Hell’s bells. That looked awesome. It took a serious mastery of shape-shifting to bring equipment and clothes and things with you when you changed form, but that guy had made it look as easy as breathing.
I mean, say what you will about the faeries, but they’ve got style. Not so much style that I didn’t hurl another bolt of force after the flying archer, but I missed him and he winged away with a mocking shriek.
Then I felt a small, sharp pain in my left leg.
I looked down to see a little wooden dart sticking out of the back of my calf. It was carved, perfectly smooth and round, and fletched with a few tiny slivers of scarlet feather. I snapped my gaze around behind me, and caught a single glimpse of the Redcap poised in a crouch atop the fence surrounding the warehouse, balancing his weight with apparent effortless ease along a strand of barbed wire that had to have been a sixteenth of an inch wide.
His mouth was spread in a wide, manic grin. He held a short silvery tube in one hand, and as my eyes found his face, he touched two fingertips of his other hand to his lips, blew me a kiss, and plummeted back off of the fence and out of sight.
I whirled toward him and brought up my shield, then spun around and angled it that way, then jittered about, rubbernecking everywhere at once. But that was it. Assuming the Sidhe weren’t simply undetectable to my senses, they were gone.
A slow burning sensation began to spread from the wound in my leg.
A cold shiver oozed down my spine. I tugged the dart out of my calf. It hadn’t done much—the slender spear of wood had penetrated maybe a quarter inch into my skin—but when I rolled up my pant leg to look, I found an inordinately large trickle of blood coming from the tiny wound.
And that burning sensation became an almost infinitesimally greater presence with each heartbeat.
This hadn’t been a hostage crisis at all.
It had been an assassination. Or . . . or something.
“Goddammit!” I snarled. “I just got played again! I am so sick and tired of this backstabby bullshit!”
I more or less stormed into the warehouse, shoving open the office door and stalking out onto the main floor. The place was just as empty as I remembered, give or take the leavings of several apparent transients between the present and the past. Molly was at the very rear of the warehouse, near the door. She was helping Justine to sit up. Mac was there, too, and he and Butters were between them helping a wobbly-looking Andi to remain on her feet. Mouse was standing guard between the group and the front of the warehouse, and he started wagging his tail when he saw me.
“Clear,” I called out to them, hurrying over. “Or at least clearish. What happened?”
“They were under a sleeping enchantment,” Molly reported. “Pretty standard stuff. I woke them up.”
“Everyone okay?”
“Andi got hit on the head when they took her,” she said. “Other than that, I think we’re good.”
When she spoke, Molly’s voice never quavered, but her eyes flickered uncertainly toward Mac. I took a closer look at everyone. Andi, Butters, and Justine had all been bound. Justine was only now getting the ropes cut off of her wrists, and as Molly sawed them away with a pocketknife, I could see the deep red marks they’d left on Justine’s slender wrists. Butters and Andi had them, too, visible even in the dimness of the warehouse.
Mac didn’t.
That was interesting. Why hadn’t Mac been tied up? Or if he had, how come there wasn’t a mark to show for it? Either way, that was odd.
My first instinct was to grab him and demand answers—but the direct approach hadn’t gotten me anything but more confused as I went through this stupid day. I might have been a better thug than at any point in my life, but that wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t figure out where to apply my muscle. And I was damned tired of being sneaked up on. So it was time to get sneaky.
I ground my teeth and pretended that Molly hadn’t clued me into anything. “All right, people,” I said. “Let’s move. I think they’re gone but they could be back.”
“That’s it?” Molly asked. “I was expecting more trouble than th—” She broke off, staring at the floor behind me.
My leg throbbed and burned a little more, and I glanced down at it in irritation. To my shock, I saw a long line of small smears of my blood on the tile floor. The little wound had continued bleeding, soaked through my sock and my shoe, and dribbled down onto my heel.
“What happened?” Molly asked.
“It was another stupid trick,” I said. “The point wasn’t to hold them for ransom. It was to get me here, under pressure, and too keyed up to defend myself from every direction.” I held up the dart. “We’d better find out what this thing is and what kind of poison is on it.”
“Oh, my God,” Molly breathed.
“I’ll take whatever help I can get,” I said. “Let’s g—”
But before I could finish the sentence, there was a loud crunching whoomp of a sound, and the entire warehouse shook. I barely had time to think demolition charges before there was a deafening crack, and the floor tilted.
And then the back twenty feet of the warehouse, including all of us, fell right off of the street and into the cold, dark water of Lake Michigan.
Chapter
Thirty-eight
We didn’t drop straight down. Instead, there was a scream of shearing bolts, and our part of the building lurched drunkenly and then plunged into the water at an oblique angle.
The confusion of it was the worst part. The loud noise, the disorientation inherent in the uneven motion, and then the short surge of terror as gravity took over all served to create a panic reaction in my head—and I’m not a guy who panics easily.
That’s what most people don’t understand about situations like this one. People are just built to freak out when something goes wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re a kindergarten teacher or a Special Forces operator—when life-threatening stuff happens, you get scared. You freak out. That’s just what happens. When it’s because you’ve woken up to a hungry bear in your camp, that’s usually a pretty good mechanism.
But being dropped into black water in an enclosed area is not a place where panicked adrenaline is going to help you out. That’s when you have to somehow set that fear aside and force yourself to use your rational mind to guide you out of the situation. There are two ways to get yourself into that terrified-but-rational state of mind. First is training, where you drill a reaction into yourself so hard and so many times that it becomes a form of reflex you can perform without even thinking. And the other way you get there is to have enough experience to have learned what you need to do.
So the first thing I did as the cold water swallowed me was to close my eyes for a second and focus, just as I would if I were preparing a spell, relaxing my limbs and letting them float loosely in the water. I gathered my thoughts and laid out my options.
First, I had time, but not much of it. I had gotten a good breath before I went under. The others might or might not have done the same. So I had about two minutes to act before people started trying to breathe Lake Michigan. Two minutes doesn’t sound like long, but it was enough time to spend a few seconds thinking.
Second, we were surrounded by steel siding. I wasn’t getting through that with anything short of a full-power blast, and that wasn’t going to happen while I was surrounded by water. Water tends to disperse and ground out magical energies just by being nearby. When water is all around you, it’s all but impossible to direct any energy out of your body without it spreading out and diluting to uselessness.