Death Masks

She turned to me, and I felt her fingers cover my eyes, pushing me away from the ladder. I got it then, and leaned away from the shaft the ladder had come up just before there was a hellishly loud noise and a flash of light, scarlet through Susan’s fingertips.

My ears rang and my balance wavered. Susan helped me to my feet and started moving out through the darkness, her steps swift and certain. From the shaft, I could dimly hear the demon-girl shrieking in fury. I asked, "Was that a grenade?"

"Just a stunner," Susan said. "Lots of light and noise."

"And you had it in your pocket," I said.

"No. Martin did. I borrowed it."

I tripped over something faintly yielding in the darkness, a limp form. "Whoa, what is that?"

"I don’t know. Some kind of guard animal. Shiro killed it."

My next step squished in something damp and faintly warm that soaked through my sock. "Perfect."

Susan slammed a door open onto nighttime Chicago, and I could see again. We left the building behind us and went down a flight of concrete steps to the sidewalk. I didn’t recognize the neighborhood offhand, but it wasn’t a good one. It had that wary, hard-core feel that made The Jungle seem like Mary Poppins by comparison. There was dim light in the sky-evidently dawn was not far away.

Susan looked up and down the street and cursed quietly. "Where is he?"

I turned and looked at Susan. The dark swirls and spikes of her tattoo still stood out dark against her skin. Her face looked leaner than I remembered.

Another shrieking scream came from inside the building. "This is a really bad time for him to be late," I said.

"I know," she said, flexing her fingers. "Harry, I don’t know if I can handle that demon bitch if she comes at us again." She looked down at her own hand, where the dark tattoos swirled and curved. "I’m almost out."

"Out?" I asked. "Of what?"

Her lip lifted into a quiet snarl and she swept dark eyes up and down the street. "Control."

"Ooooookay," I said. "We can’t just stand here. We need to move."

Just then, an engine growled, and a dark green rental sedan came screeching around the corner of the block. It swerved across to the wrong side of the street and came up on the curb before sliding to a stop.

Martin threw open the back door. There was a cut on his left temple and a streak of blood had dried dark on his jaw. Tattoos like Susan’s, but thicker, framed one eye and the left side of his face. "They’re behind me," he said. "Hurry."

He didn’t have to tell either of us twice. Susan shoved me into the back of the car and piled in after me. Martin had the car moving again before she’d shut the door, and I looked back to see another sedan after us. Before we’d gone a block, a second car slid in behind the first, and the two accelerated, coming after us.

"Dammit," Martin said, glaring at his rearview mirror. "What did you do to these people, Dresden?"

"I turned down their recruiting officer," I said.

Martin nodded, and snapped the car around a corner. "I’d say they don’t handle rejection well. Where’s the old man?"

"Gone."

He exhaled through his nose. "These idiots are going to land us all in jail if this keeps up. How bad do they want you?"

"More than most."

Martin nodded. "Do you have a safe house?"

"My place. I’ve got some emergency wards I can set off. They could keep out a mail-order record club." I bobbed my eyebrows at Susan. "For a while, anyway."

Martin juked the car around another corner. "It isn’t far. You can jump out. We’ll draw them off."

"He can’t," Susan objected. "He can barely move. He’s been hurt, and he could go into shock. He isn’t like us, Martin."

Martin frowned. "What did you have in mind?"

"I’ll go with him."

He stared up at the rearview mirror for a moment, at Susan. "It’s a bad idea."

"I know."

"It’s dangerous."

"I know," she said, voice tight. "There’s no choice, and no time to argue."

Martin turned his eyes back to the road and said, "Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

"God be with you both, then. Sixty seconds."

"Wait a minute," I said. "What are you both-"

Martin screeched around another corner and roared ahead at top speed. I bounced off the door on my side and flattened my cheek against the window. I recognized my neighborhood as I did. I glanced at the speedometer of the car and wished I hadn’t.

Susan reached across me to open the door and said, "We get out here."

I stared at her and then motioned vaguely at the door.

She met my eyes and that same hard, delighted smile spread over her lips. "Trust me. This is kid stuff."

"Cartoons are kid stuff. Petting zoos are kid stuff. Jumping out of a car is insane."

"You did it before," she accused me. "The lycanthropes."

"That was different."

"Yes. You left me in the car." Susan crawled across my lap, which appreciated her. Especially in the tight leather pants. My eyes agreed with my lap wholeheartedly. Especially about the tight leather pants. Susan then crouched, one foot on the floorboards, one hand on the door, and offered her other hand to me. "Come on."

Susan had changed in the last year. Or maybe she hadn’t. She had always been good at what she did. She’d just altered her focus to something other than reporting. She could take on demonic murderers in hand-to-hand combat now, rip home appliances from the wall and throw them with one hand, and use grenades in the dark. If she said she could jump out of a speeding car and keep us both from dying, I believed her. What the hell, I thought. It wasn’t like I hadn’t done this before-albeit at a fifth the speed.

But there was something deeper than that, something darker that Susan’s vulpine smile had stirred inside of me. Some wild, reckless, primal piece of me had always loved the danger, the adrenaline, had always loved testing myself against the various and sundry would-be lethalities that crossed my paths. There was an ecstasy in the knife edge of the struggle, a vital energy that couldn’t be found anywhere else, and part of me (a stupid, insane, but undeniably powerful part) missed it when it was gone.

That wildness rose up in me, and gave me a smile that matched Susan’s.

I took her hand, and a second later we leapt from the car. I heard myself laughing like a madman as we did.

Chapter Twenty-four

As we went out the door, Susan pulled me hard against her. On general policy, I approved. She got one arm around the back of my head, shielding the base of my skull and the top of my neck. We hit the ground with Susan on the bottom, bounced up a bit, rolling, and hit the ground again. The impacts were jolting, but I was on the bottom only once. The rest of the time, the impact was something I felt only through my contact with Susan.