less ask questions. She just took off her shoes and handed them to me.
I put a gentle hand on her shoulder, then touched Sarah’s face until she lifted her eyes to me. “I don’t understand what’s happening,” she whispered.
“Stay with Molly,” I told Sarah. “She’s going to take care of you. Do whatever she says. All right?” I frowned down at her expensive black heels. “Gucci?”
“Prada,” she said in a numb voice.
Being all manly, I know dick about shoes, but hopefully it wouldn’t blow my cover as Thomas’s mystery man. “Give them to me.”
“All right,” she said, and did, too shocked to argue.
Thomas had been right about the larpers. The corpse of Sarah’s innocence lay on the floor along with her last meal, and she was taking it pretty hard.
I fought down a surge of anger and rose without another word, padding out from the protection of Molly’s veil, shoes gripped in one hand, my gun in the other. The .44 might as well have been Linus’s security blanket. It wouldn’t do a thing to help me against a vampire of the Black Court—it just made me feel better.
I went as fast as I could without making an enormous racket and stalked up the nearest stairs—a deactivated escalator. Once I’d reached the second level, I took a right and hurried toward Shoegasm.
It was a fairly spacious shop that had originally occupied only a tiny spot, but after ironing out some early troubles, the prosperous little store had expanded into the space beside it. Now, behind a steel mesh security curtain, the store was arranged in an oh-so-trendy fashion and sported several huge signs that went on with a thematically appropriate orgasmic enthusiasm about the store’s quality money-back guarantee.
“I am totally underappreciated,” I muttered. Then I raised my voice a little, forcing a very slight effort of will, of magic, into the words as I spoke. “Keef! Hey, Keef! It’s Harry Dresden!”
I waited for a long moment, peering through the grating, but I couldn’t see anything in the dim shadows of the store. I took a chance, slipping the silver pentacle amulet from its chain around my neck, and with a murmur willed a whisper of magic through the piece of jewelry. A soft blue radiance began to emanate from the silver, though I tried to keep the light it let out to a minimum. If Drulinda or her vampire buddies were looking even vaguely in my direction, I was going to stand out like a freaking moron holding the only light in an entire darkened shopping mall.
“Keef!” I called again.
The cobb appeared from an expensive handbag hung over the arm of a dressing dummy wearing a pair of six-hundred-dollar Italian boots. He was a tiny thing, maybe ten inches tall, with a big puff of fine white hair like Albert Einstein. He was dressed in something vaguely approximating nineteenth-century urban-European wear— dark trousers, boots, a white shirt, and suspenders. He also wore a leather work belt thick with tiny tools, and he had a pair of odd-looking goggles pushed up over his forehead.
Keef hopped down from the dressing dummy and hurried across the floor to the security grate. He put on a pair of gloves and pulled out a couple of straps from his work belt. Then, nearly as nimble as a squirrel and very careful not to touch the metal with his bare skin, he climbed up the metal grate using a pair of carabiners. Keef was a faerie, one of the Little Folk who dwelled within the shadows and hidden places of our own world, and the touch of steel was painful to him.
“Wizard Dresden,” he greeted me in a Germanic accent as he came level with my head. The cobb’s voice was pitched low, even for someone as tiny as he. “The market this night danger roams. Here you should not be.”
“Don’t I know it,” I replied. “But there are people in danger.”
“Ah,” Keef said. “The mortals you insist to defend. Unwise that battle is.”
“I need your help,” I said.
Keef eyed me and gave me a firm shake of his head. “The walking dead very dangerous are. My people’s blood it could cost. That I will risk not.”
“You owe me, Keef,” I growled.
“Our living. Not our lives.”
“Have it your way,” I said. Then I lifted up one of Sarah’s shoes and, without looking away from the little cobb, snapped the heel off.
“Ach!” Keef cried in horror, his little feet slipping off the metal grate.
There was a chorus of similar gasps and cries from inside Shoegasm.
I held up the other shoe and did it again.
Keef wailed in protest. All of a sudden, thirty of the little cobbs, male and female, pressed up to the security grate. All of them had the same frizzy white hair, all of them dressed like something from Oktoberfest, and all of them were horrified.
“
I took a step to my left and held the broken shoes over a trash can.
The cobbler elves gasped, all together, and froze in place.
“Do not do this,” Keef begged me. “Lost all is not. Repaired they can be. Good as new we can fix them. Good as new! Do not throw them away.”
I didn’t waver. “I know things have been hard for your people since cobblers have gone out of business,” I said. “I got you permission for your clan to work here, fixing shoes, in exchange for taking what you need from the vending machine. True?”
“True,” Keef said, his eyes on the broken shoes in my hand. “Wizard, over the trash you need not hold them. If dropped they are, trash they become, and touch them we may not. Lost to all will they be. Anything we both will regret let us not do.”
Anxious murmurs of agreement rose from the other cobbs.
Enough of the stick—it was time to show them the carrot. I held up Molly’s battered old Birkenstocks. The sight made several of the more matronly cobbs cluck their tongues in disapproval.
“I helped set you up with a good deal here at Shoegasm,” I said. “But I can see you’re getting a little crowded. I can get you another good setup—a family, seven kids, mom and dad, all of them active.”
The cobbs murmured in sudden excitement.
Keef coughed delicately and said, staring anxiously at the broken heels in my hand, “And the shoes?”
“I’ll turn them over to you,” I said, “if you help me.”
Keef narrowed his eyes. “Slaves to you we are,” he snapped. “Threatened and bribed.”
“You know the cause I fight for,” I said. “I protect mortals. I’ve never tried to hide that, and I’ve never lied to you. I need your help, Keef. I’ll do what it takes to get it—but you know my reputation by now. I deal fairly with the Little Folk, and I always show gratitude for their help.”
The leader of the cobbs regarded me steadily for a moment. Nobody likes being strong-armed, not even the Little Folk, who are used to getting walked on, but I didn’t have time for diplomacy.
Keef’s gaze kept getting distracted by the shoes, dangling over the trash can, and he made no answer. The other cobbs all waited, clearly taking their cue from Keef.
“Show of good faith, Keef,” I said quietly. I took the broken shoes and set them gently on the ground in front of the shop. “I’ll trust you and your people to repair them and return them. And I’ll pay in pizza.”
The cobbs gasped, staring at me as if I’d just offered them a map to El Dorado. I heard one of the younger cobbs exclaim, “
“Fleeting, pizza is,” Keef said sternly. “Eternal are shoes and leather goods.”
“Shoes and leather goods,” the rest of the cobbs intoned, their tiny voices solemn.
“Few mortals to the Little Folk show respect, these days,” Keef said quietly. “Or trust. True it is that beneath this roof we are crowded. And unto the wizard, debt is owed.” He gave the shoes a professional glance and nodded once. “Under your terms, and within our means, our aid is given. Your need unto us speak.”
“Scouts,” I said at once. “I know there are Black Court vampires in the mall. I need to know exactly how many and exactly where they are.”
“Done it will be,” Keef barked. “Cobbs!”
There was a little gust of wind, and I was suddenly alone. Oh, and both Sarah’s expensive heels and Molly’s clunky sandals were gone, the latter right out of my hands and so smoothly that I hadn’t even noticed them being
