Changes (27 page)

I folded my arms, scowling. Tilly did the same. But we both shut up.

“Thank you,” Murphy said. “Till . . . Do you remember that tape that was on the news a few years back? After the deaths at Special Investigations?”

“The werewolf thing?” Tilly asked. “Yeah. Blurry, badly lit, out of focus, and terrible effects. The creature didn’t look anything like a werewolf. Only suddenly the tape mysteriously vanishes, so it can’t be verified by anyone. Secondhand versions are probably on the Internet somewhere.” He mused and said, “The actress they had playing you was pretty good, though.”

“That wasn’t an actress, Till,” Murphy said quietly. “I was there. I saw it happen. The tape was genuine. You have my word.”

Tilly frowned again. He ducked his head down slightly, dark eyes focused on his thoughts, as if he were reading from a report only he could see.

“Look, man,” I said quietly. “Think about it like this. What if you’d never heard me say the word
vampire
? What if I’d said
drug cartel
or
terrorists
instead? And I told you that this group of terrorists was financed by shady corporations and that one of them had blown the office building to prevent their illegal data from being stolen and exposed to the world? What if I had told you that because I’d pissed them off, a bunch of terrorists had taken my daughter? That they were going to cut her head off and put the video on the Internet? That Susan and the mystery man were spooks from an organization I was not at liberty to divulge, trying to help me find and recover the girl? Would it still sound crazy?”

Tilly cocked his head for a second. Then he said in a subdued voice, “It would sound like the plot of a cheesy novel.” He shrugged. “But . . . the logic would hold up. I mean . . . they don’t call those assholes ‘extremists’ for nothing.”

“Okay,” I said gently. “Then . . . maybe we can just pretend I said it was terrorists. And go from there. It’s my daughter, man.”

Tilly looked back and forth from me to Murphy. He said quietly, “Either you’re both crazy—or I am—or you’re telling me the truth.” He shook his head. “And . . . I’m not sure which of the possibilities disturbs me more.”

“You got a piece of paper?” I asked him.

Bemused, he opened his drawer and got out a pad.

I grabbed a pen and wrote on it:

I tore off the page, folded the note, and said, “I guess Susan hasn’t said much to you.”

Tilly grunted. “Nothing, in fact. Literally nothing. Which is fairly hard-core, in my experience.”

“She can be stubborn,” I said. “Go give her this. You know I haven’t seen her in hours. Get her story, off the record. See how well it matches up.”

He took the note and looked at it. Then back at me.

“Hard to know who to trust,” I said. “Talk to her. Try to take the story apart. See if it stands up.”

He thought about it for a moment and said, “Keep him here, Murphy.”

“Okay.”

Tilly left.

There were two chairs, and neither looked comfortable. I settled down on the floor and closed my eyes.

“How bad is it?” she asked me.

“Pretty bad,” I said quietly. “Um. I need to ask you a favor.”

“Sure.”

“If . . . Look. I have a will in a lockbox at the National Bank on Michigan. If something should happen to me . . . I’d appreciate it if you’d see to it. You’re on the list of people who can open it. Listed as executor.”

“Harry,” she said.

“Granted, there’s not much to have a will
about
at the moment,” I said. “Everything was in my house or office, but . . . there are some intangibles and . . .” I felt my throat tighten, and cut short my request. “Take care of it for me?”

There was silence, and then Murphy moved and settled down next to me. Her hand squeezed mine. I squeezed back.

“Sure,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“There’s . . . there’s nothing in there about Maggie, obviously,” I said. “But if I can’t be there to . . . I want her in a good home. Somewhere safe.”

“Hey, emo boy,” she said. “Time to take a gloom break. Right? You aren’t dead yet, as far as I can tell.”

I snorted quietly and opened my eyes, looking up at her.

“You’ll take care of her yourself when this is done.”

I shook my head slowly. “I . . . can’t, Murph. Susan was right. All I can offer her is a life under siege. My enemies would use her. She’s got to vanish. Go somewhere safe. Really safe. Not even I can know where she is.” I swallowed on a choking sensation in my throat. “Father Forthill at St. Mary’s can help. Mouse should go with her. He’ll help protect her.”

Murphy looked at me, troubled. “You aren’t telling me something.”

“It isn’t important for now,” I said. “If you could find Mister . . . Molly might like to have him around. Just so long as he’s taken care of.”

“Jesus, Harry,” Murphy said.

“I’m not planning a suicide run, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said. “But there’s a possibility that I won’t come back from this. If that happens, I need someone I can trust to know my wishes and carry them out. In case I can’t.”

“I’ll do it,” Murphy said, and let out a short laugh. “For crying out loud, I’ll do it, just so we can talk about something else.”

I smiled, too, and Rudolph entered Tilly’s office and found us both on the floor, grinning.

Everyone froze. No one looked certain of how to react.

“Well,” Rudolph said quietly. “I always figured this for what it was. But, boy, did you have everyone at your headquarters fooled, Murphy.”

“Hi, Rudy,” I said. “You’ve got a beautiful home.”

Rudolph gnashed his teeth and drew an envelope out of his pocket. He flicked it to the floor near Murphy. “For you. A cease-and-desist order, specifying that you aren’t allowed within two hundred yards of this case or anyone involved in the active investigation, until your competence and noncomplicity have been confirmed by a special tribunal of the Chicago Police Board. Also a written order from Lieutenant Stallings, specifying that you are to have nothing to do with the investigation into the explosion, and relieving you of duty forthwith if you do not comply.” His eyes shifted to me. “You. I haven’t forgotten you.”

“Shame,” I said. “I’d almost forgotten you, but you’ve ruined that. Walking into the room and all.”

“This isn’t over, Dresden.”

I sighed. “Yeah. I’ve been having that kind of week.”

Murphy opened the envelope and read over a pair of pages. Then she looked at Rudolph and said, “What did you tell them?”

“You have your orders, Sergeant,” Rudolph said coldly. “Leave the building before I relieve you of your weapon and your shield.”

“You mosquito-dicked weasel,” she said, her voice coldly furious.

“That remark is going into my report for the tribunal, Murphy,” Rudolph said. There was a vicious satisfaction in his voice. “And once they read the rest, you’re done. With your record? They aren’t paying you any more slack, bitch. You’re gone.”

Something dark and ugly stirred in my chest, and the sudden image of Rudolph pinned to the wall by a ton of crystalline ice popped into my brain.

“
Bitch?
” Murphy said, rising.

“Whoa,” I said, drawing out the word as I came to my own feet, and speaking as much to myself as to the furious woman. “Murph, don’t play his game here.”

“Game?” Rudolph said. “You’re a menace, Murphy, and a disgrace. You belong behind bars. Once you’re out, it’ll happen, too. You and this clown both.”

“
Clown?
” I said, in the exact same tone Murphy had used.

And the lights went out.

There was a sudden hush all around us, as FBI headquarters was plunged into powerless darkness. After several seconds, the emergency lights still hadn’t come on.

“Harry,” Murphy said, her tone annoyed.

I felt the hairs on the back of my neck crawling around. I lowered my voice and said, “That wasn’t me.”

“Where are the emergency lights?” Rudolph said. “Th-they’re supposed to turn on within seconds. Right?”

“Heh,” I said into the darkness. “Heh, heh. Rudy, old buddy, do you remember the night we met?”

Tilly’s office was adjacent to the elevator. And I distinctly heard the hunting scream of a Red Court vampire echoing around the elevator shaft.

It was followed by a chorus of screams, more than a score of individual hunting cries.

Lots of vampires in an enclosed space. That was bad.

The heavy, throbbing beat of a hideous heart underlay the screams, audible four stories up and through the wall. I shuddered.

Lots of vampires
and
the Ick in an enclosed space. That was worse.

“What is that?” Rudolph asked in a squeaky whisper.

I willed light into my amulet, prepared my shield bracelet, and drew my blasting rod out of my coat. Beside me, Murphy had already drawn her SIG. She tested the little flashlight on it, found it functional, and looked up at me with the serene expression and steady breathing that told me that she was controlling her fear. “What’s the play?” she asked.

“Get Susan and get out,” I said. “If I’m not here and she’s not here, they’ve got no reason to attack.”

“What is it?” Rudolph asked again. “What is that noise? Huh?”

Murphy leaned her head a bit toward Rudolph, questioning me with a quirked eyebrow.

“Dammit.” I sighed. “You’re right. We’ll have to take him with us, too.”

“Tell me!” Rudolph said, near panic. “You have to tell me what that is!”

“Do we tell him?” I asked.

“Sure.”

Murphy and I turned toward the door, weapons raised, and spoke in offhanded stereo. “Terrorists.”

35

By the time Murphy and I had moved into the hall, gunfire had erupted on the floors below us. It didn’t sound like much—simple, staccato thumping sounds—but anyone who’d heard shots fired in earnest would never mistake them for anything else. I hoped that nobody was carrying rounds heavy enough to come up through the intervening floors and nail me. There just aren’t any minor injuries to be had from something like that.

“Those screams,” Murphy said. “Red Court, right?”

“Yeah. Where’s Susan?”

“Interrogation room, that way.” She nodded to the left, and I took the lead. I walked with my shoulder brushing the left- hand wall. Murph, after dragging the sputtering Rudolph out of the office, walked a step behind me and a pace to my right, so that she could shoot past me if she had to. We’d played this game before. If something bad came for us, I’d stand it off long enough to give her a clean shot.

That would be critical, buying her the extra second to place her shot. Vampires aren’t immune to the damage bullets cause, but they can recover from anything but the most lethal hits, and they know it. A Red Court vampire would almost always be willing to charge a mortal gunman, knowing how difficult it is to really place a shot with lethal effect, especially with a howling monster rushing toward you. You needed a hit square in the head, severing the spine, or in their gut, rupturing the blood reservoir, to really put a Red Court vampire down—and they could generally recover, even from those wounds, with enough time and blood to feed upon.

Murphy knew exactly what she was shooting at and had proved that she could be steady enough to deal with a Red—but the other personnel in the building lacked her knowledge and experience.

The FBI was in for a real bad day.

We moved down the hall, quick and silent, and when a frightened-looking clerical type stumbled out of a break room doorway toward us, I nearly sent a blast of flame through him. Murphy had her badge hanging around her neck, and she instructed him to get back inside and barricade the door. He was clearly terrified, and responded without question to the tone of calm authority in Murph’s voice.

“Maybe we should do that,” Rudolph said. “Get in a room. Barricade the door.”

“They’ve got a heavy with them,” I said to Murphy as I took the lead again. “Big, strong, fast. Like the loup-garou. It’s some kind of Mayan thing, an Ik-something-or-other.”

Murphy cursed. “How do we kill it?”

“Not sure. But daylight seems a pretty good bet.” We were passing down a hallway that had several offices with exterior windows. The light of the autumn afternoon, reduced by the occasional curtain, created a kind of murky twilight to move through, and one that my ambient blue wizard light did little to disperse.

Eerier than the lighting was the silence. No air ducts sighed. No elevators rattled. No phones rang. But twice I heard gunshots—the rapid
bang-bang-bang
of practically useless panic fire. Vampires shrieked out their hunting cries several different times. And the
thub-dub
of the Ick’s bizarre heartbeat was steady, omnipresent—and slowly growing louder.

“Maybe we need a lot of mirrors or something,” Murphy said. “Bring a bunch of daylight in.”

“Way harder to do than it looks in the movies,” I said. “I figure I’ll just blow open a hole in the side of the building.” I licked my lips. “Crud, uh. Which way is south? That’ll be the best side to do it on.”

“You’re threatening to destroy a federal building!” Rudolph squeaked.

Gunshots sounded somewhere close—maybe on the third floor, directly below us. Maybe on the other side of the fourth floor, muffled by a lot of cubicle walls.

“Oh, God,” Rudolph whimpered. “Oh, dear, sweet Jesus.” He just started repeating that in a mindlessly frightened whisper.

“Aha,” I said as we reached the interrogation room. “We have our Cowardly Lion. Cover me, Dorothy.”

“Remind me to ask what the hell you’re talking about later,” Murphy said.

I started to open the door, but paused. Tilly was armed, presumably smart enough to be scared, and it probably wasn’t the best idea in the world to just open the door of the room and scare him. So I moved as far as possible to one side, reached way over to the door, and knocked. In code, even.
Shave and a haircut.

There was a lengthy pause and then someone knocked on the other side of the door.
Two bits.

I twisted the knob and opened the door very, very slowly.

“Tilly?” I said in a hoarse whisper. “Susan?”

The interrogation room didn’t have any windows, and it was completely dark inside. Tilly appeared in the doorway, holding up a hand to shield his eyes. “Dresden?”

“Yeah, obviously,” I said. “Susan?”

“I’m here,” she said from the darkness, her voice shaking with fear. “I’m cuffed to the chair. Harry, we’ve got to go.”

“Working on it,” I said quietly.

“You don’t understand. That thing, that drumming sound. It’s a devourer. You don’t fight them. You run, and pray someone slower than you attracts its attention.”

“Yeah. Already met the Ick,” I said. “I’d rather not repeat the experience.” I held out a hand to Tilly. “I need cuff keys.”

Tilly hesitated, clearly torn between his sense of duty and order and the primal fear that had risen in the building. He shook his head, but it didn’t seem like his heart was in it.

“Tilly,” Murphy said. She turned to him, her expression ferociously determined, and said, “Trust me. Please just do it. People are going to die as long as these three are in the building.”

He passed me the keys.

I took them over to Susan, who was sitting in the same chair I had during my chat with the feds. She wore her dark leather pants and a black T-shirt and looked oddly vulnerable just sitting there during a situation like this. I went to her and started unfastening the cuffs.

“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I was getting a little worried there.”

“They must have come in through the basement somehow,” I said.

She nodded. “They’ll work their way up, floor by floor. Kill everyone they can. It’s how they operate. Remove the target and leave a message for everyone else.”

Tilly shook his head as if dazed. “That’s . . . What? That’s how some of the cartels operate in Colombia, Venezuela, but . . .”

Susan gave him an impatient look and shook her head. “What have I been
telling
you for the last fifteen minutes?”

A vampire let out a hunting scream, one not interdicted by floors.

“They’re here,” Susan whispered as she rubbed at her newly freed wrists. “We have to move.”

I stopped for a moment. Then I said quietly, “They’ll just keep on killing until they find the target, floor by floor,” I said.

Susan nodded tightly.

I bit my lip. “So, if we run . . . they’ll keep going. All the way up.”

Murphy turned her head to look at me, then jerked her eyes back out to the hallway, wary. “Fight?”

“We won’t win,” I said, certain. “Not here, on their timing. They’ve got all the advantages. But we can’t just abandon all those people, either.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “No, we can’t,” Murphy said. “So. What are we going to do?”

“Does anyone have an extra weapon?” Susan asked. No one said anything, and she nodded, turned to the heavy conference table, and flipped it over with one hand. She tore off a heavy steel leg as if it had been attached with a kindergartner’s glue rather than high-grade steel bolts.

Tilly stared, his mouth open. Then he said, very quietly, “Ah.”

Susan whirled the table leg once, testing its balance, and nodded. “It will do.”

I grunted. Then I said, “Here’s the plan. We’re going to show ourselves to the vampires and the Ick. We’re going to hit whoever they have out front with everything we have and squash them flat. That should make sure we have the attention of the entire strike team.”

“Yes,” Murphy said in a dry tone. “That’s brilliant.”

I made a face at her. “Once they’re good and interested, you, Tilly, and Rudolph are going to split off from the rest of us and hit the nearest emergency exit. If it comes down to it, you probably have better odds of surviving a jump out the window than you do staying in here. You with me?”

Murphy frowned. “What about you?”

“Susan, me, and your stunt doubles are going to jump over into the Nevernever and try to draw the bad guys after us.”

“Stunt doubles?” Murphy asked.

“We are?” Susan asked, alarmed.

“Sure. I need your mighty thews to protect me. You being superchick and all.”

“Okay,” Susan said, eyeing me as if she thought I was losing my mind—which, hey, I admit. Totally possible. “What’s on the other side?”

“No clue,” I said, and a touch to my mother’s gem told me that she hadn’t ever actually been in this building on her dimension-hopping jaunts. “We’ll hope it isn’t an ocean of acid or a patch of cloud five thousand feet above a big rock.”

Susan’s eyes widened slightly. And then she shot me a wolfish smile. “I love this plan.”

“Thought you would,” I said. “Meanwhile, you three get out. Does this place have an exterior fire escape?”

Rudolph just rocked back and forth, making soft moaning noises. Tilly still looked stunned at what he had just seen from Susan.

Murphy cuffed him lightly on the back of the head. “Hey. Barry.”

Tilly shook his head and looked at her. “Fire escape. No.”

“Find a stairwell, then,” I told Murphy. “Go quiet and fast, in case some of them were too stupid to follow me.”

Murphy nodded and gave Tilly’s shoulder a little shake. “Hey. Tilly. You’re in charge of Rudolph. All right? Keep him moving and out of any lines of fire.”

The slender little man nodded, slowly at first, and then more rapidly as he seemed to take control of himself. “Okay. I’m his nanny. Got it.”

Murphy gave him part of a grin and a firm nod.

“Right,” I said. “Is this a great plan or what? I’m point; Murph, you’ve got my six; Susan, you ride drag.”

“Got it,” Susan said.

The faint, constant drumbeat of the Ick’s throbbing heart got fractionally louder.

“Go,” I said, and hit the hallways again. At my request, Tilly steered us toward the central staircase running parallel to the elevator shafts, because I figured it would make sense for most of the strike team to use the central stairwell, while the others were covered by maybe a single guard.

We ran into another handful of people who were hovering, uncertain of what to do, and who looked at me in a manner that suggested they would find my advice less than credible.

“Tilly,” I said, half pleading.

Tilly nodded and started speaking in a calm, authoritative tone. “There’s some kind of attack under way. Tammy, you and Joe and Mickey need to get to one of the offices with a window. You got that? A window. Take the curtains down, let the light in, barricade the door, and sit tight.” He looked at me and said, “Help’s on the way.”

I swapped a look with Murphy, who nodded confidently at me. Tilly had gotten the supernatural shoved in his face pretty hard, but he’d rebounded with tremendous agility. Or maybe he’d simply cracked. I guessed we’d see eventually.

The federal personnel scurried to obey Tilly, running down the hall we’d just come from.

If we’d been about ten seconds slower, the vampire would have found them first instead of us.

I heard a scream, shrill and terrible, meant to send a jolt of terrorized surprise through the prey so that the vampire could close upon it. It really said something about the Red Court, that simple tactic. Animals would never have been startled into immobility that way. It takes a thinking mind, trying to reason its way to what was happening, to fall for a psychological ploy like that one.

And it probably said something about me that it completely failed to startle me. Or maybe it wasn’t that big a deal. As the Scarecrow, I felt that I had amply proven that I didn’t
have
much of a brain with which to be messed.

So instead of finding a helpless target waiting for him, the Red Court vampire found a field of adamant, invisible power as I brought my shield up. And while it might have supernatural strength, that didn’t increase its mass. It bounced off my shield like any other body would if abruptly meeting someone’s front bumper at fifty or sixty miles an hour.

There was a flash of blue light, and I released the shield with a little English on it, tossing the vampire to sprawl on the ground on the righthand side of the hallway, squarely in Murphy’s line of fire, and started moving forward again.

Murphy calmly put two bullets into the vampire’s head, which made an unholy mess of the wall behind it. She put two more into its blood-gorged belly on the way by, and as Susan passed, I heard an ugly, moist sound of impact.

Tilly stood there staring for a second, frozen. Then Susan nudged him into motion again. The agent grabbed Rudolph and dragged him after Murphy and me.

We found the first human body several steps later, a glassy-eyed young woman covered in her own blood. Beyond her, a man in a suit lay sprawled on his face in death, and the corpses of two more women lay within a few feet of him.

There was the most furtive of sounds from a darkened supply closet near an intersection of hallways, its doorway gaping wide open. I didn’t let on that I’d heard it.

“You know what?” I said quietly to no one in particular. “That makes me mad.”

I turned with my blasting rod’s runes blazing into sudden life and roared, “
Fuego!
”

A spear of white-hot fire erupted from the rod, blowing through the interior wall in a concussive chorus of shattering materials. I slewed it along the length of the closet at waist height, cutting through the wall like an enormous buzz saw.

A surprised scream of inhuman agony greeted my efforts, and I spun in place at once, bringing up the shield again. A second vampire bounded around the intersection ahead, running on all fours along the wall, and threw itself at me. At the same time, another of the rubbery black creatures exploded out of an air vent I would have sworn was too tiny to contain it, coming down from almost straight overhead.