Martin took one look at Susan and stiffened. Then he hurried over to us.
"Take her," I rasped. Martin picked up Valmont and carried her to the limo like a sleepy child. I followed him. Martin put the blond thief in and got behind the wheel. Susan slipped in after her, and I slung the tube off my shoulder to get in behind her.
Something grabbed me from behind, wrapping around my waist like a soft, squishy rope. I slapped at the car door, but I managed only to slam it shut as I was hauled back off my feet. I landed on the ground near the fire door.
"Harry!" Susan shouted.
"Go!" I gasped. I looked at Martin, behind the wheel of the limo. I grabbed the Shroud and tried to throw it at the car, but something pinned my arm down before I could. "Get out! Get help!"
"No!" Susan screamed, and tried for the door.
Martin was faster. I heard locks click shut on the limo. Then the engine roared, and the car screamed into the street and away.
I tried to run. Something tangled my feet and I couldn’t even get off the ground. I turned to find Nicodemus standing over me, the hangman’s noose the only thing he wore that wasn’t soaked with blood. His shadow, his freaking shadow was wrapped around my waist, my legs, my hands, and it moved and wriggled like something alive. I reached for my magic, but the grasping shadow-coils grew suddenly cold, colder than ice or frosted steel, and my power crumbled to frozen powder beneath it.
One of the shadow-coils took the courier’s tube from my numbed hands, curling through the air to hand it to Nicodemus. "Excellent," he said. "I have the Shroud. And I have you, Harry Dresden."
"What do you want?" I rasped.
"Just to talk," Nicodemus assured me. "I want to have a polite conversation with you."
"Blow me."
His eyes darkened with cold anger, and he drew out the heavy revolver.
Great, Harry, I thought. That’s what you get for trying to be a hero. You get to eat a six-pack of nine-millimeter bon-bons.
But Nicodemus didn’t shoot me.
He clubbed me over the head with the butt of the gun.
Light flashed in my eyes, and I started to fall. I was out before my cheek hit the ground.
Chapter Twenty-one
The cold woke me.
I came to my senses in complete darkness, under a stream of freezing water. My head hurt enough to make the wound on my leg feel pleasant by comparison. My wrists and shoulders hurt even more. My neck felt stiff, and it took me a second to realize that I was vertical, my hands bound together over my head. My feet were tied too. My muscles started jumping and twitching under the cold water and I tried to get out from under it. The ropes prevented me. The cold started cutting into me. It hurt a lot.
I tried to get loose, working my limbs methodically, testing the ropes, trying to free my hands. I couldn’t tell if I was making any progress. Thanks to the cold, I couldn’t even feel my wrists, and it was too dark to see.
I got more scared by the moment. If I couldn’t work my hands free, I might have to risk using magic to scorch the ropes. Hell, I was cold enough that the thought of burning myself had a certain appeal. But when I started trying to reach out for the power to manage it, it slithered away from me. Then I understood. Running water. Running water grounds magical energies, and every time I tried to get something together the water washed it away.
The cold grew more intense, more painful. I couldn’t escape it. I panicked, thrashing wildly, dull pain flaring in my bound limbs, and fading away into numbness under the cold. I screamed a few times, I think. I remember choking on water while I tried.
I didn’t have much energy. After a few minutes, I hung panting and hurting and too tired to struggle any more, the water only getting colder, bound limbs screaming.
I hurt, but I figured the pain couldn’t possibly get any worse.
A few hours went by and showed me how wrong I was.
A door opened and firelight stabbed at my eyes. I would have flinched if I had been able to move that much. A couple of large, blocky men came through the door carrying actual flaming torches. The light let me see the room. The wall beside the door was finished stone, but the walls all around me were a mishmash of fallen rubble and ancient brick, and one was made of curved concrete—some kind of piping for the city’s water system, I supposed. The ceiling was all rough earth, some stone, some roots. Water poured down from somewhere, over me, and vanished down a groove worn in the floor.
They had taken me to Undertown, a network of caves, ruined buildings, tunnels, and ancient construction that underlay the city of Chicago. Undertown was dark, damp, cold, full of various creatures that shunned sunlight and human company, and might have been radioactive. The tunnels where the Manhattan Project had been housed were just the start of Undertown. The people who knew of its existence didn’t come down here—not even wizards like me—unless matters were desperate.
No one knew their way around down here. And no one would be coming to find me.
"Been working out pretty hard," I muttered to the two men, my voice a croak. "One of you guys got a cold beer? Maybe a freeze pop?"
They didn’t so much as look at me. One man took up a position on the wall to my left. The other took the wall to my right.
"I should have cleaned up, I know," I told them. "If I’d realized I was having company I’d have taken a shower. Mopped the floor."
No answer. No expression on their faces. No nothing.
"Tough room," I said.
"You’ll have to forgive them," said Nicodemus. He came through the door and into the torchlight, freshly dressed, shaved, and showered. He wore pajama pants, slippers, and a smoking jacket of Hugh Hefner vintage. The grey noose still circled his throat. "I like to encourage discretion in my employees, and I have very high standards. Sometimes it makes them seem standoffish."
"You don’t let your goons talk?" I asked.
He removed a pipe from his pocket, along with a small tin of Prince Albert tobacco. "I remove their tongues."
"I guess your human resources department isn’t exactly under siege, is it," I said.
He tamped tobacco into his pipe and smiled. "You’d be surprised. I offer an excellent dental plan."
"You’re going to need it when the formal-wear police knock your teeth out. This is a rented tux."
His dark eyes glittered with something ugly. "Little Maggie’s youngest. You’ve grown up to be a man of considerable strengths."
I stared at him for a long second, shivering and startled into silence. My mother’s name was Margaret.
And I was her youngest? As far as I knew, I had been an only child. But I knew precious little of my parents. My mother died giving birth to me. My father had suffered an aneurism when I had been about six years old. I had a picture of my father on a piece of yellowed newspaper I kept in a photo album. It showed him performing at a children’s benefit dinner in a small town in Ohio. I had a Polaroid instant picture showing my father and my mother, her stomach round with pregnancy, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial. I wore my mother’s pentacle amulet around my neck. It was scarred and dented, but that’s to be expected when you run around using it to kill werewolves.
They were the only concrete things I had left of my parents. I’d heard stories before, that my mother hadn’t run with a very pleasant crowd. Nothing of substance, just inferences made from passing comments. I’d had a demon tell me that my parents had been murdered, and the same creature had hinted that I might have relatives. I’d shied away from the whole concept, deciding that the demon had been a dirty liar.