Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

The potion hadn’t been a very potent one—I’d spent most of my effort on the actual blending potion to keep us concealed—and it wouldn’t last long. The cloak’s batteries already looked like they were getting weaker, its movements less frantic. We might not have time enough to make it to the door, in fact. I hurried my pace a little, as much as I dared.

And, halfway to the door, two figures abruptly flared into full color and looked right at us.

I froze as the dragon Ferrovax, still sitting in his chair, smoke dribbling from his nostrils, stared right at me—and gave me a slow, toothy smile.

Oh, Hell’s bells.

If he raised the alarm, we were done.

Ferrovax inhaled in preparation to call out.

And, over the sounds of the room, I heard three sharp, quick raps of wood on stone.

I whipped my head in the other direction to see Vadderung, also in full color, still seated, still faced off against Ferrovax. His black eye patch lent him a particularly sinister aspect. He held a stylish cane of silvery hardwood in his right hand. Some trick of the light cast a shadow three times the length of the cane on the wall behind him. Vadderung stared at Ferrovax without blinking. A tiny smile touched the corner of his mouth.

Holy crap. The last time a dragon had been slain out here in the tangible, mortal world, it had been in a region called Tunguska. If Ferrovax decided to throw down in the middle of a city as large and as crowded as Chicago, the death toll could be the most catastrophic, concentrated loss of human life in history.

And it would kind of be my fault.

My heart began to pound. I looked back at the disguised dragon with wide eyes.

Ferrovax didn’t look at me. I probably wasn’t worth noticing, by his standards. My only noticeable feature, as far as he was concerned, was my ability to set myself on full smartass before conversing with dragons. He regarded Vadderung for a moment with hooded eyes. Then his partly open mouth twitched into a smirk and closed. He exhaled the breath he’d been going to use to call me out through his nose, along with two heavy plumes of acrid-smelling smoke.

I looked back at Vadderung. He didn’t take his gaze from the dragon. He just twitched one of his knees toward the exit.

I gave him a tight nod and a wolfish grin, and we pressed on.

We made it out of the great hall and into the passage beyond just as the energy animating Ramirez’s cape began to run out. From the entry antechamber, Childs appeared with his dog, and they both hurried toward us, and they both remained monochromatic as they passed us.

I picked up the pace even more. We hurried out the front, and I hoped to God that Murphy had remembered to drink her portion of the blending potion as well.

She had. She’d rented a car for the occasion, and Lara’s people had provided false plates. The lights of the luxury sedan came up and she pulled smoothly into the street, coming to a halt nearby.

We hurried to the car. Murphy leaned out the window, and something in her eyes became easier when she saw me. “How’d it go?”

I winked at her. “I think we’ll get away with it if we run fast enough,” I said.

Lara got into the backseat first, and I pushed Thomas after her. Between the two of us, we got him wrestled in. Freydis followed him, and I circled toward the passenger-side door.

I had just opened it when a large truck rushed up toward us from the other direction, engine roaring, and I had a horrible flash of realization—the blending potion’s real problem was that it was just too damned strong. It was entirely possible that the driver of the vehicle hadn’t really noticed us or our car. The potion’s magic might have influenced their subconscious to tell them that we were a large cardboard box or something, just aching to be run over.

But the truck swerved at the last minute, coming up onto the sidewalk with a couple of wheels, and screeched to a halt outside the Brighter Future Society.

The external valets and staff stood around confused by this turn of events, except for one security guard who was fumbling for both his weapon and his radio, shouting into it in a high-pitched, terrified voice.

He got a couple of words out before the doors to the truck rolled up and something that sounded like a broken piece of pneumatic machinery tore his torso to ribbons and sent a scarlet fan of blood onto the wall behind him. What hit the ground wasn’t a person for much longer.

A dozen men in black tactical uniforms came pouring out of the back of the truck, holding suppressed semiautomatic carbines. They opened fire, the sound mostly a fuzzy cloud of clacks, hisses, and whumps.

It was over in maybe three seconds. None of the valets or staff survived. The ones still moving after they fell got bullets to the head.

“Holy shit,” Murphy breathed. Her gun had appeared in her hand.

“Don’t move,” I warned. “Don’t fire. Lara?”

The vampire’s voice was tense. “They aren’t mine.”

“Clear!” snapped one of the soldiers, and I recognized him with a surge of rage. His name was Listen. He was medium-sized, of innocuous build, his head was as smooth as a cue ball, and he had led the tactical aspect of the Fomor’s efforts here in Chicago—which was the polite way to say that he and his turtlenecks had spent years kidnapping minor magical talents and dragging them off to God knew what fate for his masters. He’d also killed or escaped from everyone who had tried to interfere with his mission.

I hate when the bad guys have good help.

Listen walked briskly back to the truck, bowed his head, and said, “Majesty, your will is done.”

“Excellent,” rasped a heavy, burbling voice. There was the sound of footsteps and a being descended from the truck. It stood nearly eight feet in height and reminded me of nothing so much as an enormous toad with an excellent tailor. He wore silk robes that were somehow reminiscent of Edo-style kimonos, but with the smooth lines subtly twisted. Between the design and the bizarre, disturbing imagery of the embroidery upon the sea-colored fabrics of each layer of robes, I was feeling a little queasy.

The guy wearing the robes was no looker, either. His face was too large and lumpy to be human. His mouth was so wide he could have eaten a banana sideways, and his lips were like rubbery, black, rotten fruits of the same variety. His skin was pocked and warty and a sickly blue-green where it wasn’t ghostly pale, and his eyes were huge, watery, protruding, and disturbing. He had hair like withered black seaweed, draping over his head and shoulders in uneven clumps. He moved with a kind of frantic, jerky energy, and my instincts sized him up as someone dangerous and not particularly sane.

King Corb of the Fomor, I presumed.

The Fomor monarch leered down at the corpses for a moment before raising his gaze to Listen again. “Bring us within, Captain.”

Listen snapped to attention and began barking orders to his “men.” The turtlenecks were human, technically, but the Fomor had messed with them, sculpting flesh to their liking. The members of this crew would be quicker, tougher, and stronger than any normal bunch of mortals, and they could be damnably tough to kill, like ghouls. They responded at once, lining up on either side of the doorway.

Corb descended from the truck, spun on his heel, and, with a surprising amount of poise and grace, fell to one knee at the foot of the ramp, his head bowed.

I felt my eyebrows go up.

Footsteps sounded on the ramp once more, heavier this time. A generally humanoid, generally feminine figure in a heavy, hooded cloak of some oddly metallic fabric descended the ramp a deliberate step at a time. Whoever she was, she was taller than Corb and had to unfold herself carefully from the truck. Her bare feet were visible, their proportions perfect, simply huge. They looked like she’d had them bronzed a long time ago, and the bronze had been covered with verdigris and then polished irregularly. It formed lumps and nodes over her skin like molten wax, but flexed and moved as if alive. Flickers of metallic and colored crystals were embedded in that bronze exoflesh.