came a white-and-cobalt floodlight, driving back the gloom, burning it from my path. It left the large room still coated in shadow, but it was no longer the total occlusion of the magical murk.
It was a long room, about sixty feet, maybe half that wide. At the far end of the room was a very large projection screen. Chairs faced it in two columns. At one point in the aisle between them, a projector sat, running at such a frantic speed that smoke was rising from the reels of celluloid. The projected movie still appeared clearly on the screen, in a frantic fast-motion blur of faces and images from a classic horror film from the early eighties. The soundtrack could only be heard as a single, long, piercing howl.
There were still about twenty people in the room. Immediately beside the door was an old woman, curled on her side on the ground, sobbing in pain. Nearby a wheelchair lay overturned, and a man with braces of some kind on his legs and hips had fallen into an awkward, painful-looking sprawl from which he could not arise. One of his arms was visibly broken, bone pushing at skin. Other people cringed against the walls and beneath chairs. When my wizard light flooded the place, they got up and started staggering away, still screaming in horror.
Straight ahead of me were bodies and blood.
I couldn't see much of them. Three people were down. There was a lot of blood around. A fourth person, a young woman, crawled toward the door making frantic mewling sounds.
A man stood over her. He was nearly seven feet tall and so thick with slabs of muscle that he almost seemed deformed-not pretty bodybuilder muscle, either, but the thick, dull slabs that come from endless physical labor. He wore overalls, a blue shirt, and a hockey mask, and there was a long, curved sickle in his right hand. As I watched, he took a pair of long steps forward, seized the whimpering girl by her hair, and jerked her body into a backward bow. He raised the sickle in his right hand.
Rawlins didn't bother to offer him a chance to surrender. He took a stance not ten feet away, aimed, and put three shots into the masked maniac's head.
The man jerked, twisting a bit, and released the girl's hair abruptly, tossing her aside with a terrible, casual strength. She hit a row of chairs and let out a cry of pain.
Then the maniac turned toward Rawlins and, even though the mask hid his features, the tilt of his head and the tension of his posture showed that he was furious. He went toward Rawlins. The cop shot him four more times, flashes of bright white burning the image of the maniac and the room onto my eyes.
He brought the sickle down on Rawlins. The cop managed to catch the force of it upon his long flashlight. Sparks flew from the steel case, but the light held. The maniac twisted the sickle, so that the tip plowed a furrow across Rawlins's forearm. The cop snarled. The flashlight spun to the ground. The maniac raised the sickle again.
I braced myself, raised my staff and my will, and cried, "Forzare!"
Unseen power lashed from my staff, pure kinetic energy that ripped through the air and hit the maniac like a wrecking ball. The blow drove him back down the aisle, through the air. He hit the projector on its stand. It shattered. He went through it without slowing down. He kept going, the flight of his passage tearing through the large projection screen, and hit the back wall with a thunderous impact.
I sagged in sudden exhaustion, the effort of the spell an enormous drain on me, and had to plant my staff on the ground to keep from falling over. My headache flared up with a vengeance, and the light of my amulet and staff both faded.
There were a few more screams, the quick, light sound of frightened feet, and I whirled. I saw someone flee the room from the corner of my eye, but I didn't get much of a look at them. A second later, the room returned to normal, the lights back, the broken projector still spinning one reel at reduced speed, a loose tongue of film slap-slap-slapping the broken casing.
Rawlins advanced, gun still out, his eyes very wide, down to the far end of the room. He went past the screen and looked behind it, gun in firing position. He looked around for a second, then back at me, his expression baffled.
"He's not here," Rawlins said. "Did you see him go that way?"
I just didn't have enough left in me to speak right at that moment. I shook my head.
"There's a dent in the wall," he reported. "Covered in… I dunno what. Some kind of slime."
"He's gone," I grunted. Then I started forward, toward the downed people. Two of them were young men, the third a young woman. "Help me."
Rawlins holstered his weapon and did. One of the young men was dead. There was a crescent-shaped cut in his thigh that had opened an artery. Another lay mercifully unconscious, a bruise on his head, several hideous inches of bloody innards protruding from a slash across his belly. I was afraid that if we moved him, his guts might come popping out. The girl was alive, but the sickle's tip had drawn a pair of long lines down her back along the spine, and the cuts had been vicious and deep. Bits of bone showed and she lay on her belly, her eyes open and blinking but utterly unfocused, either unwilling or unable to move.
We did what we could for them, which wasn't much more than jerking the tablecloths off the water tables in the corner and improvising soft pads out of them to apply to open wounds. The second girl lay on her side nearby, sobbing hysterically I checked on the old woman, who had just had the wind knocked out of her. I hauled the guy who'd fallen from his wheelchair into a slightly more comfortable position and he nodded thanks at me.
"See to the other victim," Rawlins said. He held the pad against the boy's opened abdomen, putting gentle pressure on it as he jerked out his radio. It squealed with feedback and static when he used it, but he managed to get emergency help headed our way.
I went to the sobbing girl, a tiny little brunette wearing much the same clothes as Molly had been. She'd been bruised up pretty well, and from the way she lay on the floor she could evidently not move without feeling agony. I went to her and felt over her left shoulder gently. "Be still," I told her quietly. "It's your collarbone, I think. I know it hurts like hell, but you're going to be all right."
"It hurts, it hurts, hurts, hurts, hurts," she panted.
I found her hand with mine and squeezed tight. She returned it with a desperate pressure. "You'll be all right," I told her.
"Don't leave me," she whimpered. Her hand was all but crushing mine. "Don't leave."
"It's all right," I said. "I'm right here."
"What the hell is this?" Rawlins said, panting. He looked around him, at the corpse, at the movie screen, at the dent in the wall beyond. "That was the Reaper, the freaking Reaper. From the Suburban Slasher films. What kind of psycho dresses up as the Reaper and starts…" His face twisted in sudden nausea. "What the hell is this?"
"Rawlins," I said, in a sharp voice, to get his attention.
His frightened eyes darted to me.
"Call Murphy," I told him.
He stared at me blankly for a second, then said, "My captain is the one who has to make the call on that one. He'll decide."
"Up to you," I said. "But Murphy and her boys might actually be able to do something with this. Your captain can't." I nodded at the corpse. "And we aren't playing for pennies here."
Rawlins looked at me. Then at the dead boy. Then he nodded once and picked up his radio again.
"Hurts," the girl whimpered, breathless with pain. "Hurts, hurts, hurts."
I held her hand. I patted it awkwardly with my gloved left hand while we heard sirens approach.
"My God," Rawlins said again. He shook his head. "My God, Dresden. What happened here?"
I stared at the enormous rip in the movie screen and at the Reaper-shaped dent in the wooden panels of the wall behind it. Clear gelatin, the physical form of ectoplasm, the matter of the spirit world, gleamed there against the broken wood. In minutes it would evaporate, and there would be nothing left behind.
"My God," Rawlins whispered again, his voice still stunned. "What happened here?"
Yeah.
Good question.
The authorities arrived and replaced crisis with aftermath. The EMTs rushed the more badly injured girl and the eviscerated young man to an emergency room, while police officers who arrived on the scene did what they could to take care of the other injured attendees until more medical teams could show up. I stayed with the injured girl, holding her hand. One of the EMTs had examined her briefly, saw that though in considerable pain she was not in immediate danger, and ordered me to stay with her and keep anyone from moving her until the next team could arrive.
That suited me fine. The thought of standing up again was daunting.
I sat with the girl as more police arrived. She had become quiet and listless as her fear faded and her body produced endorphins to dull the pain. I heard a gasp and the sudden sound of pounding feet. I looked up to see Molly slip by a patrolman and fling herself down beside the girl.
"Rosie!" she cried, her face very pale. "Oh my God!"
"Easy, easy," I told her, putting a hand against Molly's shoulder to prevent her from embracing the wounded girl. "Don't jostle her."
"She's hurt," Molly protested. "Why haven't they put her in an ambulance?"
"She's not in immediate danger," I said. "Two other people were. The ambulance took them first. She goes on the next one."
"What happened?" Molly asked.
I shook my head. "I'm not sure yet. I didn't see much of it. They were attacked."
The girl on the floor suddenly stirred and opened her eyes. "Molly?" she said.
"I'm here, Rosie," Molly said. She touched the injured girl's cheek. "I'm right here."
"My God," the girl said. Tears welled from her eyes. "He killed them. He killed them." Her breathing began to come faster, building toward panic.
"Shhhhhhh," Molly said, and stroked Rosie's hair back from her forehead as one might a frightened child. "You're safe now. It's all right."
"The baby," Rosie said. She slid her hand from mine and laid it over her belly. "Is the baby all right?"
Molly bit her lip and looked at me.
"She's pregnant?" I asked.
"Three months," Molly confirmed. "She just found out."
"The baby," Rosie said. "Will the baby be all right?"
"They're going to do everything possible to make sure that you're both all right," I said immediately. "Try not to worry about it too much."
Rosie closed her eyes, tears still streaming. "All right."
"Rosie," Molly asked. "Can you tell me what happened?"
"I'm not sure," she whispered. "I was sitting with Ken and Drea. We'd already seen our favorite scene in the movie and we decided to go. I was bending over to get my purse and Drea was checking her makeup and then the lights went out and she started screaming… And then when I could see again, he was there." She shuddered. "He was there."
"Who?" Molly pressed.
Rosie's eyes opened too wide, showing white all around. Her voice dropped to a whisper. "The Reaper."
Molly frowned. "Like in the movie? Someone in a costume."
"It couldn't be," Rosie said, her trembling growing more pronounced. "It was him. It was really him."
The next medical team arrived and headed right for us. Rosie seemed to be on the verge of another panic attack when she saw them, and started thrashing around. Molly leaned in close, whispering to her and continually touching her head, until the EMTs could get to work.
I stepped back. They got Rosie loaded onto a stretcher. When they laid her arm down by her side, I could see several small, round marks, irregular bruises, and damaged capillaries just under the surface of the skin at the bend of her arm.
Molly stared at me for a second, her eyes wide. Then she helped the EMTs throw a blanket over Rosie and her track marks. The EMTs counted to three and lifted the stretcher, flicked out the wheels underneath, and rolled her toward the doors. The girl stirred and thrashed weakly as they did this, letting out whimpering little cries
