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And Susan had lied to—
    Before I could begin circling the block a few more times on that vicious cycle, a cold feeling went slithering down my spine.
    I didn’t even look around. Several years of tense missions with Wardens not old enough to buy their own beer had taught me to trust my instincts when they went insane in a darkened city at two in the morning. Without even thinking about it, I crouched, reached into the air surrounding me, and drew a veil around myself.
    Veils are subtle, tricky magic, using one of several basic theories to render objects or people less visible than they would be otherwise. I used to suck so badly at veils that I wouldn’t even try them—but I’d had to bone up on them enough to be able to teach my apprentice, Molly Carpenter, how to use them. Molly had a real gift and had learned quickly, but I’d been forcing her to stretch her talents—and it had taken a lot of personal practice time for me to be able to fake it well enough to have credibility in front of the grasshopper.
    Long story short—fast, simple veils were no longer beyond my grasp.
    The street darkened slightly around me as I borrowed shadow and bent light. Being under a veil always reduced your own ability to see what was happening around you, and was a calculated risk. I figured it was probably worth it. If someone had a gun pointed my way, I had a long damned run before I could get around the corner of a nice thick building. It would be better to be unseen.
    I crouched next to the car, not quite invisible but pretty close. The ability to be calm and still was critical to actually using a veil. It is hard to do when you think danger is close and someone might be planning to part you from your thoughts in a purely physical fashion. But I arrested the adrenaline surge and regulated my breathing. Easy does it, Harry.
    So I had a dandy view of half a dozen figures that came darting toward the office building with a hideous, somehow arachnid grace. Two of them were bounding along rooftops, vaguely humanoid forms that moved as smoothly as if they were some kind of hunting cat. Three more were closing on the building from different angles at ground level, gliding from shadow to shadow. I couldn’t sense much of them beyond blurs in the air and more shivers along my spine.
    The last form was actually scuttling down the sides of buildings on the same street, bounding from one to the next, sticking to the walls like an enormous spider and moving with terrible speed.
    I never got more of a look than that—flickering shadows moving with sinister purpose. But I knew what I was looking at.
    Vampires.
    Red Court vampires.
    They closed on my office building like sharks on bloody meat.
    The tempest in my chest suddenly raged, and as I watched them vanish into the building— my fricking building—like cockroaches somehow finding a way to wriggle into places they shouldn’t be, the anger rose up from my chest to my eyes, and the reflections of streetlights in the window glass tinted red.
    I let the vampires enter the building.
    And then I gathered up my fury and pain, honing them like immaterial blades, and went in after them.

4
    My blasting rod was hanging from its tie on the inside of my coat, a stick of oak about eighteen inches long and a bit thicker than my thumb. The ridges of the runes and sigils carved into it felt comfortably familiar under the fingers of my right hand as I drew it out.
    I went up to the building as silently as I could, let myself in with my key, and dropped the veil only after I was inside. It wasn’t going to do anything to hide me from a vampire that got close—they’d be able to smell me and hear my heartbeat anyway. The veil would only hamper my own vision, which was going to be taxed enough.
    I didn’t take the elevator. It wheezed and rattled and would alert everyone in the building to where I was. I checked the index board in the lobby. Datasafe, Inc., resided on the ninth floor, five stories above