Jim Butcher - Changes

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.