Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)(96)

My hand quivered, clenched spasmodically once, and suddenly felt heavy, as if a large, slightly damp beach towel had been draped across it.

“On me,” I whispered. “Here we go.”

And then I spread my fingers out as if guiding a marionette, started wiggling them, and Lara and I started hauling Thomas out, Freydis close behind us.

The potion I’d slipped onto Ramirez’s cloak had been half of the brew. The stuff currently on my hand was the other half. The two were magically linked by a drop of my blood, the most powerful agent for magical bindings known to reality. With that bond formed, it was a simple enough trick to send a pulse of energy from my hand over to poor Carlos’s cloak.

The grey cloth abruptly flared, whipped wildly around as if in a hurricane wind, and promptly dragged the young Warden off his feet and across the floor—toward the back of the hall, in the opposite direction of the front door.

People and not-people let out noises of distress. Several dozen security teams bolted for their primaries. A lot of folks got tackled to the floor by their own retainers. I caught a glimpse of Molly being surrounded by a group of Sidhe and hustled to one side of the room—and I recognized one of them, the goddamned Redcap. The murderous Sidhe assassin had traded in his baseball cap for a scarlet headband of a leather whose origins I shuddered to consider.

We moved through the chaos as Carlos struggled with his cloak. He managed to unfasten it, and the damned thing promptly began flapping around like an enormous bat.

And it worked. The room stayed black-and-white. Everyone’s paranoia was so focused on the potential threat that they didn’t have enough cognitive cycles left to be paranoid about us.

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.