one that my ambient blue wizard light did little to disperse.
Eerier than the lighting was the silence. No air ducts sighed. No elevators rattled. No phones rang. But twice I heard gunshots—the rapid bang-bang-bang of practically useless panic fire. Vampires shrieked out their hunting cries several different times. And the thub-dub of the Ick’s bizarre heartbeat was steady, omnipresent—and slowly growing louder.
“Maybe we need a lot of mirrors or something,” Murphy said. “Bring a bunch of daylight in.”
“Way harder to do than it looks in the movies,” I said. “I figure I’ll just blow open a hole in the side of the building.” I licked my lips. “Crud, uh. Which way is south? That’ll be the best side to do it on.”
“You’re threatening to destroy a federal building!” Rudolph squeaked.
Gunshots sounded somewhere close—maybe on the third floor, directly below us. Maybe on the other side of the fourth floor, muffled by a lot of cubicle walls.
“Oh, God,” Rudolph whimpered. “Oh, dear, sweet Jesus.” He just started repeating that in a mindlessly frightened whisper.
“Aha,” I said as we reached the interrogation room. “We have our Cowardly Lion. Cover me, Dorothy.”
“Remind me to ask what the hell you’re talking about later,” Murphy said.
I started to open the door, but paused. Tilly was armed, presumably smart enough to be scared, and it probably wasn’t the best idea in the world to just open the door of the room and scare him. So I moved as far as possible to one side, reached way over to the door, and knocked. In code, even. Shave and a haircut.
There was a lengthy pause and then someone knocked on the other side of the door. Two bits.
I twisted the knob and opened the door very, very slowly.
“Tilly?” I said in a hoarse whisper. “Susan?”
The interrogation room didn’t have any windows, and it was completely dark inside. Tilly appeared in the doorway, holding up a hand to shield his eyes. “Dresden?”
“Yeah, obviously,” I said. “Susan?”
“I’m here,” she said from the darkness, her voice shaking with fear. “I’m cuffed to the chair. Harry, we’ve got to go.”
“Working on it,” I said quietly.
“You don’t understand. That thing, that drumming sound. It’s a devourer. You don’t fight them. You run, and pray someone slower than you attracts its attention.”
“Yeah. Already met the Ick,” I said. “I’d rather not repeat the experience.” I held out a hand to Tilly. “I need cuff keys.”
Tilly hesitated, clearly torn between his sense of duty and order and the primal fear that had risen in the building. He shook his head, but it didn’t seem like his heart was in it.
“Tilly,” Murphy said. She turned to him, her expression ferociously determined, and said, “Trust me. Please just do it. People are going to die as long as these three are in the building.”
He passed me the keys.
I took them over to Susan, who was sitting in the same chair I had during my chat with the feds. She wore her dark leather pants and a black T-shirt and looked oddly vulnerable just sitting there during a situation like this. I went to her and started unfastening the cuffs.
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I was getting a little worried there.”
“They must have come in through the basement somehow,” I said.
She nodded. “They’ll work their way up, floor by floor. Kill everyone they can. It’s how they operate. Remove the target and leave a message for everyone else.”
Tilly shook his head as if dazed. “That’s . . . What? That’s how some of the cartels operate in Colombia, Venezuela, but . . .”
Susan gave him an impatient look and shook her head. “What have I been telling you for the last fifteen minutes?”
A vampire let out a hunting scream, one not interdicted by floors.
“They’re here,” Susan whispered as she rubbed at her newly freed wrists. “We have to move.”
I stopped for a moment. Then I said quietly, “They’ll just keep on killing until they find the target, floor by floor,” I said.
Susan nodded tightly.
I bit my lip. “So, if we run . . . they’ll keep going. All the way up.”
Murphy turned her head to look at me, then jerked her eyes back out to the hallway, wary. “Fight?”
“We won’t win,” I said, certain. “Not here, on their timing. They’ve got all the advantages. But we can’t just abandon all those people, either.”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “No, we can’t,” Murphy said. “So. What are we going to do?”