Valmont shouted something at me. I was concentrating so hard, I barely heard her the first time. “Close your eyes!” she screamed. Then she tensed and moved and something flew over the faintly glowing top edge of my shield and clattered to the ground at the turtlenecks’ feet.
The two shooters reacted instantly, diving away, and a second later there was a flash of utterly blinding white light and something slapped the air of the hallway like a giant’s palm.
I hadn’t gotten my eyes closed in time, and my vision was covered in red and purple spots, my ears ringing in a steady, high-pitched tone, but the shield had protected me from the force of the small explosion, and my head was clear enough that I could stagger to my feet and get out of the deadly hallway, Valmont pulling me along in her wake.
“Jesus Christ,” she swore in a vicious tone as we ran. “It was just some goddamned files. Other stairway!”
Going back into the darkened ballroom after the stroboscopic hallway had left my eyes helplessly trying to adjust. “I can’t see yet,” I said, and felt her take my hand. “Okay, go!”
Valmont started running, and I lurched blindly along with her, holding her hand like an NBA-sized toddler and trying not to fall down. We crossed what had to have been most of the ballroom before Valmont suddenly stopped. My rented shoes were not exactly hell on wheels for traction, and I all but fell over her before I could stop, too.
“What?” I asked.
“Quiet,” she hissed. “One of those things at the door.”
“You have any more flash-bangs?” I said, lower.
“Most girls don’t even carry the one, you know,” she said rather primly. “I can’t tell you how many jobs I’ve done without a hitch since the last time I saw you, Dresden. You walk through the door and everything goes to hell.”
“That’s embroidered on my towels, actually,” I said. I blinked my eyes hard, several times, and could barely make out the shape of one of the octokongs waiting at the door. Well, technically, it was waiting over the door, its tentacles spread out along the ceiling, sticking to it like some enormous spider, apelike arms hanging down. Valmont had stopped us behind a column, deep in the shadows created by the emergency lights in the hallway beyond the octokong. “Wow, those things are ugly.” I blinked some more. “Okay, stay close.”
“Can you see?”
“Yeah, almost. We’ll make a run for it. If it comes at us, I’ll knock it away and we meep-meep right the hell out of here.”
“Meep-meep.” Valmont’s voice was dry. “It’s so nice to work with a mature professional.”
“Fine. We extract, exfiltrate, whatever,” I said. I changed hands, shifting hers to my left, making sure my right was free. “Here we go.”
And we ran for the door.
The octokong started slorping down the wall, all tentacles and slime and harsh, ugly grunting sounds, but it didn’t just drop, and though I was ready to unleash another blast of force at it, we scooted by a couple of inches ahead of the nearest tentacle tip, and into the hallway, free and clear, even more easily than I’d planned.
So naturally, alarm bells started going off in my head.
There was a doorway across the hall, and I didn’t slow down. I lowered my shoulder and hit it with the weight of my entire body, and with the full power of the Winter Knight.
I don’t wanna say I’m strong when I’ve got my Winter Knight on—but I’ve lifted cars. Maybe it isn’t really comic-book-style superstrength, but I’m a big guy, I’m no lightweight, and that door splintered, its lock tearing free of its wooden frame as if it had already half rotted out. I went through it, my shoulder sending up a hot pulse of discomfort, dragging Valmont with me.
The second octokong had been waiting on the inside of the hallway, already plunging down at us, and if we’d paused for even a fraction of a second, it would have nabbed us both. Instead, I crashed into a rack of brooms and mops at the back of a large cleaning closet, snapping several handles and putting a huge dent in the drywall. I sort of bounced off of it, my eyes still blurry with spots, stunned.
“Dresden!” Valmont cried.
I spun to see her lurch and grab onto a heavy metal shelf of cleaning products. I’d lost hold of her at some point. No sooner had she grabbed on than one of her legs was jerked out from beneath her, and her hands were wrenched free of the shelf.
I snapped my arms out and caught her before she could be hauled out of the closet, becoming cognizant of a purple-grey tentacle wrapped around her ankle as I did. I went to the floor, lashing out with all the power of my legs, and sent the door swinging closed with vicious force, neatly severing the tip of the octokong’s tentacle.
There was a furious bellow from outside the door.
“Get behind me, get behind me!” I shouted at Valmont, keeping the door pressed shut with my legs. She scrambled over me in the darkness inside the closet, her limbs lean and solid beneath her disguise. A second later, there was a click, and light from a tiny flashlight flooded the room as she used it to start scanning the shelves.
I expected the octokong to come shoving against the door, but instead there were several smaller impacts, and then suddenly the door let out a shriek as it was simply torn into pieces and ripped away from me. I caught a flash of multiple tentacles holding various shattered pieces of the door, and then the octokong was coming through the doorway, low, propelled by still more tentacles and its apelike arms.
I let out a scream and kicked it in the chest with both feet, tagging it hard enough to draw a coughing roar of surprise from it and send its heavy torso tumbling back into the hallway—but its tentacles caught the doorframe with clearly supernatural power, arresting its momentum and beginning to send it hurtling back into me.
I lifted my hand and screamed, “Forzare!” A second wave of kinetic energy lashed through the air and caught the octokong, pressing outward, and for half a dozen seconds the strength of my will contended with all of those tentacles and arms.
The shield in the hallway had taken too much out of me. I could feel my will beginning to buckle, the spell begin to falter. The octokong pressed closer and closer to where I lay prostrate, my arm extended. Little stars gathered at the edges of my vision.
And then there was a shriek, a high-pitched howling sound that was absolutely industrial in its tone and intensity. There was a flash of light, blue-white and so bright that it made Valmont’s stun grenade look like a camera’s flashbulb by comparison, and the air itself was rent with a miniature thunderclap as a sphere of fire the size of my two fists appeared in the same space as the octokong’s skull.
It was there for a fraction of a second, pop, like a short-lived soap bubble.
And when it was gone . . . all that was left was blackened bone and a cloud of fine, fine black powder.
The octokong convulsed, all ten limbs writhing, but it didn’t last long. The headless corpse thrashed around for a moment, and the blackened remnants of the skull went rolling off of it, cracking and crumbling as it did.
Hannah Ascher appeared over the body, her party shoes held in one hand, her dark eyes blazing. “Dresden? You okay?”
I just stared at her for a second.
Hell’s bells.
I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’m a Wizard of the White Council. But what I’d just witnessed was a display of precision and power so awesome that I would barely have believed it from a senior Council member, much less a freaking warlock younger than me. Fire’s a tricky, tricky magic to use. Call up enough power to do damage, and you have to fight to control it. The hotter you make it, the more it spreads out, consumes, destroys. This fire spell had been positively surgical.
I mean, I’m good with fire.
But Hannah Ascher was good with fire.
Ye gods, no wonder the Wardens hadn’t brought her in yet.
“Thanks,” I said, climbing to my feet. And then I reached out and shoved her away as the first octokong came swarming through the doorway behind her and pounced, tentacles flailing.
I had time to get my arms up and then the weight of the thing drove me flat to the floor. I tried to fight it, but there was nothing to fight—I was pinned beneath a fleshy web of tentacles that ripped and tore and bit at me through my clothes. I barely managed to wrench my head free of the slimy, stinking thing and get a breath, and because I did I was in time to see Anna Valmont step out of the cleaning closet and hurl a cup of some kind of powdered concentrate into the octokong’s eyes.
The thing shrieked in agony, pure agony, and half of its tentacles lifted off of me instantly in a vain attempt to protect its face and head. The beast writhed in torment, and I managed to get a leg into place to shove it off me. I pushed myself to my feet.
“Go!” I shouted at Ascher and Valmont. “Go, go, go!”
They didn’t need any more encouragement. We fled down the hallway, leaving the screaming octokong behind us, and all but flew down the stairs.
“There,” I snapped at Ascher on the way down. “We got her out and she’s helping. You happy?”
“Yeah, Dresden,” she said, her tone cross. “I’m happy. I’m thrilled. I’m freaking joyous. Now shut up and run.”
And I fled the hotel, blood oozing out to stain my shredded tux.
I didn’t mind so much.
I’d like to see Nicodemus try to get his deposit back on that.