People started screaming as flickering gloom descended, though as luck would have it, the band still had light enough to play by and, after a stutter, kept going. The octokongs, knocked back several yards before they could spread out their tentacles and grab onto the floor, let out enormous, feral roars of defiance, and at that terrifying sound, genuine panic began to spread through the ballroom. A few seconds later, someone must have pulled a fire alarm, because an ear-piercing mechanical whoop began to cycle through the air.
So, basically: Harry Dresden, one; peaceful gathering, zero.
I grabbed Valmont by the hand and darted to one side, shoving scarlet cloth aside with my other hand and running blindly forward through it. The Fomor would be on our heels any second. Anything I could have unleashed that would have killed or disabled the Fomor crew would have caused even more collateral damage and might have gotten someone killed in the relatively limited confines of the ballroom. All I’d done was knock them back on their heels—but I wasn’t trying to win a fight. I just wanted to get us out in one piece.
I didn’t know where Ascher had gotten off to, but the Fomor were after Valmont. Ascher had survived being hunted by the White Council for years. I imagined she could get herself out of a hotel without my help.
“What are we doing?” Anna shouted.
“Leaving!”
“Obviously. Where?”
“Fire stairs!” I called back. “I’m not getting stuck in an elevator with one of those things!”
We plunged out of the obscuring curtains, and I tripped on a chair, stumbled, and banged my hip hard into the buffet table. I might have fallen if Valmont hadn’t hauled on my arm.
I pointed toward the door the caterers had been using and got my feet moving again. “There! Fire stairs down the hall, to the right.”
“I saw the signs too,” she snapped.
We rushed through the doors, rounded the corner, and I found myself facing two more of the flat-eyed Fomor servitors, both of them bigger and heavier than average and wearing their more common uniform—black slacks with a tight black turtleneck.
And machine guns.
I don’t mean assault rifles. I mean full-on automatic weapons, the kind that come with their ammunition in a freaking box. The two turtlenecks had obviously been placed to cover the stairs, and they weren’t standing around being stupid. The second I came around the corner, one of them lifted his weapon and began letting loose chattering three- and four-round bursts of fire.
In movies, when someone shoots at the hero with a machine gun, they hit everything around him but they don’t actually hit him. The thing is, actual machine guns don’t really work like that. A skilled handler can fire them very accurately, and can lay down so many rounds that whatever he’s shooting at gets hit. A lot. That’s why they make machine guns in the first place. Someone opens up on you with one of those, and you have two choices—get to cover or get shot multiple times. I was less than fifty feet away, down a straight, empty hallway. He could barely have missed me if he’d been trying.
I threw back my right arm, hauling Anna Valmont behind me, and lifted my left arm, along with my will, snapping out, “Defendarius!”
Something tugged hard at my lower leg, and then my will congealed into a barrier of solid force between us and the shooter. Bullets struck it, sending up flashes of light as they did, revealing it as a half-dome shape with very ragged edges. The impact of each hit was visceral, felt all the way through my body, like the beat of a big drum in a too-loud nightclub. Heavy rounds like that were specifically designed to hit hard and penetrate cover. They could kill a soldier on the other side of a thick tree, chew apart a man in body armor, and reduce concrete walls to powder and rubble.
Without a magical focus to help concentrate my shield’s energy, it took an enormous amount of juice to keep it dense enough to actually stop the rounds, while slowing them down enough to keep them from simply ricocheting everywhere. Rounds like that would penetrate the walls and ceiling of the Peninsula as if going through soft cheese. Innocent people five floors away could be killed if I didn’t slow the bullets as they rebounded, and the metal-clad slugs bounced and clattered to the floor around me.
That didn’t deter the turtleneck. He started walking slowly forward in the goofy-looking, rolling, heel-to-toe gait of a trained close-quarters gunman, the kind of step that kept his eyes and head and shoulders level the whole time he was moving. He kept firing steady, controlled bursts as he approached, filling the hallway with light and deafening thunder, and it was everything I could do just to keep the bullets off of us.
Holding the shield in place was a job of work, and within seconds I had to drop to one knee, reducing the size of the shield needed as I did. I had to hold on for a little longer. Once the turtleneck ran dry, he’d have to change weapons or reload his magazine, and then I’d have a chance to hit back.
Except that his buddy was advancing right next to him, not firing. Ready to take over the second the first turtleneck’s weapon ran out. Gulp. I wasn’t sure I had the juice to hang on that long.
I was missing my shield bracelet pretty hard at that point—but it hadn’t been with me when I woke up under the island of Demonreach, and I hadn’t had the time or the resources to make another one since. My new staff would have done just fine, but it was just a little bit harder to sneak that thing into a formal gathering.
I needed a new plan.
Valmont shouted something at me. I was concentrating so hard, I barely heard her the first time. “Close your eyes!” she screamed. Then she tensed and moved and something flew over the faintly glowing top edge of my shield and clattered to the ground at the turtlenecks’ feet.
The two shooters reacted instantly, diving away, and a second later there was a flash of utterly blinding white light and something slapped the air of the hallway like a giant’s palm.
I hadn’t gotten my eyes closed in time, and my vision was covered in red and purple spots, my ears ringing in a steady, high-pitched tone, but the shield had protected me from the force of the small explosion, and my head was clear enough that I could stagger to my feet and get out of the deadly hallway, Valmont pulling me along in her wake.
“Jesus Christ,” she swore in a vicious tone as we ran. “It was just some goddamned files. Other stairway!”
Going back into the darkened ballroom after the stroboscopic hallway had left my eyes helplessly trying to adjust. “I can’t see yet,” I said, and felt her take my hand. “Okay, go!”
Valmont started running, and I lurched blindly along with her, holding her hand like an NBA-sized toddler and trying not to fall down. We crossed what had to have been most of the ballroom before Valmont suddenly stopped. My rented shoes were not exactly hell on wheels for traction, and I all but fell over her before I could stop, too.
“What?” I asked.
“Quiet,” she hissed. “One of those things at the door.”
“You have any more flash-bangs?” I said, lower.
“Most girls don’t even carry the one, you know,” she said rather primly. “I can’t tell you how many jobs I’ve done without a hitch since the last time I saw you, Dresden. You walk through the door and everything goes to hell.”
“That’s embroidered on my towels, actually,” I said. I blinked my eyes hard, several times, and could barely make out the shape of one of the octokongs waiting at the door. Well, technically, it was waiting over the door, its tentacles spread out along the ceiling, sticking to it like some enormous spider, apelike arms hanging down. Valmont had stopped us behind a column, deep in the shadows created by the emergency lights in the hallway beyond the octokong. “Wow, those things are ugly.” I blinked some more. “Okay, stay close.”
“Can you see?”
“Yeah, almost. We’ll make a run for it. If it comes at us, I’ll knock it away and we meep-meep right the hell out of here.”
“Meep-meep.” Valmont’s voice was dry. “It’s so nice to work with a mature professional.”
“Fine. We extract, exfiltrate, whatever,” I said. I changed hands, shifting hers to my left, making sure my right was free. “Here we go.”
And we ran for the door.
The octokong started slorping down the wall, all tentacles and slime and harsh, ugly grunting sounds, but it didn’t just drop, and though I was ready to unleash another blast of force at it, we scooted by a couple of inches ahead of the nearest tentacle tip, and into the hallway, free and clear, even more easily than I’d planned.
So naturally, alarm bells started going off in my head.
There was a doorway across the hall, and I didn’t slow down. I lowered my shoulder and hit it with the weight of my entire body, and with the full power of the Winter Knight.
I don’t wanna say I’m strong when I’ve got my Winter Knight on—but I’ve lifted cars. Maybe it isn’t really comic-book-style superstrength, but I’m a big guy, I’m no lightweight, and that door splintered, its lock tearing free of its wooden frame as if it had already half rotted out. I went through it, my shoulder sending up a hot pulse of discomfort, dragging Valmont with me.
The second octokong had been waiting on the inside of the hallway, already plunging down at us, and if we’d paused for even a fraction of a second, it would have nabbed us both. Instead, I crashed into a rack of brooms and mops at the back of a large cleaning closet, snapping several handles and putting a huge dent in the drywall. I sort of bounced off of it, my eyes still blurry with spots, stunned.
“Dresden!” Valmont cried.
I spun to see her lurch and grab onto a heavy metal shelf of cleaning products. I’d lost hold of her at some point. No sooner had she grabbed on than one of her legs was jerked out from beneath her, and her hands were wrenched free of the shelf.
I snapped my arms out and caught her before she could be hauled out of the closet, becoming cognizant of a purple-grey tentacle wrapped around her ankle as I did. I went to the floor, lashing out with all the power of my legs, and sent the door swinging closed with vicious force, neatly severing the tip of the octokong’s tentacle.
There was a furious bellow from outside the door.
“Get behind me, get behind me!” I shouted at Valmont, keeping the door pressed shut with my legs. She scrambled over me in the darkness inside the closet, her limbs lean and solid beneath her disguise. A second later, there was a click, and light from a tiny flashlight flooded the room as she used it to start scanning the shelves.
I expected the octokong to come shoving against the door, but instead there were several smaller impacts, and then suddenly the door let out a shriek as it was simply torn into pieces and ripped away from me. I caught a flash of multiple tentacles holding various shattered pieces of the door, and then the octokong was coming through the doorway, low, propelled by still more tentacles and its apelike arms.
I let out a scream and kicked it in the chest with both feet, tagging it hard enough to draw a coughing roar of surprise from it and send its heavy torso tumbling back into the hallway—but its tentacles caught the doorframe with clearly supernatural power, arresting its momentum and beginning to send it hurtling back into me.
I lifted my hand and screamed, “Forzare!” A second wave of kinetic energy lashed through the air and caught the octokong, pressing outward, and for half a dozen seconds the strength of my will contended with all of those tentacles and arms.
The shield in the hallway had taken too much out of me. I could feel my will beginning to buckle, the spell begin to falter. The octokong pressed closer and closer to where I lay prostrate, my arm extended. Little stars gathered at the edges of my vision.
And then there was a shriek, a high-pitched howling sound that was absolutely industrial in its tone and intensity. There was a flash of light, blue-white and so bright that it made Valmont’s stun grenade look like a camera’s flashbulb by comparison, and the air itself was rent with a miniature thunderclap as a sphere of fire the size of my two fists appeared in the same space as the octokong’s skull.
It was there for a fraction of a second, pop, like a short-lived soap bubble.
And when it was gone . . . all that was left was blackened bone and a cloud of fine, fine black powder.
The octokong convulsed, all ten limbs writhing, but it didn’t last long. The headless corpse thrashed around for a moment, and the blackened remnants of the skull went rolling off of it, cracking and crumbling as it did.
Hannah Ascher appeared over the body, her party shoes held in one hand, her dark eyes blazing. “Dresden? You okay?”
I just stared at her for a second.
Hell’s bells.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m a Wizard of the White Council. But what I’d just witnessed was a display of precision and power so awesome that I would barely have believed it from a senior Council member, much less a freaking warlock younger than me. Fire’s a tricky, tricky magic to use. Call up enough power to do damage, and you have to fight to control it. The hotter you make it, the more it spreads out, consumes, destroys. This fire spell had been positively surgical.
I mean, I’m good with fire.
But Hannah Ascher was good with fire.
Ye gods, no wonder the Wardens hadn’t brought her in yet.
“Thanks,” I said, climbing to my feet. And then I reached out and shoved her away as the first octokong came swarming through the doorway behind her and pounced, tentacles flailing.
I had time to get my arms up and then the weight of the thing drove me flat to the floor. I tried to fight it, but there was nothing to fight—I was pinned beneath a fleshy web of tentacles that ripped and tore and bit at me through my clothes. I barely managed to wrench my head free of the slimy, stinking thing and get a breath, and because I did I was in time to see Anna Valmont step out of the cleaning closet and hurl a cup of some kind of powdered concentrate into the octokong’s eyes.
The thing shrieked in agony, pure agony, and half of its tentacles lifted off of me instantly in a vain attempt to protect its face and head. The beast writhed in torment, and I managed to get a leg into place to shove it off me. I pushed myself to my feet.
“Go!” I shouted at Ascher and Valmont. “Go, go, go!”
They didn’t need any more encouragement. We fled down the hallway, leaving the screaming octokong behind us, and all but flew down the stairs.
“There,” I snapped at Ascher on the way down. “We got her out and she’s helping. You happy?”
“Yeah, Dresden,” she said, her tone cross. “I’m happy. I’m thrilled. I’m freaking joyous. Now shut up and run.”
And I fled the hotel, blood oozing out to stain my shredded tux.
I didn’t mind so much.
I’d like to see Nicodemus try to get his deposit back on that.
Eleven
On the way down the stairs, Anna Valmont ditched her tunic and pants, and proved to be wearing a little party dress beneath. Once she’d kicked off her shoes and socks, she blended in with every other society girl fleeing the building. A small bag belted around her waist and concealed beneath the tunic became a clutch. She pulled her hair off, ditched the wig, and shook out shoulder-length dark blond hair from beneath it, fashionably tousled. She put on sunglasses, and appropriated Hannah Ascher’s heels. She hurried a little, caught up to the last group to head out in front of us, and blended in with them seamlessly. By the time we’d reached the ground floor, the shapeless, shorter, brunette hotel staffer had vanished, and a tall and lean blond woman in a black dress was tottering out of the building along with all the rest of them.
Valmont was no dummy. The Fomor servitors were waiting outside, in their caterer uniforms, scanning everyone leaving the building with their flat, somehow amphibian gazes.
“I’ll run interference. You get her to
the car,” I muttered to Ascher as we exited the building.
Then I pointed a finger at the nearest servitor and thundered, “You!”
The man turned his eyes to me. I felt the rest of them do the same. Good. The more of them that were looking at me, the fewer eyes there were to notice Valmont making good her escape. I stalked over to the servitor like a man spoiling for a fight. “What do you people think you’re doing? I mean, I’ve heard of getting your sushi fresh, but that’s just plain ridiculous.”
Fomor servitors were not known for their bantering skills. The man just stared at me and took an uneasy half step back.
“I’ve got half a mind to sue!” I shouted, waving an arm in a broad, drunken gesture. “Do you see the state of my tux? You’ve taken something from me tonight. My wardrobe’s peace of mind!”
By now, I was getting the attention of all kinds of people—evacuated guests, hotel staff, passersby on the sidewalk. There are a limited number of blood-covered economy-sized males ranting at the top of their lungs in a shredded tuxedo, even in Chicago. Sirens were wailing too, coming closer. Emergency services were en route. Motorcycle cops and prowl cars were already beginning to arrive, lickety-split here in the heart of the city.
I saw the servitor take note of the same thing. His weight shifted uneasily from foot to foot.
“Yeah,” I said in a lower, quieter voice. “I don’t know which of the Fomor you serve. But tell your boss that Harry Dresden is back, and he says to stay the hell out of Chicago. Otherwise, I’m going to knock his teeth out.” I paused. “Assuming, uh, he has teeth, I mean. But I’ll knock something out. Definitely. You tell him that.”