“Harry,” he said. “Trouble.”

“What’s happening?”

“Nicodemus is about to kill Anna Valmont.”

“And you’re here?”

“Four of them and one of me,” he said.

I got out the key to my manacles and made sure it was handy.

“Dresden,” Ascher said, her voice tense, “if you blow out the electronics, you’ll blow the whole job!”

“I love it when a posh bird talks dirty!” called Binder merrily, from upstairs.

I ground my teeth, took my staff in my right hand, and said to Michael, “Come on.”

And then I took off down the hallway.

Thirty-five

The hallway beyond the first security door ran for a bit less than a hundred feet, and I found the mental shields against my various pains fluttering as I put more demand on my body. I ground my teeth and got through it, while Michael moved with effortless, well, grace at my side, even steadying me once when I wobbled.

At the end of the hall was another security door with a hole scorched through the wall beside it—and again I was treated to the stench of burned Genoskwa hair.

I ducked and went through the hole with Michael right behind me, and found myself in a room that was walled on two sides with what at first glance looked like lockers and which I realized a second later were security-deposit boxes. Minimum security, I guessed, where people stored copies of their important paperwork and such, from the size of them.

The third wall was made of obdurate, unjointed steel, broken only by a large steel door with a relatively small, unobtrusive control panel in its center. The panel didn’t look like cutting-edge tech to me. It was simply a keypad, a large combination wheel, and a small LED display.

Anna Valmont stood in front of the control panel with her tool roll splayed out on the floor beside her feet, all her equipment at the ready. She had what looked like a small flashlight in her hand. She was facing not the door, but Nicodemus.

The leader of the Denarians stood off to one side, his little automatic in his hand, pointing it steadily at Valmont. Deirdre stood on his right, and Grey on his left. The Genoskwa was a giant blur against the wall behind them and a stench in the air.

“I still don’t see the problem,” Nicodemus said.

“The problem,” Valmont said, her eyes flicking nervously to me, “is that this isn’t the door from the plans you gave me.”

“My information sources are impeccable,” Nicodemus replied. “They assure me that the door I showed you was the one installed when the bank was built.”

“Obviously, they aren’t as smart as they think they are,” Valmont replied tartly. “Marcone must have had the door changed out secretly after it was installed.”

“Then open this door,” Nicodemus said, andgestured with the gun. “Now.”

“You don’t get it,” Valmont said. “With the blueprints and a day to plan, I might have been able to crack the door. Maybe. This one is another Fernucci, but it’s a custom job, and it could be designed completely differently. Not only that, but this door . . .”

A horrible instinct hit me. “Hell’s bells. It’s wired, isn’t it?”

Grey scowled at me. “How did you know that?”

Because my brother’s girlfriend had seen Marcone defending one of his strongholds with her own eyes a few years before, against an angry Fomor sorcerer. He’d had the place rigged with mines and defensive strong points and booby traps. Thomas had told me about it. But all I said to Grey was, “How? I’m a freaking wizard, that’s how.”

Valmont gave me a grim nod, and jerked her head toward the hole in the wall where we’d entered. “We’re lucky Ascher didn’t set them off on the way in.”

I padded over to the wall and examined it. At the edges of the scorched hole, I could see the melted plastic edges of shapes I recognized from previous horrible experiences—claymore antipersonnel mines. They’d been set into the wall, between the concrete and the drywall, facing into the room.

I swallowed. One claymore, when detonated, would spew hundreds of ball bearings out in a broad arc in front of it, a giant’s shotgun. I counted eight of the devices, stacked vertically, one per linear foot. I think the things were about a foot across.

So. Assume Marcone wanted anyone who tried to force their way into his vault reduced to salsa. Assume he was perfectly well aware how hard a lot of supernatural beings were to hurt. How would he handle it?

Overkill, that’s how.

I was guessing he’d installed one claymore mine per square foot of wall. Multiply that by, for simplicity’s sake, three hundred ball bearings each, and you had a whole freaking lot of round pieces of metal waiting to tear us all to shreds. They would bounce around the steel walls of this room like BBs rattling around the inside of a tin can and render any physical body in it to churned meat sauce.

“Fun,” I said. I turned to Nicodemus and said, “Looks like this party is over. You weren’t sufficiently prepared.”

“We aren’t stopping now,” Nicodemus said, staring at Valmont. “Open the vault, Miss Valmont.”

“It would be stupid,” Valmont said. “I think I could have done the first one. This is a door I know nothing about. Even if I do everything right, I could run into something that trips the circuit just because I don’t know it’s there.”

“I’m going to give you three minutes to open the vault, Miss Valmont. After that, I’ll kill you.”