Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,156

the distraction?”

It was a fair question. Molly’s One-woman Rave spell could get more attention than a crash at an airshow. “The Sidhe know all about veils,” I said. “Mine aren’t good enough to get anywhere near them. Yours are. It’s that simple.”

“Right,” she said, and swallowed. “So we’re . . . going to depend on me for the important part. Saving people.”

“You’ve been playing Batman for a while now, kid,” I said. “I think you’ve got this.”

“Mostly I was the only one in danger if I screwed up,” Molly said. “Are you sure this is the right plan?”

“If you think you can handle it,” I said. “Or if you don’t.”

“Oh.”

I put a hand on her shoulder. “We don’t have time to dance around on this one. So we go dirt simple. When it starts, if someone gets in your way, I want you to hit them with everything you’ve got, right in the face. Mouse will be with you as muscle.”

“Shouldn’t he be with you? I mean, if you’re going to fight . . .”

“I’m not going to fight,” I said. “No time to prepare, no plan, I’d lose a fight. I’m going to be a big noisy distraction.”

“But what if you get in trouble?”

“That’s my part. You do your part. Keep focused on your objective. Get in, get them, get out, signal. Then we all run away. Got it?”

She nodded tightly. “Got it.”

“Woof,” said Mouse.

* * *

“Huh,” I said a few moments later. We had triangulated with the tracking spell and narrowed down their location to one building, and we now lurked in an alley across the street. “I’ve actually been in there before.”

“You have?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Client had lost a kid or something to some half-assed wannabe warlock. He had the cheesy dialogue and everything, was gonna sacrifice the kid with this big cheap, spiky knife.”

“How did it turn out?”

“If I remember it right, I got beat up,” I said. “Didn’t make much money on it, either. The bad guy ran away, and the client walked out threatening a lawsuit. Except she left the kid. Turns out, she wasn’t even his mom, and his real parents tried to have me arrested. Never heard from her again. No clue what it was about. Chalk.”

Molly reached into her bag and came out with a stick of chalk, which she passed to me. I crouched and quickly sketched a diagram of the rectangular warehouse. “Here’s the front door. Office door. Back door. There’re some windows up high, but you’d have to be a bird to get there. The rear of the warehouse actually protrudes over the water, but there’s a wooden deck around the back. That’s where you’ll go in, at the back door. Watch for trip wires. Mouse can help with that. Trust him. We’re basically blind and deaf by comparison.”

“Right,” Molly said, nodding. “Okay.”

“Don’t get hung up on what could happen if it goes wrong,” I said. “Focus, concentrate, just like we do for a spell. Get in. Get them. Get out.”

“Let’s just do it,” she said, “before I throw up.”

“I’ll give you five minutes to get into position. Don’t go in until I get noisy.”

“Right,” Molly said. “Come on, Mouse.”

The big dog came up beside Molly, and she didn’t even have to bend to slip the fingers of one hand through his collar. “Stay this close to me, okay?” she said to Mouse.

He looked up at her and wagged his tail.

She gave him a shaky smile, nodded at me, then spoke a word and vanished.

I started counting to three hundred and briefly wondered why I kept running into repeat uses of various locations around town. This wasn’t the first time I’d dealt with the bad guys choosing to reuse a location different bad guys had used before them. Maybe there was a Villainous Time-share Association. Maybe my life was actually a basic-cable television show, and they couldn’t afford to spend money on new sets all the time.

Or—and this seemed more likely—maybe there was a reason for it. Maybe the particular vibe of certain spots just felt more like home to predators. Predators like to lair in a place with multiple ways in and out, isolated from casual entry, near supplies of whatever it was they like to eat. Supernatural predators would also have some level of awareness of the nature of the Nevernever that abutted any given part of our reality, even if it was only an instinct. It would make sense that they would be more at