People started screaming as flickering gloom descended, though as luck would have it, the band still had light enough to play by and, after a stutter, kept going. The octokongs, knocked back several yards before they could spread out their tentacles and grab onto the floor, let out enormous, feral roars of defiance, and at that terrifying sound, genuine panic began to spread through the ballroom. A few seconds later, someone must have pulled a fire alarm, because an ear-piercing mechanical whoop began to cycle through the air.

So, basically: Harry Dresden, one; peaceful gathering, zero.

I grabbed Valmont by the hand and darted to one side, shoving scarlet cloth aside with my other hand and running blindly forward through it. The Fomor would be on our heels any second. Anything I could have unleashed that would have killed or disabled the Fomor crew would have caused even more collateral damage and might have gotten someone killed in the relatively limited confines of the ballroom. All I’d done was knock them back on their heels—but I wasn’t trying to win a fight. I just wanted to get us out in one piece.

I didn’t know where Ascher had gotten off to, but the Fomor were after Valmont. Ascher had survived being hunted by the White Council for years. I imagined she could get herself out of a hotel without my help.

“What are we doing?” Anna shouted.

“Leaving!”

“Obviously. Where?”

“Fire stairs!” I called back. “I’m not getting stuck in an elevator with one of those things!”

We plunged out of the obscuring curtains, and I tripped on a chair, stumbled, and banged my hip hard into the buffet table. I might have fallen if Valmont hadn’t hauled on my arm.

I pointed toward the door the caterers had been using and got my feet moving again. “There! Fire stairs down the hall, to the right.”

“I saw the signs too,” she snapped.

We rushed through the doors, rounded the corner, and I found myself facing two more of the flat-eyed Fomor servitors, both of them bigger and heavier than average and wearing their more common uniform—black slacks with a tight black turtleneck.

And machine guns.

I don’t mean assault rifles. I mean full-on automatic weapons, the kind that come with their ammunition in a freaking box. The two turtlenecks had obviously been placed to cover the stairs, and they weren’t standing around being stupid. The second I came around the corner, one of them lifted his weapon and began letting loose chattering three- and four-round bursts of fire.

In movies, when someone shoots at the hero with a machine gun, they hit everything around him but they don’t actually hit him. The thing is, actual machine guns don’t really work like that. A skilled handler can fire them very accurately, and can lay down so many rounds that whatever he’s shooting at gets hit. A lot. That’s why they make machine guns in the first place. Someone opens up on you with one of those, and you havetwo choices—get to cover or get shot multiple times. I was less than fifty feet away, down a straight, empty hallway. He could barely have missed me if he’d been trying.

I threw back my right arm, hauling Anna Valmont behind me, and lifted my left arm, along with my will, snapping out, “Defendarius!”

Something tugged hard at my lower leg, and then my will congealed into a barrier of solid force between us and the shooter. Bullets struck it, sending up flashes of light as they did, revealing it as a half-dome shape with very ragged edges. The impact of each hit was visceral, felt all the way through my body, like the beat of a big drum in a too-loud nightclub. Heavy rounds like that were specifically designed to hit hard and penetrate cover. They could kill a soldier on the other side of a thick tree, chew apart a man in body armor, and reduce concrete walls to powder and rubble.

Without a magical focus to help concentrate my shield’s energy, it took an enormous amount of juice to keep it dense enough to actually stop the rounds, while slowing them down enough to keep them from simply ricocheting everywhere. Rounds like that would penetrate the walls and ceiling of the Peninsula as if going through soft cheese. Innocent people five floors away could be killed if I didn’t slow the bullets as they rebounded, and the metal-clad slugs bounced and clattered to the floor around me.

That didn’t deter the turtleneck. He started walking slowly forward in the goofy-looking, rolling, heel-to-toe gait of a trained close-quarters gunman, the kind of step that kept his eyes and head and shoulders level the whole time he was moving. He kept firing steady, controlled bursts as he approached, filling the hallway with light and deafening thunder, and it was everything I could do just to keep the bullets off of us.

Holding the shield in place was a job of work, and within seconds I had to drop to one knee, reducing the size of the shield needed as I did. I had to hold on for a little longer. Once the turtleneck ran dry, he’d have to change weapons or reload his magazine, and then I’d have a chance to hit back.

Except that his buddy was advancing right next to him, not firing. Ready to take over the second the first turtleneck’s weapon ran out. Gulp. I wasn’t sure I had the juice to hang on that long.

I was missing my shield bracelet pretty hard at that point—but it hadn’t been with me when I woke up under the island of Demonreach, and I hadn’t had the time or the resources to make another one since. My new staff would have done just fine, but it was just a little bit harder to sneak that thing into a formal gathering.

I needed a new plan.

Valmont shouted something at me. I was concentrating so hard, I barely heard her the first time. “Close your eyes!” she screamed. Then she tensed and moved and something flew over the faintly glowing top edge of my shield and clattered to the ground at the turtlenecks’ feet.