bolt hole

The storage rental facility was located a couple of blocks from Deerfield Square in a fairly upscale suburban neighborhood north of Chicago proper. Most of the buildings nearby were residential, and it was tough to go more than a quarter of an hour without spotting a patrol car.
I'd picked it as the spot for my bolt hole for one reason: shady characters would stand out against the upper-middle-class background like mustard stains under a black light.
Granted, it would probably work even better if I wasn't one of them.
I used my key at the security gate, and Thomas pulled the van around to my unit, a storage unit the size of a two-car garage. I unlocked the steel door and rolled it up while Thomas got Morgan out of the van. Molly followed, and when I beckoned, she wheeled Morgan into the storage space. Mouse got down out of the van and followed us. I rolled the door back down, and called wizard light to the amulet I held up in my right hand, until its blue-white glow filled the unit.
The interior of the place was mostly empty. There was a camp cot, complete with sleeping bag and pillow, placed more or less in the middle of the room, along with a footlocker I had filled with food, bottled water, candles, and supplies. A second footlocker sat next to the first one, and was filled with hardware and magical gear-a backup blasting rod, and all manner of useful little items one could use to accomplish a surprisingly broad spectrum of thaumaturgic workings. A camp toilet with a couple of jugs of cleaning liquid sat on the opposite side of the cot.
The floor, the walls, and the ceiling were covered in sigils, runes, and magical formulae. They weren't proper wards, like the ones I had on my home, but they worked on the same principles. Without a threshold to build them upon, no single one of the formulae was particularly powerful-but there were lots of them. They began to gleam with a silvery glow in the light coming from my amulet.
"Wow," Molly said, staring slowly around her. "What is this place, Harry?"
"Bolt hole I set up last year, in case I needed someplace quiet where I wouldn't get much company."
Morgan was looking, too, though his face was pale and drawn with pain. He swept his eyes around and said, "What's the mix?"
"Concealment and avoidance, mostly," I replied. "Plus a Faraday cage."
Morgan nodded, glancing around. "It looks adequate."
"What's that mean?" Molly asked me. "A Faraday what?"
"It's what they call it when you shield equipment from electromagnetic pulses," I told her. "You build a cage of conductive material around the thing you want to protect, and if a pulse sweeps over it, the energy is channeled into the earth."
"Like a lightning rod," Molly said.
"Pretty much," I said. "Only instead of electricity, this is built to stop hostile magic."
"Once," Morgan corrected me primly.
I grunted. "Without a threshold to work with, there's only so much you can do. The idea is to protect you from a surprise assault long enough for you to go out the back door and run."
Molly glanced at the back of the storage unit and said, "There's no door there, Harry. That's a wall. It's kind of the opposite of a door."
Morgan nodded his head at the back corner of the space, where a large rectangular area on the floor was clear of any runes or other markings. "There," he said. "Where's it come out?"
"About three long steps from one of the marked trails the Council has right of passage on in Unseelie territory," I said. I nodded at a cardboard box sitting in the rectangle. "It's cold there. There're a couple of coats in the box."
"A passage to the Nevernever," Molly breathed. "I hadn't thought of that."


Turn Coat Chapter 12, Page 104-106