I ducked down the next alley between buildings, circling back toward where I hoped Grey and Deirdre would be waiting to give me some backup, but they were not to be found. As I looked, I saw Tessa emerge from the back door of Harvey’s office and begin hurrying after us. There wasn’t much foot traffic on this block, and I saw Tessa shuck out of her overcoat on the run. In another moment, she’d take her demonic form and close in on us.

If she was truly out to disrupt her husband’s plans, Tessa wasn’t worried about causing a scene. If she could stir up the city’s police forces, so much the better. She’d happily become that hideous bug thing she turned into and rip Harvey’s skull apart.

“Dammit,” I said, fleeing down the street, away from Harvey’s office and my compatriots. I didn’t have much choice. Tessa had me outnumbered. I might have been able to take my chances in a fight with her and some armed thugs, but I couldn’t fight them and protect Harvey at the same time. If I stood my ground, they’d take him. So I ran, to buy myself some time to think.

As I did, I realized that I didn’t have to beat them in a fight. All I had to do was stall them, or hold them off long enough for Deirdre and Grey to catch up with me. While I didn’t trust either of my companions to give a damn about me, they needed Harvey to carry out the plan, and the farther I ran, the more likely it was that I might accidentally lose my own backup.

We reached a building that had been abandoned; its windows were boarded up and covered with graffiti. It would have to do. I whirled toward it, unleashed another blast of energy from my staff, and blew a hole the size of a garbage can in the plywood and the glass beyond.

“Come on,” I said. “Stay close.”

“What are you doing?”

“We’re playing hide-and-seek,” I said, and lunged into the building. Harvey stared slack-jawed at me for a second, but then glanced back toward Tessa.

His face went pale, and his eyes widened. He made a few strangled noises, and then thrust himself through the hole, almost sprawling into the broken glass. I caught him and set him on his feet.

The building had been a retail store of some kind, and most of it was one large room. There were still clothing racks scattered around the place, along with the detritus of long-term abandonment. The only light came in around the edges of its boarded-up windows, and through the hole I’d blasted. Shadows crawled everywhere.

I headed deeper into the building, stumbling blindly over things on the floor while my eyes struggled to shift from the light of the spring morning to the gloom of the store’s interior. I almost ran into a wall before I saw it, but once I had, I was able to make out just enough shapes to realize that the shop had a doorway leading back to some restrooms and what were probably managerial offices of some kind.

Ipushed Harvey into the hallway, then stepped into the doorway between him and the rest of the shop, raising my staff to the horizontal and preparing a shield spell. It wasn’t anything like ideal, but it was a better defensive position than I could get on the street outside. They’d all have to come at me from the same direction. “Stay low,” I advised him. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“We should be running,” he panted. “Shouldn’t we? Calling the police?”

“Cops got better things to do than get killed,” I said.

He blinked. “What?”

“Seriously, you don’t recognize that reference either? Hell’s bells, Harvey, do you even go to the movies?”

Shadows moved in the shaft of light provided by my impromptu portal, and figures entered the abandoned store. Three gunmen, then four—and then something that might have been a praying mantis, only hundreds of times too large, complete with googly, faceted bug eyes and a second set of glowing green eyes open above them.

It took Tessa only a second to spot me. Then she darted toward me over the floor, moving with terrible, insectlike speed, and I triggered the shield spell. The runes on my staff flared green-white again, and a fine curtain of blue-green light washed out from the oak, covering the doorway.

Tessa stopped in front of it, maybe ten feet away. Then she pointed at the door with one long leg and said, in a perfectly normal human voice, “Open fire.”

The gunmen didn’t hesitate. Their silenced weapons went clickity-clack, and sparks and flashes of light bounced up from my shield where the bullets struck. Foiling them wasn’t a terrible strain. Subsonic ammunition is slow-moving by its very nature, and each individual round carried considerably less force when it struck than it would have at full speed.

“Hold,” the mantis-thing said.

The gunmen stopped firing.

The giant bug stared at me for a long moment. Then its jaws opened, and opened, and opened some more, and Tessa’s face and head emerged from its mouth, flaccid chitin peeling back like a hood. Her skin and hair were covered in some kind of glistening slime. She was an odd one to look at. She didn’t look like she could be out of her teens when she didn’t have wardrobe to lend her its gravitas, and her apparent youth was magnified by the fact that she was a tiny woman, under five feet tall. She was pretty, the high school girl next door.

Of course, she’d been walking the earth for more than a millennium before there were any high schools.

“Hello, Dresden,” Tessa said.

“Hi, Tessa,” I replied.

“The upright hero Harry Dresden,” she said, “working for Nicodemus Archleone. Did Lasciel finally talk you into taking up her Coin?”