“What is it?” slurred one of them. His voice was ragged but not the horrible parody Drulinda’s was.

Her hand blurred, too fast to see. The newborn vampire reacted with inhuman speed, but not nearly enough of it, and the blow threw him from his feet to land on the floor, shattered teeth scattering out from him like coins from a dropped purse. “You can talk,” Drulinda rasped, “when I say you can talk. Speak again and I will rip you apart and throw you into Lake Michigan. You can spend eternity down there with no arms, no legs, no light, and no blood.”

The vampire, his nose smashed into shapelessness, rose as if he’d just slipped and fallen on his ass. He nodded, his body language twitchy and cringing.

Drulinda’s leathery lips peeled back from yellow teeth stained with drying, brownish blood. Then she turned and darted ahead, her footsteps making that light, swift patter on the tiles of the floor. She was gone and around the corner, heading for the bistro, in maybe two or three seconds. The two newbie vampires went after her, if far more slowly.

“Crap,” I whispered as they vanished. “Dammit, dammit, dammit.”

“What was that, Harry?” Molly whispered.

“Black Court vampires,” I replied, trying not to inhale too deeply. The stench was fading, but it wasn’t gone. “Some of the fastest, strongest, meanest things out there.”

“Vampires?” Sarah hissed, incredulous. She didn’t look so good. Her face was turning green. “No, this is, no, no, no—” She broke off and was violently sick. I avoided joining in by the narrowest of margins. Molly had an easier time of it than me, focused as she was on maintaining the veil over us, but I saw her swallow very carefully.

“Okay, Molly,” I said quietly. “Listen to me.”

She nodded, turning abstracted eyes to me.

“Black Court vampires,” I told her. “The ones Stoker’s book outed. All their weaknesses—sunlight, garlic, holy water, symbols of faith. Remember?”

She nodded. “Yes.”

“Most of the strengths, too. Strong, fast. Don’t look them in the eyes.” I swallowed. “Don’t let them take you alive.”

My apprentice’s eyes flickered with both apprehension and a sudden, fierce fire. “I understand. What do you want me to do?”

“Keep the veil up. Take Sarah here. Find a shady spot and lay low. This should be over in half an hour, maybe less. By then, there’s going to be a ruckus getting people’s attention, one way or another.”

“But I can—”

“Get me killed trying to cover you,” I said firmly. “You aren’t in this league, grasshopper. Not yet. I have to move fast. And I have friends here. I won’t be alone.”

Molly stared at me for a moment, her eyes shining with brief, frustrated tears. Then she nodded once and said, “Isn’t there anything I can do?”

I peered at her, then down at her Birkenstocks. “Yeah. Give me your shoes.”

Molly hadn’t been my apprentice in the bizarre for a year and a half for nothing. She didn’t even blink, much less ask questions. She just took off her shoes and handed them to me.

I put a gentle hand on her shoulder, then touched Sarah’s face until she lifted her eyes to me. “I don’t understand what’s happening,” she whispered.

“Stay with Molly,” I told Sarah. “She’s going to take care of you. Do whatever she says. All right?” I frowned down at her expensive black heels. “Gucci?”

“Prada,” she said in a numb voice.

Being all manly, I know dick about shoes, but hopefully it wouldn’t blow my cover as Thomas’s mystery man. “Give them to me.”

“All right,” she said, and did, too shocked to argue.

Thomas had been right about the larpers. The corpse of Sarah’s innocence lay on the floor along with her last meal, and she was taking it pretty hard.

I fought down a surge of anger and rose without another word, padding out from the protection of Molly’s veil, shoes gripped in one hand, my gun in the other. The .44 might as well have been Linus’s security blanket. It wouldn’t do a thing to help me against a vampire of the Black Court—it just made me feel better.

I went as fast as I could without making an enormous racket and stalked up the nearest stairs—a deactivated escalator. Once I’d reached the second level, I took a right and hurried toward Shoegasm.

It was a fairly spacious shop that had originally occupied only a tiny spot, but after ironing out some early troubles, the prosperous little store had expanded into the space beside it. Now, behind a steel mesh security curtain, the store was arranged in an oh-so-trendy fashion and sported several huge signs that went on with a thematically appropriate orgasmic enthusiasm about the store’s quality money-back guarantee.

“I am totally underappreciated,” I muttered. Then I raised my voice a little, forcing a very slight effort of will, of magic, into the words as I spoke. “Keef! Hey, Keef! It’s Harry Dresden!”

I waited for a long moment, peering through the grating, but I couldn’t see anything in the dim shadows of the store. I took a chance, slipping the silver pentacle amulet from its chain around my neck, and with a murmur willed a whisper of magic through the piece of jewelry. A soft blue radiance began to emanate from the silver, though I tried to keep the light it let out to a minimum. If Drulinda or her vampire buddies were looking even vaguely in my direction, I was going to stand out like a freaking moron holding the only light in an entire darkened shopping mall.

“Keef!” I called again.

The cobb appeared from an expensive handbag hung over the arm of a dressing dummy wearing a pair of six-hundred-dollar Italian boots. He was a tiny thing, maybe ten inches tall, with a big puff of fine white hair like Albert Einstein. He was dressed in something vaguely approximating nineteenth-century urban European wear—dark trousers, boots, a white shirt, and suspenders. He also wore a leather work belt thick with tiny tools and had a pair of odd-looking goggles pushed up over his forehead.

Keef hopped down from the dressing dummy and hurried across the floor to the security grate. He put on a pair of gloves, pulled out a couple of straps from his work belt, and climbed up the metal grate using a pair of carabiners, nearly as nimble as a squirrel, being very careful not to touch the metal with his bare skin. Keef was a faerie, one of the little folk who dwelled within the shadows and hidden places of our own world, and the touch of steel was painful to him.

“Wizard Dresden,” he greeted me in a Germanic accent as he came level with my head. The cobb’s voice was pitched low, even for someone as tiny as he. “The market this night danger roams. Here you should not be.”

“Don’t I know it,” I replied. “But there are people in danger.”

“Ah,” Keef said. “The mortals whom you insist to defend. Unwise that battle is.”

“I need your help,” I said.

Keef eyed me and gave me a firm shake of his head. “The walking dead very dangerous are. My people’s blood it could cost. That I will risk not.”

“You owe me, Keef,” I growled.

“Our living. Not our lives.”

“Have it your way,” I said. Then I lifted up one of Sarah’s shoes and, without looking away from the little cobb, snapped the heel off.

“Ach!” Keef cried in horror, his little feet slipping off the metal grate. “Nein!”

There was a chorus of similar gasps and cries from inside Shoegasm.

I held up the other shoe and did it again.

Keef wailed in protest. All of a sudden, thirty of the little cobbs, male and female, pressed up to the security mesh. All of them had the same frizzy white hair, all of them dressed like something from Oktoberfest, and all of them were horrified.

“Nein!” Keef wailed again. “Those are Italian leather! Handmade! What are you doing?”

I took a step to my left and held the broken shoes over a trash can.

The cobbler elves gasped, all together, and froze in place.