Skin Game

by Jim Butcher

  “They . . . they never said anything,” I said. “I mean, they never spent the night, either, but . . .”

  “Of course they didn’t,” he said. “You already beat yourself up for enough things that aren’t your fault. People who care don’t want to add to that.” He paused, and then added gently, “But you assumed it was about you.”

  I finished the beer and sighed. “Arrogance,” I said. “I feel stupid.”

  “Good,” Michael said. “It’s good for everyone to feel that way sometimes. It helps remind you how much you still have to learn.”

  What he said about the island tracked. I remembered my first moments there, how unsettling it was. I had talent and training in defending myself against psychic assault, and I’d shielded against it on pure reflex, shedding the worst that it could have done to me. Wizard. And not long after that, I’d taken on Demonreach in a ritual challenge that had left me the Warden of the place, and exempt from its malice.

  Thomas hadn’t had the kind of training, the kind of defenses I did. Molly, who was more sensitive than me to that kind of energy, must have found it agonizing. And Karrin, who had been assaulted psychically before . . . damn.

  They’d all picked up more scars for me, on my behalf, without a word of complaint—and I’d been upset because they hadn’t been willing to take more.

  Michael was right.

  I’d gotten completely focused on myself.

  “It occurs to me,” I said, “if I wasn’t being the Winter Knight . . . Mab would have picked another thug.” Mab had even told me who she would have gone after—my brother, Thomas. I shuddered to think what might have happened, if the temptations of Winter had been added to those he already bore. “Someone else would be bearing this burden. Maybe someone it would have destroyed by now.”

  “It occurred to you just now?” Michael asked. “I thought of it about five seconds after I heard about it.”

  I laughed and it felt really good to do it.

  “There,” Michael said, nodding.

  “Thank you.”

  I meant it for a lot of things. Michael got it. He inclined his head to me. “There is, of course, an elephant in the room, of which we have not spoken.”

  Of course there was.

  Maggie.

  “I don’t want to make her into a target again,” I said.

  Michael sighed patiently. “Harry,” he said, as if speaking to a rather slow child, “I’m not sure if you noticed this. But things did not turn out well for the last monster who raised his hand against your child. Or any of his friends. Or associates. Or anyone who worked for him. Or for most of the people he knew.”

  I blinked.

  “Whether or not that was your intention,” Michael said, “you did establish a rather effective precedental message to the various predators, should they ever learn of her relationship to you.”

  “Do you think Nicodemus would hesitate?” I asked. “Even for a second?”

  “To take her from this house?” Michael asked. He smiled. “I’d love to see him try it.”

  I lifted my eyebrows.

  “A dozen angels protect this house, still,” Michael said. “Part of my retirement package.”

  “She’s not always in the house,” I said.

  “And when she isn’t, Mouse is with her,” he said. “We got him attached to her as a medical assist dog. He prevents her from having panic attacks.”

  I made a choking sound, imagining Mouse in a grade school. “By making everyone else around her panic instead?”

  “He’s a perfect gentleman,” Michael said, amused. “The children love him. The teachers let the best students play with him on recess.”

  I imagined my enormous moose of a dog on a playground, trotting around after Maggie and other kids, with that dopey doggy grin on his face, cheerfully going along with whatever the kids seemed to have planned, moving with tremendous care around them, and shamelessly cadging tummy rubs whenever possible.

  “That’s kind of awesome,” I said.

  “Children frequently are,” Michael said.

  I chewed on my lip some more. “What if . . . Michael, she was there. She was in the temple when . . .” I looked up. “What if she remembers what I did?”

  “She doesn’t remember any of it,” Michael said.

  “Now,” I said. “Stuff like that . . . it has a way of popping up again.”

  “If it does,” he said, “don’t you think she deserves to know the truth? All of it? When she’s ready?”

  I looked away. “The things I do . . . I don’t want any of it to splash on her.”

  “I didn’t want it to touch my children, either,” Michael said. “Mostly, it didn’t. And I don’t regret my choices. I did everything in my power to protect them. I’m content with that.”

  “My boss has a few differences in policy compared to yours.”

  “Heh. True, that.”

  “I need to get moving,” I said. “Seriously. I’m on the clock.”

  “We aren’t done talking about Maggie,” he replied firmly. “But we’ll take it up soon.”

  “Why?” I asked. “She’s safe here. Is she . . . She’s happy?”

  “Mostly,” he said amiably. “She’s your daughter, Harry. She needs you. But not, I think, nearly as much as you need her.”

  “I don’t know how you can say that to me,” I said, “after Molly.”

  He tilted his head. “What about Molly?”

  “You . . . you know about Molly, right?” I asked.

  He blinked at me. “She’s been doing great lately. I saw her last weekend. Did she lose her apartment or something?”

  I looked back at him in dismay, realizing.

  He didn’t know.

  Michael didn’t know that his daughter had become the Winter Lady. She hadn’t told him.

  “Harry,” he said, worried, “is she all right?”

  Oh, Hell’s freaking bells. She hadn’t told her parents?

  That was so Molly. Unimpressed by a legion of wicked faeries—terrified to tell her parents about her new career.

  But it was her choice. And I didn’t have the right to unmake it for her.

  “She’s fine,” I blurted. “She’s fine. I mean, I meant, uh . . .”

  “Oh,” Michael said, a look of understanding coming over his face. “Oh, right. Well, that’s . . . that’s fine. Behind us now, and it all worked out.”

  I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but it was getting me out of making a major problem for Molly. I rolled with it. “Right,” I said. “Anyway. Thank you, again. For too much.”

  “If it’s ever too much,” he said, “I’ll thump you politely on the head.”

  “You’ll have to, for it to get through,” I said.

  “I know.” He rose, and offered me his hand.

  I shook it.

  “Michael,” I asked, “do you ever . . . miss it?”

  His smile lines deepened. “The fight?” He shrugged. “I’m very, very happy to have the time to spend with my wife and children.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “That . . . wasn’t exactly an answer.”

  He winked at me. Then he walked me to the door, leaning on his cane.

  By the time I got to the car, the icy ache in my arm had dulled down to a buzzing sensation. I was recovering. I’d get some anti-inflammatories into me before I got back, to help with the swelling. No, I couldn’t feel the pain, but that didn’t mean that it wouldn’t be smart to do whatever I could to take the pressure off the mantle, to save my strength for when it counted. I needed to pick up some other things too, thinking along the same lines.

  Whatever Nicodemus had planned, it would go down in the next twenty-four hours, and I was going to be ready for it.

  Twenty-one

  I rolled back up to t
he slaughterhouse just before the rented town car’s transmission gave out on me altogether.

  It sort of cheered me up, actually. I hadn’t wrecked a car with my wizardliness in a long time. And it just couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy’s rental vehicle. For a moment, I felt a sudden, sharp pining for my old Volkswagen, which made about as much sense as anything else I’d been doing that day. The Blue Beetle had been uncomfortable and cramped and it had smelled a bit odd, not to mention that it was put together from the cannibalized scraps of a bunch of other late-sixties VWs—and I must have looked absolutely ridiculous crouched behind its wheel. But it had been my car, and while it hadn’t run like a race car, it did run, most of the time.

  Suck it, rental town car. The built-in talking GPS computer hadn’t lasted two blocks.

  “Jordan!” I boomed as I came in. I tossed a paper bag with a couple of cheeseburgers in it at the Denarian squire. “Chow down, buddy. They’re hot, so don’t let the cheese burn your ton— Oh, right. Sorry.”

  Jordan scowled at me and fumbled with the bag and his shotgun until he managed to balance the two. I clapped him on the shoulder in a genial fashion and rolled on by. I pointed at the guard at the next post and said, “You don’t get cheeseburgers. You didn’t say nice things to me like Jordan did.”

  The guard glowered at me in silence, of course. It was an act. No one could resist my bluff and manly charisma. In his heart of hearts, he wanted to be friends with me. I just knew it.

  As I descended to the floor of the slaughterhouse, Karrin looked up from a long worktable absolutely covered in guns. She tracked my entrance, her expression touched with both wariness and . . . a certain amount of incredulity.

  “Harry?” she asked, as I came down the last few steps.

  “Who else would I be?” I asked. “Except that jerk Grey, except he’s too busy being Harvey to be me.” I took another paper bag from Burger King and plopped it down in front of Karrin, then dumped the loaded duffel I’d picked up from a military surplus store off where it hung over my shoulder. “Figured you might be hungry.”

  She eyed the fast-food bag. “I’m not sure I’m that hungry.”

  “Whoa, whoa, hold on there, Annie Oakley. You did not just say that,” I said. “Not right to my face.”

  A slow smile spread over her mouth and reached her eyes. “Harry.”

  “I . . .” I exhaled. The talk with Michael had made me feel about twenty tons lighter, at least on the inside. “Yeah. I guess maybe it is.” I felt my own smile fade. “Harvey’s dead.”

  Her face sobered and her eyes raked over me, stopping on my arm. “What happened?”

  “Polonius Lartessa showed up with a squad of soldier-ghouls and whacked him,” I said. “Unless maybe it was Deirdre who did it. Or Grey. I had ghouls all over my face when it happened.”

  “Who took care of your arm for you?”

  “A good man,” I said.

  She stared at me for a moment and then her eyebrows lifted. “Oh,” she said. Her eyes glittered. “Oh. That explains some things, then.”

  “Yeah,” I said, bouncing my weight lightly on my toes. “The point being, someone’s trying to screw with the job before we even get going.”

  “What a crime,” Karrin said.

  I grunted. “If Tessa’s trying to stop Nicodemus, I’ve got to wonder why.”

  “She’s married to him?” she suggested drily.

  “That’s vengeance-worthy, all right,” I said. “But . . . I don’t know. I hate working in the dark.”

  “So what’s the move?”

  I chewed my lip and said, “Nothing’s changed for us. Except . . .”

  “Except what?” she asked.

  “Except someone’s going down for Harvey before this is done,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I can get behind that.”

  I took a long look at the table. “Uzis,” I noted.

  “They’re a classic,” Karrin said. “Simple, reliable, durable, and not assault rifles.”

  That was good for the innocent bystanders of Chicago. Pistol ammunition wasn’t nearly as good at flying through an extraneous wall or ten and killing some poor sap sitting in his apartment two blocks away. Which wasn’t to say that they weren’t insanely dangerous—just less so than a bunch of AK-47s would have been. Nicodemus wasn’t doing that to be thoughtful. Either he’d bought what was available, or else he had a reason to cause only limited collateral damage.

  “Can Binder’s goons handle them?” she asked.

  “I assume so,” I said. “They seemed to take to guns pretty easily the last time. Check with Binder on it.”

  “Check with Binder on what?” asked Binder, appearing from farther down the factory floor. He was carrying a sandwich in one hand, a cup of what might have been tea in the other.

  “Speak of the devil and he appears,” I said.

  Binder sketched me a courtly little bow, rolling his sandwich as he did.

  “Your . . . people,” Karrin said. “Do they know how to handle an Uzi or do they need some kind of orientation?”

  “They’ll be fine,” he said, his tone confident, even cocky. “Don’t ask them to fieldstrip and repair one, or for witty banter before they shoot, but for trigger work or reloading they’re golden.” His sharp, beady little eyes landed on my arm in its splint. “Does someone not know how to play well with others?”

  His eyes went from me to start flicking around the slaughterhouse. I could all but see the calculation going on in his head. One Harry, no Deirdre, no Grey.

  “They’re fine,” I said. “We ran into some opposition around the accountant.”

  “Bookmark,” Binder said, holding up two fingers. He turned and retreated, wolfing down his sandwich, and returned a moment later with Hannah Ascher in tow. Ascher had ditched her sweater in favor of a tank top, and she looked as if she’d just come off a treadmill. She was breathing lightly and her skin was sheened with sweat. There were bits of ash stuck in the fine hairs of her forearms and smudging one cheek. Like every other look I’d seen on her, it was an awfully intriguing one—easily translated to let a fellow imagine what she might look like during . . .

  “Right, then,” Binder said. “Resume.”

  “We staked out the accountant,” I said. “Nicodemus’s wife showed up with a crew of ghouls and went after him. The accountant was killed.”

  “The wife did it?” Ascher asked.

  “Women,” Binder said scornfully.

  Karrin and Ascher both eyed him.

  He folded his arms. “I’m a century older than any of you sprats,” he said. “I’ll stand by that.”

  “I’m pretty sure I didn’t kill Harvey,” I said. “My gut says it wasn’t Grey. Other than that, your guess is as good as mine.”

  “Eh?” Binder said, nodding toward me conspiratorially. “Women.”

  Karrin gave me a very level look.

  I coughed. “The female of the species is deadlier than the male?”

  She snorted, and picked up the next Uzi in the row.

  “I don’t understand. Why would Nicodemus’s wife be trying to sabotage him?” Ascher asked.

  “Maybe she wants to cop the job,” Binder said wistfully. “Lot of money.”

  “Nah,” I said. “Money isn’t her thing.”

  “’Fraid you’d say that,” he said. “Personal?”

  “Let’s just say that ‘dysfunctional’ doesn’t even come close to that family.”

  “Bloody hell,” Binder said. “Why does everyone have to get bloody personal? No bloody professional pride anymore.” He glowered at me. “Present bloody company included.”

  “Language,” Ascher said, wincing.

  “Sod off,” he said. “Where’re Deirdre and Grey?”

  “Grey’s doubling the accountant,” I said. “No clue about Deird
re.”

  Binder made a growling sound.

  “Hey,” Ascher said. “Has anyone else been keeping track of how many goats are in the pen?”

  “Eight,” said Karrin and Binder together.

  I did a rough calculation. “It’s eating one goat at every meal.”

  That got me a round of looks.

  I shrugged. “Something’s here. It stands to reason.”

  Ascher and Binder both looked around the factory floor. Ascher folded her arms as if she’d suddenly become cold.

  “Big,” Karrin noted calmly. “If it eats that much.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And quiet.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And really, really fast.”

  Binder shook his head. “Bloody hell.”

  “What is it?” Ascher said.

  “Could be a lot of things,” Binder said. “None of them good.” He squinted at me. “Muscle, you think?”

  “Maybe where we’re going, we need something with that kind of physical power,” I said.

  Ascher scowled. “Or maybe it’s there to clean us up after the job.”

  “We wouldn’t have been given a chance to become aware of it if that was the case,” Karrin said.

  “Unless that’s what Nicodemus wants us to think,” Binder said.

  Us. I liked the sound of that. The more people I could incline against pitching in on Nicodemus’s side when it all hit the fan, the better. “Let’s not go down that rabbit hole,” I said. “We’ve got problems enough without adding in paranoia.”

  “Too right,” Binder said. “Job worth twenty million each, with an invisible monster nipping about the place and a psychotic ex trying to bugger us out of tweaking the nose of a bloody Greek god. What have we got to be paranoid about?”

  “Look,” I said, “at the best, it means Nicodemus isn’t telling us everything.”

  “We knew that already,” Ascher said.

  I shrugged a shoulder in acknowledgment of that. “At worst, it means someone on the inside is giving information to some kind of opposition.”

  Ascher narrowed her eyes. “That’s rich, coming from the opposition.”

  I waved a hand. “At this point, I’m playing the game. I’ll get in and out again, because if I don’t, Mab is going to have my head.” Well, technically, she’d have the splattered pieces, but they didn’t need the details. “I’m not looking to derail the train before then.”