have a choice.”
The seated young man looked frightened, and did as Fitz told him.
“What are we doing?” asked another of the gunmen. He was smaller than the others, and his tone wasn’t challenging—it was a question.
“The truck’s stolen. They can’t trace it to us,” Fitz explained, dusting snow off his hands. “Even if the winter breaks tomorrow, it’ll be days before this melts and they find the weapons. With luck, they’ll never connect the two.”
“That’s long-term,” the little one said. “I sort of want to survive the night.”
Fitz almost smiled. “You want to walk down the streets of fucking Chicago with assault weapons in your hands? We could keep them out of sight in the truck. Not out here.”
The little guy nodded. “I can keep the knife, right?”
“Out of sight,” Fitz said, and lifted his head, listening and frowning. Sirens were a common sound in nighttime Chicago, but they had shifted from background noise to something louder, nearer. “Get moving, people.”
Fitz jammed his hands into the pockets of his rather light coat and started walking. The others hurried to keep up with him.
I walked next to Fitz, studying him. I was more impressed with the young man in the lousy attack’s aftermath than I had been during the drive-by. Any idiot can point a gun and squeeze a trigger. Not everyone can keep themselves calm and rational in the wake of an automobile collision, weigh the liabilities of the situation, and make—and enforce—their decisions in the face of opposition. Though the attack had been amateurish, it had not been stupid, and Fitz’s actions in response to the sudden hitch Sir Stuart had thrown into his plans were probably as ideal as the situation allowed.
Fitz was smart under pressure, he was a natural leader, and I had a bad feeling that he was the sort of person who never made the same mistake twice. He had just done his best to kill several people I cared a great deal for. Brains plus resolve equals dangerous. I’d have to see to it that he was neutralized at the first opportunity.
I followed them through cold I no longer felt and practiced vanishing. I’d jump ahead of them, behind them, onto ledges above them—all the while trying not to notice that the sky was getting lighter.
Something bothered me about the redheaded kid.
With the cops on the way, the store alarm ringing, his associates bleeding and dazed around him . . . why take a few extra, vital seconds to empty the guns? It had cost him about half a minute of time he certainly couldn’t afford to lose. Why do it?
I asked myself why I might do something similar. And the only answer I could come up with involved preventing whoever found the weapons from getting hurt. Fitz was willing to riddle a small Chicago house—and potentially the houses behind it, given the power of the weapons in question—with bullets, but he got all safety conscious when disposing of weapons? It was a contradiction.
Interesting.
Even more interesting was the fact that I’d cared enough to notice. Generally, if someone took a swing at my friends, I’d cheerfully designate him a target and proceed to make his world a noisy and dangerous place until he wasn’t a threat anymore. I didn’t lose a lot of sleep over it, either.
But I couldn’t just throw myself into the fight now, dammit. And, unlike before, those who threatened my friends could
We were absolutely no threat to one another. That made it sort of hard to keep my inner kettle of outrage bubbling along at maximum boil.
Fitz kept them all moving through the snowbound streets, stopping only once to check on the bleeder’s nose. Packing it in snow had stopped the blood loss, but the young man was disoriented from the wreck and the pain. There were other small injuries among his crew, and he stopped at a little convenience store, emerging with a bottle of water and an economy-sized bottle of painkillers. He passed them off to the short, inquisitive kid, and told him to double-dose everyone—and to keep moving.
It took them most of an hour of steady trudging through the cold to clear Bucktown and head for the South Side. A lot of people think of the South Side as a sort of economic desert crossed with a gang-warfare demilitarized zone. It isn’t like that—or at least, it isn’t like that everywhere. There are neighborhoods you don’t want to walk through wearing certain colors, or being a certain color, but they’re more exception than rule. The rest of the South Side varies pretty widely, with plenty of it zoned for industry, and Fitz and his group of battered pedestrians headed into an area on the fringe of an industrial park to a manufacturing facility that had been closed and abandoned for several years.
It took up a block all by itself, a big building only a couple of stories high that covered acres of ground. The plows had piled snow higher and higher around it, like a fortress wall, with no need to create an opening for the unoccupied building. Fitz and his crew went over the wall of snow at a spot that had evidently been worked with shovels to form narrow, if slippery, stairs. There was a foot and a half of snow covering the building’s parking lot, with a single pathway shoveled out of it. They followed it in single file, to doors that looked as if they’d been solidly chained shut—but Fitz rattled the chains and nudged one of the doors open wide enough for the crew of youngsters, all of them still skinny, to squeeze through.
I went through the doors ghost style and tried to ignore the discomfort, the way Sir Stuart did. It hurt anyway—not enough to make me howl in agony or anything, but way too much to simply lose track of. Maybe it just took time for your “skin” to toughen. At least there hadn’t been a threshold, which would have stopped me cold. This place had never been meant to be anyone’s home, and evidently nobody who lived there thought of it as anything special. The exact process that formed a threshold had never been fully explained or documented, but it might be a good idea for me to get a better idea of the exact why and how, given my circumstances.
“No, it is not a good idea. Focus, Dresden,” I muttered. “The idea is for you to take care of business so you never have to learn all about the environmental factors of long-term ghostosity.”
Fitz stopped long enough to do a head count, out loud, as the ragged troop of would-be gangsters moved deeper into the building. It was an industrial structure and it had been built for economy, not beauty. There weren’t a lot of windows, and it was definitely on the shady side—even with dawn almost here and the lights of the city and sky reflecting from fresh snow. Cold, too, judging from the way the breath was congealing into fog every time the young men exhaled.
Fitz broke out a camping light and flicked it on. It was a red one, and didn’t so much light the way as clarify the difference between utter darkness and not-quite darkness. It was enough for them to move by.
“I wonder,” I mused aloud. After all, I was immaterial. Ghosts and the material universe didn’t seem to have a completely one-way relationship, the way mortals and physics did. I didn’t actually have pupils to dilate anymore. Hell, for that matter, light apparently passed right through me—how else was I invisible to everyone, otherwise? Which meant that, whatever it might seem like, I wasn’t really
“There’s no real reason I should need the light to see, is there?” I asked myself.
“No,” I said. “No, there isn’t.”
I closed my eyes for a few steps and focused on a simple memory—when, as a kid in a foster home, I’d first found myself in a dark room when a storm knocked out the power. It was a new place, and I had fumbled around blindly, searching for a flashlight or matches or a lighter, or any other source of light, for almost ten minutes before I found something—a decorative snow globe commemorating the Olympics at Lake Placid. A small switch turned on a light that made the red, white, and blue snowflakes drifting in the liquid gleam in sudden brilliance.
The panic in my chest had eased as the room became something I could navigate safely again, my fear fading. I could see.
And when I opened my ghostly eyes, I could see the hallway through which we walked with perfect clarity, as plainly as if the long-dead fluorescents overhead had been humming along at full glow.
A quick, pleased laugh escaped me. Now I could see in the dark. “Just like . . . uhhh . . . I can’t think of an X-Man who I’m sure could see in the dark. Or was that a Nightcrawler thing . . . ? Whatever. It’s still another superpower. There is no spoon. I am completely spoonless over here.”
