Skin Game

by Jim Butcher

  I found myself inside the quarterstaff’s reach, and promptly slammed my head against the end of the ghoul’s muzzle. He let out a yowl of surprise and anger, his forward momentum abruptly stalled, and I followed up with a one-armed push using every bit of muscle the Winter mantle could muster.

  The ghoul staggered back several steps and then his feet went out from under him!

  Hope sparked and kindled will. As the ghoul fell, I let out a triumphant howl of “Infriga!”

  Winter howled into the little store for the fifth time in maybe sixty seconds, blanketing the fallen ghoul warrior in absolute cold and boiling fog. I panted frantically for a couple of seconds, until the fog boiled away enough to let me see the warrior ghoul in its frozen sarcophagus.

  “Harvey!” I croaked. “Harvey, sound off!”

  “Oh God!” Harvey sobbed. “Oh God!”

  “Yeah, or that,” I muttered, and hurried toward the sound.

  I reached him just as the other two ghouls pounded their way through the wall. Harvey let out a shockingly high-pitched squealing sound and scrambled in helpless panic on the slippery ice.

  I raised my frost-coated right hand, gathered my will for another spell—

  —and found a patch of white blankness in front of my eyes. I blinked and suddenly I was sitting on the ice next to Harvey, wondering how I’d gotten down there.

  Winter, I realized. I called up too much power, too fast, with too little chance to rest. I’d burned up my reserves of magical energy, to the point where it threatened to rob me of consciousness. But even now, I didn’t feel magically exhausted.

  Of course you don’t feel it, dummy. You’re the Winter Knight.

  I blinked a couple of times, and then looked down at my left arm, which was sending me some sort of odd, pulsing sensation.

  My duster’s sleeve was being distended from the inside by something pointy. It took me an effort of conscious observation and logical processing to realize that it was my own broken arm.

  A seven-foot section of the ice wall suddenly shattered and fell to the floor with a groan.

  I shoved myself to my feet with my good arm as the other two warrior ghouls came through the opening.

  No magic.

  No weapons.

  No options.

  I set my teeth in a defiant, futile snarl and the ghouls pounced.

  Nineteen

  Both ghouls came at me, as the most dangerous target in sight, ignoring the sobbing Harvey. I didn’t blame them. I’d have made the same call.

  All three of us were wrong.

  The warrior ghouls came at me from different angles, so that I could have nailed only one of them, even if I’d had the energy to call up another blast of Winter. It meant that one ghoul had to bound to one side and then rush me. The other one just leapt over Harvey’s screaming figure.

  Goodman Grey killed that one first.

  As the ghoul passed over him, Harvey’s eyes went cold and calm, and one arm swept out. I didn’t see it actually change, as much as I had an impression that the arm was, for a second, in an entirely different shape—a hard, inward-curving sickle, moving with fantastic speed. There was a shearing sound combined with a thunk, like a schoolroom paper cutter, but wetter and meatier, and suddenly the ghoul’s top and bottom halves were spinning off on separate arcs.

  Then the second ghoul was on top of me, and even with the extra strength of the Winter mantle, it was everything I could do to keep its teeth off my throat. If it hadn’t been for my duster, its claws would have shredded my torso in the second it took Grey to reach me.

  There was a sense of motion more than anything I could actually see, and something vaguely gorilla-like seized the ghoul in enormous hands, and threw him away from me with such power that I heard joints dislocating from the force of the throw. The ghoul hit a still-standing portion of the wall of ice and went right through it, splattering fluids in the process. Before it had gone all the way through the wall, a blur that reminded me of some kind of big hunting cat hit it in midair and bore it to the ground, out of sight behind the fog and the rubble of the wall.

  The ghoul let out a single, weak, gurgling scream.

  Then it went quiet.

  Something moved on the other side of the wall. A few seconds later, there was a long exhalation and Goodman Grey appeared, stepping calmly over what was left of the wall. Something was twitching in death on the floor beyond him, though I couldn’t make out any details—and didn’t want to. Ghouls don’t die easy, and they don’t go out any way but messy. The one he’d bisected was making scrabbling noises from two different directions in the fog.

  He looked around for a moment, pursed his lips and nodded, and said, “Good move, splitting them up like that, and in the fog, too. Smart. Don’t see that much in people your age.”

  “There’s always more of them than me,” I said, and got to my feet. I had a feeling that I didn’t want to be sitting on the ground bleeding, with a broken arm, around Goodman Grey. You don’t give predators like that ideas—and at that moment, the casually dressed, unremarkable-looking little guy was scaring me more than had the ghouls and Tessa together.

  I kept any tremor out of my voice and asked, “Where’s Harvey?”

  “Over here,” Grey said. He looked exactly as relaxed as he had before, as if he had just paused to throw away an empty paper cup, rather than tearing two ghouls to shreds. His eyes lingered on my wounded arm. “I only had a few seconds to make the switch and he wouldn’t quiet down. I had to knock him out.”

  I gave him a hard look. Then I took a couple of steps to the frozen ghoul who had taken my staff from me and reached down to wrench it free of the Winter ice. It crumbled for me obligingly, yielding the tool back into my hand. A couple of the ghoul’s clawed fingers broke off and came with it. I shook them off of it with a grimace, turned to Grey, and said, “Show me.”

  He lifted his eyebrows at me for a moment. He might have smiled a bit, but nodded and waved for me to follow him. He didn’t seem in the least worried about turning his back on me.

  Hell’s bells. For all I knew, the shapeshifter had eyes in the back of his head.

  Grey led me to the side of the sales floor, where old metal-frame shelves had once held magazines. He grabbed one and hauled it easily aside.

  Harvey Morrison’s corpse lay on the other side.

  His throat had been cut, neatly, by something sharp. There was an unholy mess on the floor around him. His eyes were open and staring sightlessly up at the ceiling. The blood was still pulsing out, though he was white enough that I knew that it was too late. He was dead. His body was still figuring it out.

  I lifted my eyes slowly to Grey.

  The shapeshifter stared down at Harvey with a very faint frown on his face. He looked up at me and said, “Huh. Awkward.”

  “You think this is funny?” I asked him. I knew my voice sounded hot.

  “I think it stinks,” Grey said, and looked back at Harvey. “I only choked him out.”

  “You would say that, though, if you were trying to screw me over.”

  “No, I wouldn’t,” Grey said. “I’d tell you I cut his cowardly throat because it was simpler.”

  “You would?”

  “It’s not as if you frighten me, Dresden. Lying well takes a lot of effort, and it gets old after a few centuries. Mostly I don’t bother.” He nudged Harvey’s shoulder with the toe of his shoe. “But someone went to a lot of effort to get this done. Did it fast. Got out just as fast.”

  “Where’s Deirdre?” I asked.

  “She was supposed to be chasing her mother away after you bloodied her nose for her.” He knelt down on the floor beside Harvey and then leaned closer, inhaling through his nose like a hound. “Nngh.” He considered for a moment. “Too much fresh blood and damned ghoul stench. Can’t get anything through it.” He looked
up at me. “What about you?”

  “If I had twenty-four hours to collect gear and another five or six to go over the place, maybe I could turn up something,” I said.

  We looked at each other. I think we were both thinking that the other one wasn’t telling us something he knew. Except that I was actually ignorant, whereas I was pretty sure Grey had scented more than he let on. But he struck me as the suspicious sort.

  Evidently, Grey had me figured the same way. He let out an impatient sigh. “Wizard. You know I’m telling you the truth, right?”

  “Right,” I said. “Sure you are. We’re a trustworthy bunch of Boy Scouts.”

  That got what almost looked like a genuine wry smile out of him. He leaned down and closed Harvey’s eyes with one hand, the motion almost respectful. In the same gesture, he ran his fingers through the thickening puddle of blood.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Getting what we came for,” he said. “Got to have the blood sample for what’s coming up. You’ll have to tell Nicodemus where I am.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “Morrison Fiduciary Services, for the rest of the day,” he said. “The point of not killing Harvey was to avoid the possibility that he’d be noticed if he went missing. So he’s about to not go missing.”

  “You’re going to fake being a confidential and knowledgeable financial expert to people you’ve never met before for the rest of the day?” I asked him, my voice heavy with sarcasm.

  “Yes,” Grey said calmly.

  I felt my eyebrows going up. “You’re that good?”

  “I’m better,” he said. His eyes glinted weirdly and it made me shudder.

  “What about Harvey’s body?”

  “He didn’t have any family. And you’ve got two ghouls on ice,” he said. “Leave them where they are. They’ll take care of him for us when they thaw out.”

  That made me grind my teeth. “Maybe I should take them out now. Those guys were different than the usual ghoul. I don’t feel like giving them a second shot at me.”

  “Whatever,” Grey said. “I need to get moving.”

  Grey started lapping the fresh blood out of his cupped hand. He grimaced, and then shuddered, and a second later, he looked exactly like the corpse at his feet, clothes and all. He leaned over and took Harvey’s glasses out of his shirt pocket. He wiped the blood off them on a corner of Harvey’s shirt, and then put them on. “Better get someone to look at that arm, eh?”

  I eyed my broken arm distractedly and then said, “Grey.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m not leaving Harvey’s body to be eaten by ghouls. And if you’ve got a problem with that, then we can discuss it right now.”

  Grey looked at me with Harvey’s face and then nodded once. “Your call. You do it.”

  And he padded off through the rapidly thinning fog toward the opening I’d blasted in the store’s window, and vanished onto the street.

  I looked down at Harvey’s corpse. Then I said, “I’m sorry.” It seemed inadequate. I was going to promise him that I would punish his murderer—but Harvey was beyond that now.

  The dead don’t need justice. That’s for those of us who are left looking down at the remains.

  I pushed the heavy shelves back in front of Harvey’s body. The authorities would probably find him in a couple of days. It wasn’t dignified, but there wasn’t a lot more that I could do—and I really didn’t feel like making a run on Hades’ vault only to find a batch of mythological badasses waiting to kill us all the moment we came in. So I did what I could.

  I didn’t have much left in the way of a magical punch. But I did have the strength of my good arm and a big heavy stick. I used them to shatter the frozen ghouls into chunks, and then I left the store too, and shambled back out to the rental car, feeling tired and sick and useless.

  Twenty

  I wasn’t sure where I was driving. The important thing was to drive.

  Some part of me was noting, with more than a little alarm, that I was not behaving in any kind of rational fashion. The numbers weren’t adding up. I had a badly broken arm. We were on the clock. I had left Karrin by herself among that crew, though I felt fairly sure that Ascher and Binder wouldn’t kill her out of hand, and that Nicodemus had no good reason to do so. Yet. But I had only Grey’s word that he had gone where he said he meant to go. For all I knew, he’d doubled back to the warehouse to indulge his interest in Karrin. Unlikely, maybe, but I still didn’t like the idea of leaving her there.

  On the other hand, I couldn’t go back either. Not with my arm hurt like that. Showing weakness to that crew was not an option.

  I checked to be sure that my arm wasn’t bleeding. It wasn’t, but I nearly crashed into a car that had come to a stop in front of me while I was looking. Whatever the mantle of the Winter Knight did for me, the damage was catching up to me now. Maybe I couldn’t feel the pain, but the mantle had to draw its energy from something, and the most logical source was me. The pain didn’t hurt, but it was still being caused by a very real injury, and covering that pain was costing me in exhaustion and focus.

  I needed help.

  Right. Help. I should drive to Butters, get him to set the arm and splint it.

  But instead I found myself parking the car in front of a pretty, simple, Colonial home in Bucktown. It was a lovely house, unpretentious and carefully maintained. There was a large oak tree out front, a couple more in the back, and a freshly painted white picket fence surrounded the front yard. A new mailbox, handmade and hand-carved, rested on a post beside the fence’s gate. Metallic gold lettering on the mailbox’s side read: THE CARPENTERS.

  I put the car in park and eyed the house nervously.

  I hadn’t been there since my last trip to Chicago, the year before. I’d stopped by when I’d been pretty sure no one was home, like a big old coward, to collect my dog, Mouse, for a secret mission.

  Doing so had permitted me to craftily dodge my first meeting with my daughter since I’d carried her from the blood-soaked temple in Chichén Itzá, from the deaths of thousands of vampires of the Red Court—and from her mother’s body, dead by my hand.

  Her name was Maggie. She had dark hair and eyes, just like Susan, her mother.

  Beautiful Susan, who I’d failed, just like I’d failed Harvey.

  And after that, I’d taken Molly Carpenter out and gotten her involved with some of the most dangerous beings I knew. Because she’d been helping me, Molly had fallen prey to the power games of the Sidhe—and now, for all I knew, she wasn’t even truly human anymore.

  Molly, who I’d failed, just like I’d failed Harvey.

  What the hell was I doing here?

  I left the car and shambled up to the gate. After a brief pause, I opened it, and continued to the front door.

  I knocked, wondering who might be home. It was the middle of the day. The kids would all be in school. For a second, I debated fleeing, driving away. What was I hoping to accomplish here? What could I possibly do here that would make victory in my treach-off with Nicodemus any more likely?

  It was wholly against reason.

  I stood on the front porch of Michael Carpenter’s house, and only then did I realize that I was crying, and had been for a while. Again, I considered simple, childish flight. But my feet didn’t move.

  A moment later, a good man opened the door.

  Michael Carpenter was well over six feet tall, and if he didn’t have quite the same musculature he’d carried when he’d been an active Knight of the Cross, he still looked like he could take most men apart without breaking a sweat. His brown hair was more deeply threaded with silver than it had been before, and his beard was even more markedly grizzled. There were a few more lines on his face, especially around the eyes and mouth—smile lines, I thought. He wore jeans and a blue flannel work shirt, and he wa
lked with the aid of a cane.

  He’d gotten the injury fighting beside me because I hadn’t acted fast enough to prevent it. I’d failed Michael, too.

  My view of him went watery and vague and fuzzed out completely.

  “I think I need help,” I heard myself whisper, voice little more than a rasp. “I think I’m lost.”

  There was not an instant’s hesitation in his answer or in his deep, gentle voice.

  “Come in,” my friend said.

  I felt something break in my chest, and let out a single sob that came out sounding like a harsh, strangled groan.

  * * *

  I sat down at Michael’s kitchen table.

  Michael’s house had a big kitchen that looked neater and a lot less cluttered than the last time I’d seen it. There were two big pantries, necessary for the provisioning of his platoon-sized family. The table could seat a dozen without putting the leaves in.

  I squinted around. The whole place looked neater and better organized, though it had always been kept scrupulously clean.

  Michael took note of my gaze and smiled quietly. “Fewer people occupying the same space,” he said. There was both pride and regret in his voice. “It’s true, you know. They grow up fast.”

  He went to the fridge, pulled out a couple of beers in plain brown bottles, and brought them back to the table. He used a bottle opener shaped like Thor’s war hammer, Mjolnir, to open them.

  I picked up the bottle opener and read the inscription on it. “‘Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy, shall wield the power of Thor.’ Or at least to crack open a beer.”

  Michael grinned. We clinked bottles and drank a pull, and I put my arm up on the table.

  He took one look at my sleeve and exhaled slowly. Then he said, “Let me help.”

  I eased out of my duster, with his aid, my arm and wrist flickering with silvery twinges of sensation as the sleeve came off. Then I eyed my arm.