Both of the Renfields lifted their flamethrowers and filled the cramped little hallway with fire.
Chapter Thirty-three
The riot gun went off, though I’m not sure if it was because I’d instinctively decided to use the weapon or if I’d just convulsed in surprise. The bad guys were twenty feet away, which was plenty of distance for the shot from the riot gun to spread. If I’d had it aimed well, it would almost certainly have put one of them down. As it was, the largest force of the blast went between them, though from the way they jerked and twisted, either the sheer roaring volume of the weapon was enough to intimidate them or they’d caught a little shot as it went past. Fire coughed uncertainly from the mouths of the flamethrowers, spattering the hall along the floors, walls, and ceiling, where it clung in globs of what had to be a mix of gasoline or some other accelerant, and petroleum jelly—homemade napalm. The air went from cold to roasting-hot, even from the aborted discharge of fire,
sucking the wind from my lungs.
Both men, unassuming-looking types in ragged clothing, their eyes wide and fanatical, hesitated for a second before planting their feet again and taking aim once more. It was only a second, but it was enough to save my life. I dropped the gun, tossed my staff into my right hand, and shook out my shield bracelet. I rammed panicked will into the focus and spread it in a wall of energy before me.
The Renfields cut loose this time, flame as thick as spray from a breached hydrant roaring down the hall. I caught it on the shield, but I had never intended it to stop heat. It was primarily a defense against kinetic energy, and while I had used it to handle everything from bullets to runaway elevator cars in my career as a wizard, it just wasn’t all that good at stopping the transfer of intense heat. The napalm-jelly splattered against the invisible shield, gallons of it, and the fire clung to it in white-hot glee. Its mindless fury seeped through the shield and flowed onto me.
It hurt. Oh, God, it hurt. The fingers of my left hand were the first to feel it, and then my palm and wrist, all in the space of a second. If you’ve never been burned, you can’t imagine the pain. And my fingers, where millions of tactile nerves were able to send panicked damage-messages to my brain, felt as if they had simply exploded and been replaced with howling agony.
I jerked my hand back, and felt my focus waver, the shield start to fade. I gritted my teeth, and somehow managed to dig up the strength to extend my hand again, hardening the shield and my will. I backed away in shuffling half steps, my mind almost drowning in pain, desperately keeping the shield up.
“Ten seconds!” Kincaid shouted.
I saw blisters rising on my left hand. I felt my fingers curling into a claw. They looked thinner, as if made of melting wax, and I could see the shadows of my bones beneath the flesh. The shield grew weaker yet. The pain got worse. I stood now at the bottom of the stairs, and as the shield faltered, the empty space between me and the doorway behind me might as well have been a mile.