Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files, Book 8) by Jim Butcher

Author:Jim Butcher [Butcher, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2007-02-05T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-seven

We plotted, the fallen angel and me. It went fast. It turns out that holding an all-mental conversation gets things done at the literal speed of thought, without all those clunky phonemes to get in the way.

Barely a minute had passed when I opened my eyes and said very quietly to Rawlins, “You’re right. They’ll kill you. We have to get out of here.”

The cop gave me a pained grimace and nodded. “How?”

I struggled and sat up. I rolled my shoulders a little, trying to get some blood flowing through my arms, which had been manacled together underneath me. I tested the chain. It had been slipped through an inverted U-bolt in the concrete floor. The links rattled metallically as they slid back and forth.

I checked Crane at the noise. The man kept speaking intently into his cell phone, and took no apparent notice of the movement.

“I’m going to slip one of these manacles off my wrist,” I told him. I nodded at a discarded old rolling tool cabinet. “There should be something in there I can use. I’ll cut us both out.”

Rawlins shook his head. “Those two going to stand there watching while we do all that?”

“I’ll do it fast,” I said.

“Then what?”

“I kill the lights and we get out.”

“Door is chained shut,” Rawlins said.

“Let me worry about that.”

Rawlins squinted. He looked very tired. “Why not,” he said, nodding. “Why not.”

I nodded and closed my eyes, slowed my breathing, and began to concentrate.

“Hey,” Rawlins said. “How you going to slip your cuffs?”

“Ever heard about yogis, out east?”

“Yogi Berra,” he said at once. “And Yogi Bear.”

“Not those yogis. As in snake charmers.”

“Oh. Right.”

“They spend a lifetime learning to control their body. They can do some fairly amazing stuff.”

Rawlins nodded. “Like fold themselves up into a gym bag and sit inside it at the bottom of a pool for half an hour.”

“Right,” I said. I followed Lasciel’s instructions, sinking into deeper and deeper focus. “Some of them can collapse the bones in their hands. Use their muscles and tendons to alter tensions. Change the shape.” I focused on my left hand, and for a moment was a bit grateful that it was already so badly maimed and mostly numb. What I was about to do, even with Lasciel’s instruction, was going to hurt like hell. “Keep an eye out and be ready.”

He nodded, holding still and not turning his head toward either Crane or Glau.

I dismissed him, the warehouse, my headache, and everything else that wasn’t my hand from my perceptions. I had the general idea of what was supposed to happen, but I didn’t have any practical, second-to-second knowledge of it. It was a terribly odd sensation, as though I were a skilled pianist whose fingers had suddenly forgotten their familiarity with the keys.

Not too quickly, murmured Lasciel’s voice in my head. Your muscles and joints have not been conditioned to this. There was an odd sensation in my thoughts, somehow similar to abruptly remembering how to tie a knot that had once been thoughtlessly familiar.

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