into a fetal position, quivering and twitching while drool rolled out of his mouth.
Actually, he sort of reminded me of my second husband in the morning.
I jerked the darts out of him and shoved the Taser and the trailing wire into my jacket pocket. It would take too much time to reset it for use, and I had a bad feeling that the electronic device wouldn’t do me much good inside the warehouse. I could have slapped some heavy restraining ties on him—but I would be happier if anyone who found the downed man had no idea what had happened to him.
So much for the easy part.
My P-90 hung easily from the tac harness, its stock high, its barrel hanging down the line of my body. I took a moment to screw a suppressor onto the end of the gun and lifted it to firing position against my shoulder. The little Belgian assault weapon was illegal for a civilian to own within city limits; the suppressor, too. If I got caught with them, I’d be in trouble. If I got caught using them, I’d do time. Both of those consequences were subordinate to the fact that if I didn’t go in armed for bear, I might not live to congratulate myself on my sterling citizenship.
Well, there’s no such thing as a perfect solution, is there.
I moved quietly back to the entry door, silenced weapon tight against my shoulder. I duckwalked, my steps quick and small and rolling, to keep my upper body level as it moved. I’d put a red dot sight on the P-90, and it floated in my vision as a translucent crosshair of red light. The sight made the weapon, to some degree, point and click. The idea was for the bullets to go wherever the crosshairs were centered. I had it sighted for short work. Even though I’d seen more action than practically any cop in the country—thanks to Dresden—I could count on one hand the number of times I’d used a weapon in earnest against a target more than seven or eight yards away.
Standing next to the entry door, I tested the knob. It turned freely. So, the folks inside had been relying on their guard to keep intruders out.
I thought of the first hissing voice I’d spoken to on the phone and shivered. They wouldn’t be relying on purely physical defenses. But I knew something about those, too. Harry’s defenses had been deadly dangerous—but to create them, apparently you had to use the energy of a threshold, which only grew up around an actual home. This old warehouse was a place of business and didn’t have a threshold. So, if a spell had been put up to guard the door, it would have to be fairly weak.
Of course, weak was a relative term in Dresden’s vocabulary. It might hit me only hard enough to break bones, instead of disintegrating me completely—if there was a spell there at all.
I hated this magic crap.
Screw it. I couldn’t just stand here all night.
I turned the doorknob slowly, keeping my body as far to one side as possible. Then I pushed in gently, and the door swung open by an inch or three. When nothing exploded or burst into wails of alarm, I eased up next to it and peeked into the building.
It was like looking into another world.
Green and blue light crawled and slithered up the walls and over the warehouse’s interior, eerie and subtly unsettling, each color moving in waves of differing widths and speeds. The strange scent of water and fish was strong inside. There were things on the wall—growths was all I could call them. Ugly patches of some kind of lumpy, rough substance I didn’t recognize were clumped all around the walls and ceiling of the warehouse in roughly circular patches about six feet across.
Cages were scattered all around the floor—a bunch of five-foot cubes made of heavy steel grid. People were locked up in several of them, the doors held shut by heavy chains. Most of them just sat, staring at nothing, or lay upon their sides doing the same thing, completely motionless. That wasn’t normal. Even someone who was drugged but conscious would show a little more animation than that. This meant magic was involved, some kind of invasive mental stuff, and a little voice in my head started screaming.
I’ve been subjected to that kind of invasion, more than once.
It’s bad.
My legs felt weak. My hands shook. The rippling colors of