Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,158

in its place, arcing through the air in free fall, holding a bow and an arrow in his hands. He drew and shot in the same instant he shifted, and I barely caught the arrow on my shield. Before he could begin to fall, he completed the roll and shifted again, back into hawk form, then beat his wings and continued rising into the sky.

Hell’s bells. That looked awesome. It took a serious mastery of shape-shifting to bring equipment and clothes and things with you when you changed form, but that guy had made it look as easy as breathing.

I mean, say what you will about the faeries, but they’ve got style. Not so much style that I didn’t hurl another bolt of force after the flying archer, but I missed him and he winged away with a mocking shriek.

Then I felt a small, sharp pain in my left leg.

I looked down to see a little wooden dart sticking out of the back of my calf. It was carved, perfectly smooth and round, and fletched with a few tiny slivers of scarlet feather. I snapped my gaze around behind me, and caught a single glimpse of the Redcap poised in a crouch atop the fence surrounding the warehouse, balancing his weight with apparent effortless ease along a strand of barbed wire that had to have been a sixteenth of an inch wide.

His mouth was spread in a wide, manic grin. He held a short silvery tube in one hand, and as my eyes found his face, he touched two fingertips of his other hand to his lips, blew me a kiss, and plummeted back off of the fence and out of sight.

I whirled toward him and brought up my shield, then spun around and angled it that way, then jittered about, rubbernecking everywhere at once. But that was it. Assuming the Sidhe weren’t simply undetectable to my senses, they were gone.

A slow burning sensation began to spread from the wound in my leg.

A cold shiver oozed down my spine. I tugged the dart out of my calf. It hadn’t done much—the slender spear of wood had penetrated maybe a quarter inch into my skin—but when I rolled up my pant leg to look, I found an inordinately large trickle of blood coming from the tiny wound.

And that burning sensation became an almost infinitesimally greater presence with each heartbeat.

This hadn’t been a hostage crisis at all.

It had been an assassination. Or . . . or something.

“Goddammit!” I snarled. “I just got played again! I am so sick and tired of this backstabby bullshit!”

I more or less stormed into the warehouse, shoving open the office door and stalking out onto the main floor. The place was just as empty as I remembered, give or take the leavings of several apparent transients between the present and the past. Molly was at the very rear of the warehouse, near the door. She was helping Justine to sit up. Mac was there, too, and he and Butters were between them helping a wobbly-looking Andi to remain on her feet. Mouse was standing guard between the group and the front of the warehouse, and he started wagging his tail when he saw me.

“Clear,” I called out to them, hurrying over. “Or at least clearish. What happened?”

“They were under a sleeping enchantment,” Molly reported. “Pretty standard stuff. I woke them up.”

“Everyone okay?”

“Andi got hit on the head when they took her,” she said. “Other than that, I think we’re good.”

When she spoke, Molly’s voice never quavered, but her eyes flickered uncertainly toward Mac. I took a closer look at everyone. Andi, Butters, and Justine had all been bound. Justine was only now getting the ropes cut off of her wrists, and as Molly sawed them away with a pocketknife, I could see the deep red marks they’d left on Justine’s slender wrists. Butters and Andi had them, too, visible even in the dimness of the warehouse.

Mac didn’t.

That was interesting. Why hadn’t Mac been tied up? Or if he had, how come there wasn’t a mark to show for it? Either way, that was odd.

My first instinct was to grab him and demand answers—but the direct approach hadn’t gotten me anything but more confused as I went through this stupid day. I might have been a better thug than at any point in my life, but that wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t figure out where to apply my muscle. And I was damned tired of being sneaked up