others to us and away from anyone else.”
Murphy looked at me for a moment, frowning gently, but nodded. “God, that’s cold, Harry.”
“I lost my warm fuzzies for the Reds a long time ago,” I said. The wounded vampire just wouldn’t shut up. Fire’s tough on them. Their outer layer of skin is combustible. My attack had probably left it in two pieces, or otherwise pared down its body mass. It would be a smoldering lump of agony writhing on the floor, in so much pain that it could literally do nothing but scream.
And that suited me just fine.
“We aren’t just standing here, are we?” Tilly asked.
A pair of particularly loud, simultaneous shrieks came through the vents and shafts, ululating over and under each other. They were particularly strident and piercing, and went on for longer than the others. A chorus of lesser shrieks wailed briefly in reply.
The Eebs, as generals, sending orders to the troops. It had to be, coordinating the raid and directing it toward the injured member of the team.
“Indeed we are not. All right, folks. Murph, Tilly, Rudolph, get scarce. Follow Murphy and do whatever the hell she tells you to do if you want to get out of this alive.”
Murphy grimaced at that. “Be careful, Dresden.”
“You too,” I said. “See you at the church.”
She gave me a sharp nod, beckoned Tilly, and the two of them started off down another hallway to one of the side stairwells. With any luck, the Eebs had just sent everyone they had running toward me. Even if Murphy and Tilly weren’t lucky, I figured they’d probably have only a single sentry to deal with, at the most. I gave Murphy even odds of handling that. A 50 percent chance of survival wasn’t real encouraging, but it was about 50 percent higher than if they’d stayed.
Susan watched them go and then looked at me. “You and Murphy never hooked up?”
“You’re asking this now?” I demanded.
“Should I fix us both a nice cup of tea, in our copious free time?”
I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “No. We haven’t.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“A lot of reasons. Bad timing. Other relationships. You know.” I took a long, deep breath and said, “Keep an eye out. I’ve got to pull off something hard here.”
“Right,” Susan said. She went back to watching the gloom, her club held ready.
I closed my eyes and summoned up my will. Time for some real razzle-dazzle stuff.
Illusions are a fascinating branch of magic. There are two basic ways to manage them. One, you can create an image and put it in someone else’s head. There’s no actual visible object there, but their brain tells them that it’s there, big as life—a phantasm. It’s walking real close to the borders of the Laws of Magic to go that way, but it could be very effective.
The second method is the creation of an actual visible object or creature—a kind of hologram. Those things are much harder to produce, because you have to pour a lot more energy into them, and while a phantasm uses a foe’s own mind to create consistency within the illusion, you’ve got to do it the hard way with holomancy.
Murph’s image was easy to fix in mind, as was Rudolph’s, though I admit that I might have made him look a bit skinnier and slouchier than he might actually have been. My holomancy, my rules.
The hardest was Tilly. I kept getting the image of the actor from The X Files confabulated with the actual Tilly, and the final result was kinda marginal. But I was in a rush.
I pictured the images with as much clarity as I could and sent my will, including a tiny bit of soulfire, into creating the mirages.
Soulfire isn’t really a destructive force. It’s sort of the opposite, actually. And while I used it in fights to enhance my offensive spells, it really shone when creating things.
I whispered, “Lumen, camerus, factum!” and released energy into the mental images. The holograms of Murphy, Tilly, and Rudolph shimmered into existence, so absolutely real-looking that even I thought they might have been solid matter.
“They’re coming!” Susan said abruptly. She turned to me and practically jumped out of her shoes upon seeing the illusions. Then she waved a hand at Tilly’s image, and it flickered straight through. She let out a low whistle and said, “Time to go?”
The thunder of the Ick’s heart grew abruptly louder, a vibration I could feel through the soles of my shoes.
Vampires boiled