"Well, well," Alicia said. She hadn't moved, other than to turn toward me. "I've never heard of you, but I must admit that you know how to make an entrance, Harry Dresden."

"I took lessons," I said.

"Give me the book," she said.

"Ha," I said. "Why?"

"Because I want it," she said.

"Sorry. It's the hot Christmas present this year," I said. "Maybe you can find a scalper in a parking lot or something."

She tilted her head, the fingers of her hand still flickering with little shimmers, like heat rising from asphalt. "You refuse?"

"Yes, moppet," I told her. "I refuse. I deny thee. No, already."

Her eyes narrowed in anger and… well, something happened that I hadn't ever seen before. The store got darker. I don't mean that the lights went out. I mean everything got darker. There was a low, trembling sensation that seemed to make my eyeballs jiggle a little, and the shadows simply expanded up out of the corners and dim areas of the store like time-lapse photography of growing molds. As they slid over portions of the store, that nasty, greasy sensation of cold came with them. When the shadows washed over an outlet that housed the power cords to a pair of table lamps, the lamps themselves went dim and then died out. They covered the old radio, and Aretha Franklin's voice faded away to a whisper and vanished. The shadows got to the register and its lights went out, and when they brushed the old ceiling fan it began to whirl down to a stop. The shadows crept over Bock and he went pale and started shaking. He thrust one hand down onto the counter as if he had to do it to keep himself upright.

The only place the darkness didn't spread was over me. The shadows stopped in a circle all around me, maybe six inches away from me and the things I was carrying. The Hellfire smoldering in the runes of my staff glowed more brightly in the darkness, and the tiny sparks falling in a steady rain from my damaged shield bracelet seemed to burn away tiny pockets of the darkness where they fell, only to have it slide back in once they had burned away.

This was a kind of power I hadn't felt before. Normally when someone who can sling major mojo around draws their stuff up around them, it's something violent and active. I'd seen wizards who charged the air around them with so much electricity it made their hair stand on end, wizards whose power would gather light into nearly solid gem-shaped clouds that orbited around them, wizards whose mastery of earth magic literally made the ground shake, wizards who could shroud themselves in dark fire that burned anyone near them with the raw, emotional rage of their magic.