weapon?” Susan asked. No one said anything, and she nodded, turned to the heavy conference table, and flipped it over with one hand. She tore off a heavy steel leg as if it had been attached with a kindergartner’s glue rather than high-grade steel bolts.
Tilly stared, his mouth open. Then he said, very quietly, “Ah.”
Susan whirled the table leg once, testing its balance, and nodded. “It will do.”
I grunted. Then I said, “Here’s the plan. We’re going to show ourselves to the vampires and the Ick. We’re going to hit whoever they have out front with everything we have and squash them flat. That should make sure we have the attention of the entire strike team.”
“Yes,” Murphy said in a dry tone. “That’s brilliant.”
I made a face at her. “Once they’re good and interested, you, Tilly, and Rudolph are going to split off from the rest of us and hit the nearest emergency exit. If it comes down to it, you probably have better odds of surviving a jump out the window than you do staying in here. You with me?”
Murphy frowned. “What about you?”
“Susan, me, and your stunt doubles are going to jump over into the Nevernever and try to draw the bad guys after us.”
“Stunt doubles?” Murphy asked.
“We are?” Susan asked, alarmed.
“Sure. I need your mighty thews to protect me. You being superchick and all.”
“Okay,” Susan said, eyeing me as if she thought I was losing my mind—which, hey, I admit. Totally possible. “What’s on the other side?”
“No clue,” I said, and a touch to my mother’s gem told me that she hadn’t ever actually been in this building on her dimension-hopping jaunts. “We’ll hope it isn’t an ocean of acid or a patch of cloud five thousand feet above a big rock.”
Susan’s eyes widened slightly. And then she shot me a wolfish smile. “I love this plan.”
“Thought you would,” I said. “Meanwhile, you three get out. Does this place have an exterior fire escape?”
Rudolph just rocked back and forth, making soft moaning noises. Tilly still looked stunned at what he had just seen from Susan.
Murphy cuffed him lightly on the back of the head. “Hey. Barry.”
Tilly shook his head and looked at her. “Fire escape. No.”
“Find a stairwell, then,” I told Murphy. “Go quiet and fast, in case some of them were too stupid to follow me.”
Murphy nodded and gave Tilly’s shoulder a little shake. “Hey. Tilly. You’re in charge of Rudolph. All right? Keep him moving and out of any lines of fire.”
The slender little man nodded, slowly at first, and then more rapidly as he seemed to take control of himself. “Okay. I’m his nanny. Got it.”
Murphy gave him part of a grin and a firm nod.
“Right,” I said. “Is this a great plan or what? I’m point; Murph, you’ve got my six; Susan, you ride drag.”
“Got it,” Susan said.
The faint, constant drumbeat of the Ick’s throbbing heart got fractionally louder.
“Go,” I said, and hit the hallways again. At my request, Tilly steered us toward the central staircase running parallel to the elevator shafts, because I figured it would make sense for most of the strike team to use the central stairwell, while the others were covered by maybe a single guard.
We ran into another handful of people who were hovering, uncertain of what to do, and who looked at me in a manner that suggested they would find my advice less than credible.
“Tilly,” I said, half pleading.
Tilly nodded and started speaking in a calm, authoritative tone. “There’s some kind of attack under way. Tammy, you and Joe and Mickey need to get to one of the offices with a window. You got that? A window. Take the curtains down, let the light in, barricade the door, and sit tight.” He looked at me and said, “Help’s on the way.”
I swapped a look with Murphy, who nodded confidently at me. Tilly had gotten the supernatural shoved in his face pretty hard, but he’d rebounded with tremendous agility. Or maybe he’d simply cracked. I guessed we’d see eventually.
The federal personnel scurried to obey Tilly, running down the hall we’d just come from.
If we’d been about ten seconds slower, the vampire would have found them first instead of us.
I heard a scream, shrill and terrible, meant to send a jolt of terrorized surprise through the prey so that the vampire could close upon it. It really said something about the Red Court, that simple tactic. Animals would never have been startled into immobility that way. It takes