Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,159

on. So it was time to get sneaky.

I ground my teeth and pretended that Molly hadn’t clued me into anything. “All right, people,” I said. “Let’s move. I think they’re gone but they could be back.”

“That’s it?” Molly asked. “I was expecting more trouble than th—” She broke off, staring at the floor behind me.

My leg throbbed and burned a little more, and I glanced down at it in irritation. To my shock, I saw a long line of small smears of my blood on the tile floor. The little wound had continued bleeding, soaked through my sock and my shoe, and dribbled down onto my heel.

“What happened?” Molly asked.

“It was another stupid trick,” I said. “The point wasn’t to hold them for ransom. It was to get me here, under pressure, and too keyed up to defend myself from every direction.” I held up the dart. “We’d better find out what this thing is and what kind of poison is on it.”

“Oh, my God,” Molly breathed.

“I’ll take whatever help I can get,” I said. “Let’s g—”

But before I could finish the sentence, there was a loud crunching whoomp of a sound, and the entire warehouse shook. I barely had time to think demolition charges before there was a deafening crack, and the floor tilted.

And then the back twenty feet of the warehouse, including all of us, fell right off of the street and into the cold, dark water of Lake Michigan.

Chapter

Thirty-eight

We didn’t drop straight down. Instead, there was a scream of shearing bolts, and our part of the building lurched drunkenly and then plunged into the water at an oblique angle.

The confusion of it was the worst part. The loud noise, the disorientation inherent in the uneven motion, and then the short surge of terror as gravity took over all served to create a panic reaction in my head—and I’m not a guy who panics easily.

That’s what most people don’t understand about situations like this one. People are just built to freak out when something goes wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re a kindergarten teacher or a Special Forces operator—when life-threatening stuff happens, you get scared. You freak out. That’s just what happens. When it’s because you’ve woken up to a hungry bear in your camp, that’s usually a pretty good mechanism.

But being dropped into black water in an enclosed area is not a place where panicked adrenaline is going to help you out. That’s when you have to somehow set that fear aside and force yourself to use your rational mind to guide you out of the situation. There are two ways to get yourself into that terrified-but-rational state of mind. First is training, where you drill a reaction into yourself so hard and so many times that it becomes a form of reflex you can perform without even thinking. And the other way you get there is to have enough experience to have learned what you need to do.

So the first thing I did as the cold water swallowed me was to close my eyes for a second and focus, just as I would if I were preparing a spell, relaxing my limbs and letting them float loosely in the water. I gathered my thoughts and laid out my options.

First, I had time, but not much of it. I had gotten a good breath before I went under. The others might or might not have done the same. So I had about two minutes to act before people started trying to breathe Lake Michigan. Two minutes doesn’t sound like long, but it was enough time to spend a few seconds thinking.

Second, we were surrounded by steel siding. I wasn’t getting through that with anything short of a full-power blast, and that wasn’t going to happen while I was surrounded by water. Water tends to disperse and ground out magical energies just by being nearby. When water is all around you, it’s all but impossible to direct any energy out of your body without it spreading out and diluting to uselessness.

The edges of the building might or might not have grounded themselves into the mud at the bottom of the lake, trapping us all like bugs under a shoe box lid. There wasn’t time to search through them systematically, not before people started drowning. That meant that we had to go out through the only way I could be sure was available—the back door.

Except that everyone was spread out in the blackness now, and at least one person,