Chapter 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.”