The bottle tumbled end over end and smashed into the work lamp with a crash of breaking glass. Sparks showered up in a brief cloud of electric outrage, and then heavy darkness slammed down upon us.
Now, I thought to Lasciel.
Darkness vanished, replaced with lines and planes of silver light that outlined the garage, the truck, the tool cabinets and workbenches, as well as the doors and windows and the bolt on the wall where Rawlins was chained.
I was not actually seeing the garage, of course, for there was no physical light for my eyes to see. Instead, I was looking at an illusion.
The portion of Lasciel in my head was capable of creating illusory sensations of almost any kind, though if I suspected any tampering I could defend myself against it easily enough. This illusion, however, was not meant to deceive. She’d placed it there to help me, gleaning the precise dimensions and arrangements of the garage from my own senses and projecting them to my eyes to enable me to move in the dark.
It wasn’t a perfect illusion, of course. It was merely a model. It didn’t keep track of animate objects, and if anything moved around I wouldn’t know it until I’d knocked myself unconscious on it—but I wouldn’t need it for long. I ran for Rawlins.
“Glau!” Crane screamed, no more than ten or twelve feet away. “Cover the door!”
I flung the third bottle to the floor at my feet. It was an exceedingly odd sensation, for the bottle was outlined in silver light until it left my hand. It vanished into the darkness, and shattered on the floor near me.
There was a moment of frozen silence, broken only by the rasp of a hacksaw against Rawlins’s cuffs. Crane took a couple of steps toward me, then hesitated, and though I could not see him, I could sense the hesitation. Then he moved again, away from me, probably assuming I was attempting another distraction. My lips stretched into a wolfish smile, and I padded to Rawlins, my steps sure and steady even in the total darkness.
I reached the bolt on the steel beam, and found Rawlins standing beneath it, breathing hard, sawing as fast as he could. He jumped when I touched his shoulder, but I took the hammer in hand and whispered, “It’s Harry. Get your head down.”
He did. I looked up at the silvery illusion of the bolt, steadied my breathing, and drew the hammer back very slowly, focusing upon that movement and nothing else. Then I hissed out a breath and struck at the bolt with every ounce of force I could physically muster.
I’m not a weightlifter, but no one’s ever accused me of being a sissy, either. More importantly, years and years of my metaphysical studies and practice had given me considerable skill at focus and concentration. The hammer struck the bolt that held the other ring of Rawlins’s cuffs. Sparks flew. The bolt, as rusted and ruined as the rest of the building, snapped.
Rawlins dragged me to the ground a heartbeat before Crane’s pistol thundered again from the far side of the garage. A bullet caromed off the metal beam with an ugly, high-pitched whine.
“Come on,” I hissed. I seized Rawlins’s shirt. He grunted and stumbled blindly after me, trying to be quiet, but given his injuries there was only so much he could do. Speed would have to serve where stealth was not available. I hauled him directly across the garage floor, skipping around a mechanic’s pit and several stacks of old tires.
“Where are we going?” Rawlins gasped. “Where is the door?”
“We aren’t taking the door,” I whispered—which was true. I wasn’t sure that we’d have a way out of the garage, but we certainly wouldn’t leave via the door.
The Full Moon Garage had been abandoned since the disappearance of its previous owners, a gang of lycanthropes with a notable lack of common sense when it came to choosing enemies. It wasn’t as big a coincidence as it seemed, that Crane was using the same building. It was old, abandoned, had no windows, was close to the convention center, and easy to get in and out of. More to the point, it had been a place where fairly horrible things happened, and the ugly energy of them still lingered in the air. I wasn’t sure what Crane and Glau were, exactly, but a place like this would feel comfortable and familiar to many denizens of