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 17

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.”