Changes (The Dresden Files #12) - Jim Butcher Page 0,48
fry one egg, I wouldn’t be able to find the little skillet until after I had already used the big skillet and cleaned it off.
I hunkered down next to Susan, and as I did she stirred and muttered softly. Then she jerked in a swift breath through her nose, her eyes suddenly opening wide, as if she were panicked.
“Easy,” I said at once. “Susan. It’s Harry. You’re safe.”
It seemed to take several seconds for my words to sink in. Then she relaxed again, blinked a few times, and turned her head toward me.
“What happened to me?” she asked.
“You were mistaken for an intruder,” I said. “You were hit with a form of magic that made you sleep.”
She frowned tiredly. “Oh. I was dreaming. . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I was dreaming that the curse was gone. That I was human.” She shook her head with a bitter little smile. “I thought I was done having that one. Martin?”
“Here,” Martin slurred. “I’m all right.”
“But maybe not for long,” I said. “The apartment’s wards are down. We’re naked here.”
“Well,” Martin said in an acidic voice. “I think we learned our lesson about where that leads.”
Susan rolled her eyes, but the look she gave me, a little hint of a smile and a level stare with her dark eyes, was positively smoldering.
Yeah. That had been pretty good.
“Did you guys find out about our tail?” I asked.
“Tails, as it turns out. Three different local investigative agencies,” Martin supplied. “They were paid cash up front to follow us from the time we arrived. They all gave a different description of the woman who hired them. All of them were too beautiful to believe.”
“Arianna?” I asked.
Martin grunted. “Probably. The oldest of them can wear any flesh mask they wish, and go abroad in daylight, hidden from the sun in the shadow of their own mask.”
I lifted my eyebrows. That was news. I wasn’t even sure the Wardens had that kind of information. Martin must have been a little groggy from his naptime.
“How long were we out?” Susan asked.
“I got here about five hours ago. Sun’s down.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, as if bracing herself for something, and nodded. “All right. Martin and I need to get moving.”
“Where?” I asked.
“The airport,” Martin said. “We should be able to be in Nevada by very late tonight or early tomorrow morning. Then we can move on the warehouse and look for more information.”
“We discussed it, Harry,” Susan said quietly. “You can’t take a plane, and we’re counting the minutes. A jet will get us there in about seven hours. The car will take two days. There’s no time for that.”
“Yeah, I can see your reasoning,” I said.
Martin stood up creakily and stretched. “Entering the facility may require a reconnaissance period. We’ll have to determine its weaknesses, patrol pacing, and so on before we—”
I interrupted him by slapping a piece of notebook paper down on the coffee table. “The storage facility is set into the side of a stone hill. There are some portable units stored outside in a yard with a twelve-foot razor-wire fence. A road leads into the hill and down into what I presume to be caverns either created for storage space or appropriated after a mining operation closed.” I pointed at the notebook paper, to different points on the sketch, as I mentioned each significant feature.
“There is a single watchtower with one guard armed with a longbarreled assault rifle with a big scope. There are two men and a dog walking a patrol around the perimeter fence with those little assault rifles—”
“Carbines,” Molly said brightly, from the kitchen.
“—and fragmentation grenades. They aren’t in a hurry. Takes them about twenty minutes; then they go inside for a drink and come back out. There are security cameras here, here, and here, and enough cars in the employee parking lot to make me think that the underground portion of the facility is probably pretty big, and probably has some kind of barracks for their security team.”
I nodded. “That’s about it on the surface, but there’s no way we can get inside to scout it out ahead of time. Looks pretty straightforward. We move up to it under a veil; I shut down the communications. We use a distraction to draw everyone’s attention, and when the reinforcements come running out, we’re in. Hopefully we can find a way to lock them outside. After that, it’s just a matter of . . .”