Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files 8)

"What the hell," he said, and shook the light a few times. He had his hand on his gun, the restraining strap off, but he hadn't drawn it yet. Good man. He knew as well as I did that the hotel was going to have far more panicked attendees than potential threats.

"We'll try mine," I said, and got the silver pentacle on its chain from around my neck. A gentle whisper and an effort of will and the amulet began to emit a pure, silver-blue light that reached into the darkness around us, burning it away as swiftly as it pressed in, until we could see for maybe fifteen feet around us. Beyond that was just a murky vagueness- not so much a cloud or a mist as a simple lack of light.

I gripped my staff in my right hand, and more of my will thrummed through it, setting the winding spirals of runes and sigils along its length to burning with a gentle, ember orange light.

Rawlins stared at me for a second and then said, "What the hell is going on?"

There were running footsteps and shouts and cries in the gloom. All of them sounded choked, muffled somehow. One of the two teenaged "vampires" stumbled into the circle of my azure wizard's light, sobbing. Several young men blundered along a moment later, blindly, and all but trampled her. Rawlins grabbed the girl with a grunt of, "Excuse me, miss." and hauled her from their path. He lifted her more or less by main strength and pushed her gently against the wall. He forced her to look at him and said, "Follow the wall that way to the door. Stay close to the wall until you get out."

She nodded, tears making her makeup run in a mascara mudslide, and stumbled off, following Rawlins directions.

"Fire?" Rawlins blurted, turning back to me. "Is this smoke?"

"No," I said. "Believe me. I know burning buildings."

He gave me an odd look, grabbed an older woman who was passing blindly, and sent her off to follow the wall to the door out. He shivered then, and when he exhaled his breath came out in a long, frosty plume. The temperature had dropped maybe forty degrees in the space of a minute.

I struggled to ignore the sounds of frightened people in the dark and focused on my magical senses. I reached out to the cold and the gloom, and found it a vaguely familiar kind of spellworking, though I couldn't remember precisely where I'd encountered it before.

I spun in a slow circle with my eyes closed, and felt the murk grow deeper, darker as I faced back down the hall to the hotel's front desk. I took a step that way, and the murk thickened marginally. The spell's source had to be that way. I gritted my teeth and started forward.

"Hey," Rawlins said. "Where are you going?"

"Our bad guy is this way," I said. "Or something is. Maybe you'd better stay here, help get these people outside safely."

"Maybe you ought to shut your fool mouth," Rawlins replied, his tone one of forced cheer. He looked scared, but he drew his gun and kept the barrel down, close to his side, and held his mostly useless flashlight in his other hand. "I'll cover you."

I nodded once at him, turned, and plunged into the darkness, Rawlins at my back. Screams erupted around us, sometimes accompanied by the sight of stumbling, terrified people. Rawlins nudged them toward the walls, barked at them in a tone of pure paternal authority to stay near them, to move carefully for the exits. The gloom began to press in closer to me, and it became an effort of will to hold up the light in my amulet against it. A few steps more and the air grew even colder. Walking forward became an effort, like wading through waist-deep water. I had to lean against it, and I heard a grunt of effort come out of my mouth.

"What's wrong?" Rawlins asked, his voice tight.

We passed under one of the hotel's emergency light fixtures, its floodlights only dim orange rings in the murk until my amulet's light burned the shadows away. "Dark magic," I growled through clenched teeth. "A kind of ward. Trying to keep me from moving ahead."

He huffed out a breath and muttered, "Christ. Magic. That isn't real."

I stopped and gave him a steady look over my shoulder. "Are you with me or not?"

He swallowed, staring up at the dim circles of light that were all he could see of another set of emergency lights. "Crap," he muttered, wiping a sudden beading of sweat from his brow despite the cold air. "You need me to push you or something?"

I let out a bark of tense laughter, and forced my power harder against the gloomy ward, hacking at it with the machete of my will until I began to chop a path through the dark working, picking up speed. As I did, the sense of the spell became more clear to me. "It's coming from up ahead of us," I said. "The first conference room in this hall."

"They got it set up for movies," Rawlins said. He seized a sobbing and terrified man in his middle years and deflected him bodily to the wall, snapping the same orders to him. "God, it was packed in there. If the crowd panicked-"

He didn't finish the sentence, and he didn't need to. Chicago has seen more than a few deaths due to a sudden panic in a movie theater. I redoubled my efforts and broke into a heavy, labored jog that led us to a pair of doors leading into the first conference room. One of the doors was shut, and the other had been slammed open so hard that it had wrenched its way clear of one of the hinges.

From inside the room came a sudden burst of terrified screams-not the canned screams you get in horror movies. Real screams. Screams of such base, feral intensity that you could hardly tell they had come from a human throat. Screams you only really hear when there are terrible things happening.

Rawlins knew what they meant. He spat out a low curse, lifting his gun to a ready position, and we rushed forward to the room side by side.

The murk began to do more than simply drag at me when I hit the doorway. The air almost seemed to congeal into a kind of gelatin, and it suddenly became a fight to keep my legs moving forward. I snarled in sudden frustration, and transformed it into more will that I sent coursing down through my silver pentacle amulet. The soft radiance emanating from the symbol became a white-and-cobalt floodlight, driving back the gloom, burning it from my path. It left the large room still coated in shadow, but it was no longer the total occlusion of the magical murk.

It was a long room, about sixty feet, maybe half that wide. At the far end of the room was a very large projection screen. Chairs faced it in two columns. At one point in the aisle between them, a projector sat, running at such a frantic speed that smoke was rising from the reels of celluloid. The projected movie still appeared clearly on the screen, in a frantic fast-motion blur of faces and images from a classic horror film from the early eighties. The soundtrack could only be heard as a single, long, piercing howl.