Thirty-seven
The lights blew out in showers of sparks and there was an instant, thunderous explosion behind us, and the closed door of the vault rang like an enormous bell. While the thick steel walls of the vault were impenetrable to the shot of the antipersonnel mines, I didn’t want to think about how much metal had just rebounded from them and gone flying off at every angle imaginable, and I wondered if anyone had just died as a result.
There was a great grinding sound, as if some part of the building’s structure had slowly collapsed, somewhere outside the vault, and in the dim red glow of the tear in the fabric of reality, I could barely make out the faces around me.
“Hell’s bells,” I said to Michael. “Binder? His prisoners?”
“I helped him move them,” Michael said at once. “It’s partly why it took me so long to get to you. Once we knew about the mines, we got everyone out of that hallway and back up to the first floor.”
“Where there were only bullets flying around,” Grey said, his voice dry.
I grimaced, but there’d been no help for it. Marcone had set up those mines, not me, and I just had to hope that the initial impact against the vault had robbed the explosively propelled projectiles of most of their strength.
Meanwhile, the torn-cloth ribbon of light in the air of the vault had spread, the Way to the Underworld opening before us, red light pouring into the strong room, and I could see scarlet flames dancing on the far side. The smell of sulfur wafted out of the Way. A moment later, there was a sudden, hot wind driving even more of the scent out of it, and pushing my hair back from my forehead.
As the flames danced and bowed with the wind, I could see a dark shape behind them—a wall rising up maybe forty yards away from us, with a clear arch shape beneath it. The arch was filled with brilliant fire, so dense that I could see nothing beyond it.
Nicodemus stepped up to stand beside me, staring into the Underworld. His dark eyes glittered with scarlet highlights.
“The Gate of Fire,” he murmured. “Miss Ascher, if you please.”
“Um,” Hannah Ascher said. She swallowed. “No one said jack about me being the first one into the Underworld.”
“I’m not sure anyone else could survive in there for more than a moment,” Nicodemus said. “Dresden?”
I squinted at the inferno raging beyond the Way and said, “It’s pretty tough to argue with fire. That’s why wizards like to use it as a weapon. Heat that intense, I could keep it off me for maybe ten or twenty seconds—if you let me get a nap and a meal in before you asked me to deal with the next gate.” I peered more closely. “Look there, in the archway. On the right wall, about five feet up.”
Hannah Ascher stopped next to me, and squinted through the Way. “Is that a lever?”
“Looks like it,” I said. “Walk through, pull the lever. Seems simple enough.”
“A little too simple,” she said, and started taking off her own thorn manacles.
“Sure,” I said. “If you’re immune to fire, it’s a piece of cake.” I blew out my breath. “I can make that sprint before my shields fail. I think. Assuming I don’t trip and fall on anything. I can’t see what the ground is like.”
“Dammit,” she said. “No. No, I guess this is where I earn my cut.” She stared at the Way and dropped the two empty backpacks she carried over one shoulder. Then she took a short breath and stripped out of her black sweater in one smooth motion, revealing a black sports bra beneath.
“Wow,” Grey said. “Nice.”
She rolled her eyes and gave him a short look, then pressed the sweater into my hands. “Hold this for me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Why?”
Her boots and fatigue pants came off next, and Michael resolutely turned slightly to one side and studied an empty section of the strong room’s wall. “Because my clothes wouldn’t survive it, and I would rather not spend the entire rest of the trip without any clothes.”
“I would,” Grey said. “I would rather that.”
“Grey,” I said. “Stop it.”
“We’re wasting time,” Nicodemus said.
Ascher met my eyes for a second, a fairly daring thing to do between two practitioners, and her cheeks flushed a little bit pink before she shucked out of her socks and underwear, motions quick and entirely without artifice. She pressed the rest of her clothes into my hands and said, “Don’t do anything weird with them.”
“I was going to shellac them into a dining set and serve a four-course meal in them,” I said, “but if you’re gonna get all squeamish about it, I guess I’ll just hold them for you.”
Ascher eyed me obliquely. “Did you just ask me out to dinner?”
I felt myself baring my teeth in a smile. Nothing much I like more than a woman with guts. “Tell you what. We both get out of this in one piece, I’ll show you where to buy the best steak sandwich in town,” I said. “Good luck.”
She gave me a quick, nervous smile and turned to the Way. She stared at it for a couple of seconds, licked her lips once, twitched her hands in a couple of nervous little gestures, then clenched her jaw and strode through the Way, naked, into the fires of the Underworld.
Granted, I hadn’t ever seen anyone with quite her degree of precision and power in pyromancy before, but even so, I cringed as she hit the first wall of flame. It surged up to meet her like it had an awareness of its own and was eager to devour her—and had about as much luck as a wave breaking on a stony shore. The fire wreathed her and recoiled, twisted into miniature cyclones that whipped her long dark hair this way and that. The wind from the flame roared and shifted, blowing hard enough to make her balance wobble. She put her hands out to either side of her, like someone walking on slippery ice, and proceeded slowly and carefully. I could see the way that focus and concentration made her spine straight and tense, and no, I was not staring at her ass. To any inappropriate degree.
I realized that Grey was standing beside me, watching her intently, his expression unreadable. He keyed in to my realization, even though neither of us looked at the other, except in our peripheral vision.
“Got to love a woman with guts,” he said.
“You talk too much,” I said.
“How is she doing that?” he asked. “I know the basics, but I’ve never seen anything quite like that.”
“She’s redirecting the energy,” I said. “See how when the waves hit her, they bounce off, all swirly?”
He grunted.
“She’s taking the heat and turning it into kinetic energy as it reaches her aura. It’s impressive as hell.”
“So far,” Grey said. “But why do you say that?”
“Because it’s hard to deal with that much heat, when you’re immersed in it,” I said. “She’s not just stopping it at one point. She’s dealing with it from every angle, and she’s got to be doing the same enchantment about a dozen times at once to stop it all, in successive layers.”
“And that’s hard?”