“Right,” she said, and swallowed. “So we’re . . . going to depend on me for the important part. Saving people.”
“You’ve been playing Batman for a while now, kid,” I said. “I think you’ve got this.”
“Mostly I was the only one in danger if I screwed up,” Molly said. “Are you sure this is the right plan?”
“If you think you can handle it,” I said. “Or if you don’t.”
“Oh.”
I put a hand on her shoulder. “We don’t have time to dance around on this one. So we go dirt simple. When it starts, if someone gets in your way, I want you to hit them with everything you’ve got, right in the face. Mouse will be with you as muscle.”
“Shouldn’t he be with you? I mean, if you’re going to fight . . .”
“I’m not going to fight,” I said. “No time to prepare, no plan, I’d lose a fight. I’m going to be a big noisy distraction.”
“But what if you get in trouble?”
“That’s my part. You do your part. Keep focused on your objective. Get in, get them, get out, signal. Then we all run away. Got it?”
She nodded tightly. “Got it.”
“Woof,” said Mouse.
* * *
“Huh,” I said a few moments later. We had triangulated with the tracking spell and narrowed down their location to one building, and we now lurked in an alley across the street. “I’ve actually been in there before.”
“You have?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Client had lost a kid or something to some half-assed wannabe warlock. He had the cheesy dialogue and everything, was gonna sacrifice the kid with this big cheap, spiky knife.”
“How did it turn out?”
“If I remember it right, I got beat up,” I said. “Didn’t make much money on it, either. The bad guy ran away, and the client walked out threatening a lawsuit. Except she left the kid. Turns out, she wasn’t even his mom, and his real parents tried to have me arrested. Never heard from her again. No clue what it was about. Chalk.”
Molly reached into her bag and came out with a stick of chalk, which she passed to me. I crouched and quickly sketched a diagram of the rectangular warehouse. “Here’s the front door. Office door. Back door. There’re some windows up high, but you’d have to be a bird to get there. The rear of the warehouse actually protrudes over the water, but there’s a wooden deck around the back. That’s where you’ll go in, at the back door. Watch for trip wires. Mouse can help with that. Trust him. We’re basically blind and deaf by comparison.”
“Right,” Molly said, nodding. “Okay.”
“Don’t get hung up on what could happen if it goes wrong,” I said. “Focus, concentrate, just like we do for a spell. Get in. Get them. Get out.”
“Let’s just do it,” she said, “before I throw up.”
“I’ll give you five minutes to get into position. Don’t go in until I get noisy.”
“Right,” Molly said. “Come on, Mouse.”
The big dog came up beside Molly, and she didn’t even have to bend to slip the fingers of one hand through his collar. “Stay this close to me, okay?” she said to Mouse.
He looked up at her and wagged his tail.
She gave him a shaky smile, nodded at me, then spoke a word and vanished.
I started counting to three hundred and briefly wondered why I kept running into repeat uses of various locations around town. This wasn’t the first time I’d dealt with the bad guys choosing to reuse a location different bad guys had used before them. Maybe there was a Villainous Time-share Association. Maybe my life was actually a basic-cable television show, and they couldn’t afford to spend money on new sets all the time.
Or—and this seemed more likely—maybe there was a reason for it. Maybe the particular vibe of certain spots just felt more like home to predators. Predators like to lair in a place with multiple ways in and out, isolated from casual entry, near supplies of whatever it was they like to eat. Supernatural predators would also have some level of awareness of the nature of the Nevernever that abutted any given part of our reality, even if it was only an instinct. It would make sense that they would be more at ease in places that joined parts of the Nevernever where they would be comfortable. I mean, everyone likes to eat somewhere that feels like home.
If I lived through the next day or so, I needed to start keeping track of where these jokers liked to get their bloodthirsty freak on. It might give me an edge someday. Or at least a list of places that could use a nice burning down. I hadn’t burned down a building in ages.
Two ninety-nine. Three hundred.
“Ready or not,” I muttered, “here I come.”
I strode out of the alley across from the warehouse, gathering my will into a shield around my left hand, and readied a lance of force in my right. Hell’s bells, I missed my equipment. Mab had forced me to learn how to do without, but that didn’t mean I could do it as well. I missed my shield bracelet. I missed my blasting rod. I missed my spell-armored coat. With that gear, this would be pretty simple. I could protect myself better from every direction and have a lot more range on my spells to make the bad guys keep their heads down. But it would take me weeks to build new ones, and I had to work with what I had—which was pretty much just me.
My shields would be as strong, but I couldn’t sustain them for as much time, or in every direction—so I couldn’t walk in with a nice comfortable bubble of force around me. Without the bracelet or a tool like it, I could protect myself only from the front, and only for a few seconds at a time. My offensive spells would hit just as hard, but they’d have a shorter range, and they would take a few more crucial fractions of a second to enact.
Man, I missed my toys.
The warehouse had a little fence covered in plastic sheeting and topped with barbed wire. There was a gated area in front of the main entryway, though the gate had been blasted off its hinges by some deranged ruffian who did not look like me, no matter what the witnesses said, and apparently no one had replaced it since.
Awful lot of open space out there. I’d be a really juicy target. Which was sort of the point: Make myself so attractively vulnerable that no one was watching the back door. It wasn’t the best idea in the world to walk out into that, but Halloween night was maybe an hour away, and there wasn’t time to be smart.
That said, there’s a difference between being reckless and being insane. I didn’t especially like the idea of stumbling over a trip line tied to, let’s say, an antipersonnel mine, so before I went in, I flung my right arm forward in a large sweeping underhand motion, as if I were trying to throw a bowling ball at the pins two lanes over from where I was standing. I muttered, “Forzare!” as I threw the spell, focusing on shaping the force I’d released into what I needed.
Energy rippled across the ground in a shock wave that threw up dust and bits of gravel and irregular chunks of broken asphalt. It rippled across the ground to the warehouse and landed against its front doorway with a giant, hollow boom.
“Say, ‘Who’s there!’” I shouted at the warehouse, already walking forward rapidly, while the dust still hung in the air—it would make it more possible, if not likely, to spot any of the Redcap’s Sidhe buddies who might be hiding under a veil inside it. “I dare you! I double-dog dare you!”
I hurled another blast of force at the big loading doors in the front of the warehouse, something meant to make a lot of noise, not to tear them down. It succeeded. A second enormous concussion made the building’s steel girders and metal walls ring like some vast, dark bell.
“The furious wizard, that’s who!” I shouted. “You’ve got ten seconds to free my friends, unharmed, or I’m going to fucking smite every last mother’s son of you!”
I had maybe half a second’s warning, and then a streaking black form dived down from above me and raked at my eyes with its talons. I snapped my head back out of the way, only to see a hawk beating back up out of the nadir of its dive. It rolled in the air, and as it did it shimmered, and in an instant the hawk was gone and one of the Sidhe was there in its place, arcing through the air in free fall, holding a bow and an arrow in his hands. He drew and shot in the same instant he shifted, and I barely caught the arrow on my shield. Before he could begin to fall, he completed the roll and shifted again, back into hawk form, then beat his wings and continued rising into the sky.