I moved forward first, shield bracelet at the ready, and Murphy walked a pace behind me and to my right, her Sig held ready.
The doorway at the end of the railroad car led us into a large workroom, teeming with computers, file cabinets, microscopes, and at least one deluxe chemistry set.
Maroon sat at one of the computers, his profile in view. “Dammit, Stu,” he snarled. “I told you that you can’t keep coming down here to use the john. You’ll just have to walk to one of the—” He glanced up at us and froze in midsentence, his eyes wide and locked on Murphy’s leveled gun.
“Stu took the rest of the night off,” I said amiably. “Where’s your boss?”
A door opened at the far end of the workroom and a young woman of medium height appeared. She wore glasses and a lab coat, and neither of them did anything to make her look less than gorgeous. She looked at us and then at Maroon and said, in a precise, British accent, “You idiot.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Good help is hard to find.”
The woman in the lab coat looked at me with dark, intense eyes, and I sensed what felt like a phantom pressure against my temples, as if wriggling tadpoles were slithering along the surface of my skin. It was a straightforward attempt at mental invasion, but I’d been practicing my defenses for a while now, and I wasn’t falling for something that obvious. I pushed the invasive thoughts away with an effort of will and said, “Don’t meet her eyes, Murph. She’s a vampire. Red Court.”
“Got it,” she said, her gun never moving from Maroon.
The vampire looked at us both for a moment. Then she said, “You need no introduction, Mr. Dresden. I am Baroness LeBlanc. And our nations are not, at the moment, in a state of war.”
“I’ve always been a little fuzzy on legal niceties,” I said. I had several devices with me that I could use to defend myself. I was ready to use any of them. A vampire in close quarters is nothing to laugh at. LeBlanc could tear off three or four of my limbs in the time it takes to draw and fire a gun. I watched her closely, ready to act at the slightest semblance of an attack. “We both know the war is going to start up again eventually.”
“You are out of anything reasonably like your territory,” she said, “and you are trespassing upon mine. I would be well within my rights under the Accords to kill you and bury your torso and limbs in individual graves.”
“That’s the problem with this ride,” I complained to Murphy. “There’s nothing that’s actually scary in the Tunnel of Terror.”
“You did get your money back,” she pointed out.
“Ah, true.” I smiled faintly at LeBlanc. “Look, Baroness. You know who I am. You’re doing something to people’s minds, and I want it stopped.”
“If you do not leave,” she said, “I will consider it an act of war.”
“Hooray,” I said in a Ben Stein monotone, spinning one forefinger in the air like a New Year’s noisemaker. “I’ve already kicked off one war with the Red Court, and I will cheerfully do it again if that is what is necessary to protect people from you.”
“That’s irrational,” LeBlanc said. “Completely irrational.”
“Tell her, Murph.”
“He’s completely irrational,” Murphy said, her tone wry.
LeBlanc regarded me impassively for a moment. Then she smiled faintly and said, “Perhaps a physical confrontation is an inappropriate solution.”
I frowned. “Really?”
She shrugged. “Not all of the Red Court are battle-hungry blood addicts, Dresden. My work here has no malevolent designs. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
I tilted my head. “That’s funny. All the corpses piled up say differently.”
“The process does have its side effects,” she admitted. “But the lessons garnered from them serve only to improve my work and make it safer and more effective. Honestly, you should be supporting me, Dresden, not trying to shut me down.”
“Supporting you?” I smiled a little. “Just what is it you think you’re doing that’s so darned wonderful?”
“I am creating love.”
I barked out a laugh.
LeBlanc’s face remained steady, serious.
“You think that this, this warping people into feeling something they don’t want to feel is love?”
“What is love,” LeBlanc said, “if not a series of electrochemical signals in the brain? Signals that can be duplicated, like any other sensation.”
“Love is more than that,” I said.
“Do you love this woman?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But that isn’t anything new.”
LeBlanc showed her teeth. “But your current feelings of