I pushed Harvey into the hallway, then stepped into the doorway between him and the rest of the shop, raising my staff to the horizontal and preparing a shield spell. It wasn’t anything like ideal, but it was a better defensive position than I could get on the street outside. They’d all have to come at me from the same direction. “Stay low,” I advised him. “Don’t go anywhere.”
“We should be running,” he panted. “Shouldn’t we? Calling the police?”
“Cops got better things to do than get killed,” I said.
He blinked. “What?”
“Seriously, you don’t recognize that reference either? Hell’s bells, Harvey, do you even go to the movies?”
Shadows moved in the shaft of light provided by my impromptu portal, and figures entered the abandoned store. Three gunmen, then four—and then something that might have been a praying mantis, only hundreds of times too large, complete with googly, faceted bug eyes and a second set of glowing green eyes open above them.
It took Tessa only a second to spot me. Then she darted toward me over the floor, moving with terrible, insectlike speed, and I triggered the shield spell. The runes on my staff flared green-white again, and a fine curtain of blue-green light washed out from the oak, covering the doorway.
Tessa stopped in front of it, maybe ten feet away. Then she pointed at the door with one long leg and said, in a perfectly normal human voice, “Open fire.”
The gunmen didn’t hesitate. Their silenced weapons went clickity-clack, and sparks and flashes of light bounced up from my shield where the bullets struck. Foiling them wasn’t a terrible strain. Subsonic ammunition is slow-moving by its very nature, and each individual round carried considerably less force when it struck than it would have at full speed.
“Hold,” the mantis-thing said.
The gunmen stopped firing.
The giant bug stared at me for a long moment. Then its jaws opened, and opened, and opened some more, and Tessa’s face and head emerged from its mouth, flaccid chitin peeling back like a hood. Her skin and hair were covered in some kind of glistening slime. She was an odd one to look at. She didn’t look like she could be out of her teens when she didn’t have wardrobe to lend her its gravitas, and her apparent youth was magnified by the fact that she was a tiny woman, under five feet tall. She was pretty, the high school girl next door.
Of course, she’d been walking the earth for more than a millennium before there were any high schools.
“Hello, Dresden,” Tessa said.
“Hi, Tessa,” I replied.
“The upright hero Harry Dresden,” she said, “working for Nicodemus Archleone. Did Lasciel finally talk you into taking up her Coin?”
“Pretty sure you know that she didn’t,” I said.
She shrugged one shoulder. The motion was absolutely eerie on her insectoid body. “True. But I cannot imagine what else might compel a man like you to work for the likes of my husband.”
“Long story,” I said. “Now go away.”
She shook her head. “I can’t do that, I’m afraid. You have something I want. I want you to give it to me.”
“It would never work out for us,” I said sadly. “I’d be too worried about you biting my head off afterward to live in the moment.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “Give the mortal to me. Make me take him from you and you will share his fate.”
“Who are you?” Harvey asked in a shaking, bewildered voice. “What on earth have I done to you?”
Tessa clicked her tongue. “Don’t trouble yourself with such questions, little man. You won’t have them for very much longer.”
“Oh, God,” Harvey said.
“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “Walk away and I won’t call the Orkin man.”
In reply she lifted an insect leg and hissed a word. A shaft of rotten-looking greenish light streaked toward my shield. I gritted my teeth and held it steady, turning back the attack, feeling the strain of holding the shield beginning to build.
“This isn’t a negotiation,” she said. “You’ve already lost. You’re trapped, and you can’t keep that shield up forever. Give him to me and I will grant you safe passage.”
She was right, of course. I couldn’t hold the shield forever, or even for long. The moment it dropped, she and her boys would cut loose with everything they had and that would be that. She might or might not be sincere about the offer of free passage, but if she was . . .
If she was, then this was my chance to derail Nicodemus’s heist. If Tessa, one of Nicodemus’s own circle, interfered and overpowered me, that wouldn’t be my fault. I could end this mess and get out while still preserving Mab’s reputation. Mab would applaud this solution.
And all I had to do was let Tessa kill Harvey.
No. I wasn’t ready to hand over anyone to one of the monsters if I could help it. I might have made some bad choices along the way, but I wasn’t that far gone. Besides, I couldn’t trust her word anyway. She was just as likely to kill me for the fun of it as to let me walk away in one piece.
“Why don’t you go back to the roach motel you crawled out of?” I replied.
She shook her head and sighed. “Such a waste of potential.” Then she turned her head to one of her minions and nodded. “Take them both.”
The gunmen did something I hadn’t expected, at that point—they dropped their weapons and started shucking out of their coats and jackets. As they did, they began to jerk and contort. Joints popped and flesh rippled. Their shirts distended as their shoulders hunched to inhuman proportions, and their faces stretched out into almost canine muzzles, teeth extending into fangs and tusks. Their hands thickened and lengthened, with long claws extending from their tips.
“OhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGod,” Harvey whispered, his breath coming in panicked gasps. “What is that?”
“Ghouls,” I said grimly. “Strong, fast, hard to kill.”
“What are they going to do?”
“Rip through the walls, come at us from all sides, kill us, and eat us,” I said.
And, in professional silence, the ghouls started ripping at the drywall on both sides of my defensive position in the doorway, to do exactly that.
Eighteen
Tearing through drywall is a surprisingly noisy process. It breaks with loud crunching, snapping noises. Ghouls have been known to claw their way through inches of stone mausoleum wall to get to a nice rotten corpse to eat, and they had very little trouble with drywall and wood, their claws and hunched shoulders ripping through it at a steady pace.
We had maybe sixty seconds, at most, before they would be romping through the wall and into the building on either side of us.
“They’re coming,” Harvey gasped. “They’re going to get us. What do we do?”
My own heart was beating a lot faster than it had been a moment ago. Ghouls were no joke. And a close, confined space like this was the worst possible situation in which a wizard could take them on. My spell-armored duster wouldn’t be of much help when one of them was chewing on my head. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve faced danger. When your life is under threat and you know it, you’re scared, end of story.
Fear—real, silvery, adrenaline-charged fear—rocketed through me.