Skin Game

by Jim Butcher

  The air had gone thick with dust and heat and the smell of brimstone. Half of the freaking amphitheater had been buried by fallen stone. One of the enormous statues was covered to the thighs.

  And Hannah Ascher and Lasciel were gone.

  A few last stones fell, clattering over the mess, bouncing. I noted, dimly, that their arches didn’t look the way they should have. Gravity was indeed something heavier here than in the physical world. It was so heavy, in fact, that I thought I might just close my eyes and stay on the floor.

  “Harry,” Michael breathed.

  “Sorry about that, Hannah,” I heard myself mutter. “I’m sorry.”

  Michael put his hand on my shoulder. “Harry? Are you all right?”

  I shook my head, and gestured weakly at the fallen rock with one hand. “Hell’s bells, Michael. That wasn’t even a fight. It was just murder. She wasn’t a monster. She just made a bad call. She let that thing inside her and . . . it just pushed her buttons. Drove her.”

  “It’s what they do,” Michael said quietly.

  “Could have been me over there . . . There but for the grace of God goes Harry Dresden.”

  Michael limped around to stand in front of me, slapped me lightly on the cheek, and said, “We don’t have time for this. Reflect later. We’ll talk about it later. Get up.”

  The blow didn’t hurt, but it did startle me a little, and make me shake my head. The immediate exhaustion of slinging that much power around began to fade, and I shrugged off the lethargy that went with it. The ugly, prickling cold was still coming closer.

  “Harry,” Michael said, “are you with me?”

  “Headache,” I muttered. And then I realized what that meant. Mab’s earring burned like a tiny frozen star in my ear, and my head was beginning to pound anyway.

  I was running out of time. And unless I could get everyone back to the first gate and open the Way back to Chicago, it was running out for everyone else as well. I planted my staff and pushed myself to my feet. I felt creaky and heavy and tired and I couldn’t afford to let that matter.

  Everything snapped back into focus, and I swiped at something hot and wet in my eyes. “Okay,” I said. “Okay. Let’s get Grey and get the hell out of here.”

  Just then, something that looked vague and lean, and had huge batlike wings, streaked through the air toward us from the far side of the amphitheater. One of its wings faltered, and it tumbled out of the air, hit the marble floor, and started bouncing. The form rolled several times, and when it stopped, Grey was lying there looking dazed. The lower half of his face, as well as his hands and forearms were soaked with scarlet blood.

  “Michael,” I said.

  We moved together, getting Grey onto his feet between us, and started back toward the entrance to the vault, skirting the hellish heat coming off of the rubble. “Grey,” I said, “what happened?”

  “He got smart and shifted down,” Grey said. “My jaws slipped. But something got in his eyes, and I disengaged before he could reverse the hold on me.”

  From somewhere behind us came the Genoskwa’s furious roar and the crash of another column falling. Then another roar, pained, that grew deeper in register as the Genoskwa assumed Ursiel’s demonform again and rose up onto his hind legs, coming into sight of us. Doing so put his head damned near twenty feet off the ground, and though we were most of the way up the amphitheater stairs, Ursiel’s glowing eyes and the Genoskwa’s ruined and bloody eye sockets were level with my own. The demon-bear opened his jaws and roared in fury.

  “He looks pissed,” I squeaked.

  “Certainly hope so,” Grey said, slurring the words a little. He was only barely supporting his own weight, and his eyes still looked vague. “Gimme sec, be fine.”

  Ursiel dropped back down to all sixes and started toward us. He was limping on the leg Michael had cut, but it wasn’t just flopping loosely the way it should have been. Hell’s bells, he recovered fast.

  “Valmont,” I said to Grey. “Where is she?”

  “Sent her back to the first gate,” Grey said, “with your magic artif . . . art . . . toys.”

  “That’s it,” I said to Michael. “You’re hurt. Grey’s scrambled. Get him back to the first gate and do it as fast as you can.”

  Michael clenched his jaws. “You can’t fight Ursiel alone, Harry. You can’t win.”

  “Don’t need to fight him,” I said. “Just need to buy you two some time to get clear. Trust me. I’ll be right behind you.”

  Michael closed his eyes for a second and then gave me a quick nod and shouldered Grey’s weight more thoroughly. “God be with you, my friend.”

  “I’ll take whatever help I can get,” I said, and stopped at the top of the amphitheater stairs, while Michael half carried Grey back out the way we’d come.

  My head pounded. I shook the sheathed knife out of my sleeve and dropped it into the duster pocket with my overgrown revolver, then checked the Shroud to make sure it was secure.

  From the far rear of the vault, I heard something let out an eerily windy-sounding cry, and the sensation of cold around me grew more and more intense, gaining an element of irrational, psychic terror to go with it. An instant later, other cries echoed the first, and the sensation of unthinking panic swelled. My heart sped up to a frantic pace and my limbs felt shaky and weak.

  The shades were coming.

  Ursiel let out another furious roar and then the twenty-foot horned bear the size of a main battle tank broke into a lumbering run as it came up the stairs toward me, fangs bared, intent upon mayhem.

  And rather than turning to flee like a sane person, I brandished my staff in one hand, flew him the bird with the other, and screamed, “Hey, Yogi! Here I am! Come get some!”

  Forty-seven

  Ursiel was too big to fight.

  Look, people go on and on about how size isn’t everything, and how the bigger they are, the harder they fall, but the people who say that probably haven’t ever faced down a charging demon-bear so big it should have been on a drive-in movie screen. As a defensive adaptation, sheer size is a winner. It’s a fact. Ask an elephant.

  But.

  As a hunting adaptation, size is only good when the things you’re hunting are also enormously huge. Successful predators aren’t necessarily bigger than the things they take down—they’re better armed, and just big enough to get the job done if they do it right. Too much bulk and nimble prey can escape, leaving the hunter less able to handle a broad range of targets.

  Grey had done something brilliant, in blinding the Genoskwa: He’d forced it to rely upon Ursiel’s eyes. That meant, apparently, that he had to stay in that giant bear form to do it. If the Genoskwa had been able to pursue me in his natural form, he would have caught me and torn me apart in short order—I’d seen him move. The bear might have been an irresistible mass of muscle, claws, and fangs, but I’d had a little experience with very, very large creatures on the move, and I’d learned one important fact about them.

  They didn’t corner well.

  Ursiel closed in and went into a little bounce, a motion as close to a pounce as something that size could manage, and I darted to one side. Harry Dresden, wizard, might have bought the farm right there. But Sir Harry, the Winter Knight, dodged the smashing paws and snapping jaws by a tiny margin, hopped back several yards, and shouted, “Olé! Toro!”

  Ursiel roared again, but its head swung around toward the retreating forms of Michael and Grey. Ursiel was no tactical genius, from what I’d seen of it, but both it and the Genoskwa were predators—and Michael and Grey were wounded and vulnerable. It could catch them and dispatch them easily and then hunt me down at its leisure, like a cat dealing with so many troublesome mice.

  So I lifted my staff, pointed it at the demon-bear, and shouted, “Fuego!”

  The blast of fire I sent at him wasn’t much. I didn’t fe
el like passing out from exhaustion at the moment, and both the Genoskwa and Ursiel had displayed a troublesome resistance to my magic. That wasn’t the point. The mini-blast of flame struck the bear in the side of the nose, and while it didn’t sear the flesh, it singed some hairs and I bet it stung like hell.

  The bear’s head whipped back toward me and it rolled a step forward. Then the glowing eyes brightened and it swung again toward the wounded men, now leaving the vault. The conflict of wills going on between the Genoskwa and the Fallen angel was all but visible.

  “Jeez,” I drawled, in the most annoying tone I possibly could. “You suck, Gen. I’ll bet you anything River Shoulders wouldn’t be all torn and conflicted right now.”

  That got it done.

  The great bear whirled back to me and lunged into instant, savage motion, and again I skittered out of the way a couple inches ahead of being ground into paste. I darted a few more yards to one side, putting one of the displays between us. It didn’t bother to go around—it just crashed straight through, spraying gold and jewels everywhere, and I damned near got my head redecorated with a falling marble column. I slipped, recovered my footing, and kept moving, forcing the huge bear to keep turning laterally if it wanted to pursue me.

  It went like that for a subjective century and a half, and maybe thirty objective seconds. Several suits of armor were crushed and scattered when a flashing, enormous paw shattered the marble column holding up the roof of their display area. Half a dozen pieces of art that might have been Fabergé eggs in delicate golden cages were smashed flat when a sledgehammer blow missed me by an inch. At one point, I picked up a cut diamond the size of my fist, screamed, “Get rocked!” and flung it at Ursiel’s nose before darting behind another exhibit, this one of rare sacred texts, featuring half a dozen Gutenberg Bibles as the centerpiece.

  And then something scary happened.

  The roaring stopped.

  I froze in place, instantly. Everything got quiet, except for the rushing sound of the flames in the hands of the giant statues, and a rising tide of moaning, terrifying wails coming steadily and unnervingly closer from the rear of the vault.

  Something made a metallic clinking sound. Like, maybe the sound a great big foot would make as its blind owner accidentally kicked a fallen gem into something made of precious metal.

  Oh, crap.

  I looked around, and realized that there was rubble scattered over every inch of floor around me for fifty feet in every direction. I had forgotten that Ursiel’s bestial nature was not the only one I had to deal with. The Genoskwa’s intellect had been at work behind it, too, and I’d been had.

  The Genoskwa had been trying to catch and kill me, sure—but he had also been intentionally covering the floor around us with detritus so that there would be no way in hell I could move without making noise.

  Then he wouldn’t need eyes to catch me and kill me.

  “Little wizard,” rumbled the Genoskwa’s voice. It had a weirdly modulated quality to it. It was coming from behind a veil, maybe, and I couldn’t isolate the direction of its origin. “Going to twist your head off your skinny neck. Going to enjoy it.”

  I had some material I could have thrown back at him, but I didn’t dare speak. I would have sounded terrified, anyway. The howls and the eerie presence of the shades continued to grow closer and more intense, and my heart was pounding hard enough to shake my chest. I held my feet perfectly still and tried to turn my head without rustling my clothing at all, scanning for the Genoskwa. I couldn’t see him, but his voice was close.

  I knew I would only get one chance to move. If I didn’t do it right, he would run me down and do exactly what he said he’d do, and a weird little fluttery sensation went slithering through my neck at the thought of it. I had to know where he was.

  “Take off your head like a cap, little wizard,” the Genoskwa rumbled, pausing to listen between each sentence. “Drink your blood. Like a bottle of pop.”

  That image was so vivid that I nearly let out a nervous giggle. I caught it just in time and closed my eyes, Listening as hard as I could. I could hear small, faint sounds. Crunching rubble. Weight shifting atop a pile of spilled gems. But it all had the same distorted tone as the Genoskwa’s voice, impossible to localize.

  Stop behaving like a prey animal, Harry, and use your brain.

  Right.

  The Genoskwa couldn’t hear me and couldn’t know exactly where I was—but sooner or later, if I held still, he’d find me. If I muttered the word to a spell to veil my own movement, he’d hear that, too. My pounding head was already under enough pressure that I didn’t dare try to use magic without a verbal utterance. I could do it, but the psychic feedback was devastating and the last thing I needed was to slip up and take myself out for him. Even using my magical senses might give me away—the Genoskwa was something of a practitioner himself, and might well be able to feel me extending my aura to detect energy around me.

  The shades came closer, and the air in the vault had grown uncomfortably warm with the heat from the melted rock. The heated air around it was rising, and that updraft was what was fanning the fires in the hands of the statues, making them growl quietly.

  Draft.

  Air brushed across the fine hairs on the back of my hand, flowing gently past me from the exterior of the vault and in toward the hot stone more or less in the center of the huge chamber.

  Don’t think like a human, Harry. Think like a predator. Ignore sight. Forget hearing. Where would a predator go when stalking his prey?

  Downwind.

  The Genoskwa would be moving downwind of me, locating me through my scent. It wasn’t the same as knowing where he was, but for my purposes it was close enough.

  Assuming, of course, that my reasoning was correct. If it wasn’t, I was about to trap myself with him and become Harry Dresden, human beverage.

  I didn’t have much energy left in me for spells, but I had to chance it.

  So I called upon Winter, focused my will through my staff and shouted, “Glacivallare!”

  Icy cold rolled out of the staff and solidified into a wall of ice maybe twenty feet long and a foot thick, curved slightly toward me. I prayed that the Genoskwa was on the other side of it, turned, and sprinted, my life depending upon it.

  I hadn’t gone twenty feet when something hit the wall and shattered it with a crash. I flashed a quick look back over my shoulder to see the Genoskwa as a large, humanoid blur behind a veil that had faltered as tiny flecks of ice landed on the Genoskwa and melted to water. The veil shimmered and fell, and he didn’t bother trying to restore it. He recovered his balance after almost a whole half second, and came after me, coming along the ground in a rush, using his huge arms as well as his legs to run.

  If Michael hadn’t lamed him, the Genoskwa could have claimed his five-cent deposit for my corpse. But though he was on the mend, he still wasn’t moving at full speed, and I was able to stay a couple of steps ahead of him. His stench filled my nose, and his huge breathing was terrifying as he came along behind me, tracking me by the frantic sound of my running feet and labored breath.

  I couldn’t fight this guy.

  But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t kill him.

  We flew out of the vault, and out past the Gate of Blood, and I poured it on, committing all of my reserves to the effort. I called light to my staff as I sprinted down the tunnel that emerged at the Gate of Ice, and as I went by it, I drew upon the power of the Winter mantle to slam the iron lever back up to the ON position and snap it off at the base in the same savage motion.

  And then I plunged out into the two-hundred-yard-long killing field as the house-sized blocks of ice began to fall and shatter and slide and flip and smash together like some kind of enormous, demented garbage disposal unit.

  “Parkour!” I screamed, dropping to a slide that took me just under a horizontally flying block of ice
as big as a freight car, then popping back up to keep running.

  “Parkour!” I shouted again, bounding up onto a small block and diving over several more, ducking and weaving between them, the Genoskwa hot on my tail, casting frantically quick glances back at him, watching him close the distance inch by inch, his huge body moving with an utterly unfair amount of agility as he handled the obstacles better than I could have, even without his eyes.

  And then the cold started to get to him.

  It wasn’t much at first. He lost a step on me. But then in the next row of grinders, one of them clipped his monstrous shoulder. He recovered his balance and kept moving, and we were nearly through the field when I played dirty.

  I jumped over a pair of low grinders, and turned in midair, just enough to point a finger back at the ground behind me and snap, “Infriga!”

  I didn’t use a lot of power. Barely a whisper, really—just enough to coat a ten-foot patch of cavern floor with smooth Winter ice.

  And his foot slipped.

  It wasn’t a big slip. But his cold-dulled reflexes weren’t up to catching him and his balance wavered. Not much—he was, after all, running on all fours. But enough. It staggered him as he came after me, slowing his pace again.

  Suddenly, there was a ten-foot wall of grinders in front of me, each individual block spinning and smashing and flipping at unpredictable intervals, and I let out a scream and leapt over it completely, high-jump-style. My shoulders brushed the top of the wall, treating me to a dandy view of another house-sized block falling straight at me from the darkness overhead, and then I bounced off the top of the wall and tumbled into the clear.

  The Genoskwa grabbed the top of the wall and vaulted it easily, his huge hairy form moving with effortless power. He’d somehow anticipated its presence. He must have heard my shout and jump, and maybe the way I’d gone over it at the top. Or maybe Ursiel was helping him through his sightless chase, the way Lasciel had once helped guide me in total darkness.