Skin Game

by Jim Butcher

  But neither the Genoskwa nor the Fallen angel sensed what was plummeting soundlessly toward them.

  A block of ice the size of a building came down like the hammer of God Almighty, and crushed the Genoskwa like a beer can.

  I rolled to a stop and flopped on the stone cavern floor, utterly exhausted, breathing like a steam engine. But I had enough energy to turn my head to the gruesome remains being tossed about like a rag doll among the last row of grinders.

  “Parkour,” I panted. “Bitch.”

  Then I just breathed for a minute.

  Footsteps approached a moment later, and I felt hands hauling me up. Michael had sheathed Amoracchius again, and he steadied me as I rose. Grey stood and watched the grinders grind for a moment before he shook his head and said, “Yuck.”

  “Right?” I said.

  Anna Valmont shuddered, her face pale, and turned to me. “Are you all right, Harry?”

  “Nothing two months asleep in a good bed won’t cure,” I said.

  A chorus of moaning wails suddenly came toward us, as though the shades that had begun flooding the vault had reached some kind of critical mass and were now surging forward. I still hadn’t seen them, and I didn’t want to see them. I had this vague image of the scrubbing bubbles of undeadness from that Lord of the Rings movie in my brain, and I was sure that would serve fine for imagining the threat drawing quickly nearer.

  “What was that?” Anna asked.

  “Bouncers,” I said. “We don’t want to be around when they get here. Let’s get clear of the first gate, people.”

  And we did, hurrying down the tunnel to the location of the original Way. I took a deep breath and steadied myself for what I hoped would be the last serious effort of the day.

  “Michael,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “I figure Nicodemus had Lasciel and Ascher as his backup Way home,” I said. Ascher had been throwing Hellfire around. With a couple of weeks’ training from a good teacher, say a Fallen angel who could provide her with images and communicate directly in thought, she might have enough talent to learn how to manage a Way—but probably not from inside several hundred tons of molten rock. “Maybe the Genoskwa could have done it. But they’re out. That leaves one way for him to get back.”

  Michael grunted and drew his sword, and Grey frowned and looked warier than he had a moment before.

  “We’re not in much shape for a fight, Harry,” Michael said.

  “Neither is he,” I said. “Eyes open. Get through the Way as quick as we can, and I’ll zip it closed behind us. Nick can find his own way home.” Then I focused my will, drew a line in the air with my staff and said, “Aparturum.”

  Once more, a line of light split the air and widened, and from where I stood, I could see the inside of the vault back at Marcone’s bank.

  I leaned heavily on my staff, and felt fairly proud of myself for not falling over and going to sleep right there.

  “Michael,” I said. “Go.”

  Michael drew his sword and went through first, his eyes wary for any danger.

  “Anna,” I said.

  Valmont went through, still carrying her backpack, I noted. It was one of the identical ones that Nicodemus had provided for everyone and that I had ignored. Grey had used a duplicate as his decoy, back at the amphitheater.

  “My God,” Grey said, looking at me. “You didn’t get any loot? How the hell are you going to pay me?”

  “Think of something,” I said.

  Grey smirked. “I know we’re in a hurry, but there’s something you need to realize.”

  “What?”

  “No one got Binder’s share,” he said. “We’re all worn pretty ragged—and he’s got an army of demons he can jump us with. Food for thought.” Then he went through the Way.

  “Oh,” I said. “Crap.”

  I just wanted to go have a nice lie-down somewhere. Why was nothing ever simple?

  I stepped through the Way and back into the mortal world, and almost instantly I felt better, lighter, more free. Gravity change. I wrenched my head back into the moment, because I had to focus. Nicodemus might be rushing the Way even now—as might a few million furious shades. I didn’t think Hades would allow his prisoners to come flooding into the mortal world, but on the other hand, you never know with those types.

  At least wrecking the weaving of a spell was easier work than creating it.

  “Michael,” I said. “Cover me.”

  He came to my side, Sword in hand. I turned to the Way, tired to my bones, lifted my staff and muttered, “Disperd—”

  And a black shadow hurtled through the Way, hitting me like a truck.

  I was watching for trouble and ready. Michael was ready. Either we were both wearier than we realized, or the shadow moved with such speed that neither of us had a chance to react. Or both.

  The impact spun me around in a circle and dumped me on the ground with my everything hurting and my elbows tangled with my scapulae.

  I jerked my head up blearily, raising my arms in a defensive gesture, to see that the streak of shadow had whooshed to the far end of Marcone’s vault, to its main door.

  Nicodemus rose up out of the swirl of shadow. He looked pale and awful, his eyes sunken with pain, but he held himself straight. His sword was sheathed again, and he still carried the Holy Grail negligently in one hand. Moving with obvious stiffness and pain, he twisted a handle that opened the main door of the vault from the inside. The door swung open when he pushed.

  Then he looked directly at me and quite calmly snapped the handle off at its base.

  “Dresden,” Nicodemus said. There was something furious and horrible in his eyes—I could see it, even from there. “From one father to another,” he called. “Well played.”

  I felt my eyes widen. “Stop him!” I blurted and flung myself to my feet.

  Michael started running. Grey blurred toward the far end of the vault, moving at speeds one normally associates with low-flying aircraft.

  None of us got there in time to stop Nicodemus from letting out a harsh, bitter laugh, and slamming the huge door closed.

  I ran to the other end of the vault anyway, or mostly ran, breathing hard. Anna Valmont stayed beside me, still carrying her tool roll.

  “God!” I said. I tried what was left of the handle, but couldn’t get a grip on it. The vault door had locked, shutting us in. I slammed a shoulder against the door, but it wasn’t moving, and I wasn’t sure I could have blasted it open even if I’d been fresh. “Michael, did you hear what he said?”

  “I heard,” Michael said grimly.

  “How could he know?”

  “You told him,” Michael replied quietly. “When you taunted him about Deirdre. You said things only another father would know to say.”

  I let out a groan, because Michael was right. Once Nicodemus had realized that I was a father, it was not too much of a stretch to identify the dark-haired, dark-eyed little girl who had suddenly appeared at Michael’s house, a place that I knew damned well Nicodemus would surveil, even if he couldn’t use his pet shadow to do it. And she had appeared there immediately after my insane assault on the Red Court and my apparent death, to boot. It wasn’t hard to figure.

  Nicodemus might not be able to walk onto Michael’s property—but he had an entire dysfunctional posse of squires with assault rifles and shotguns who could, and he was filled with the pain of losing his daughter.

  Maggie was there. So were Michael’s children. So was a defenseless archangel.

  “He’s going to your house,” I breathed. “He’s going after our families.”

  Forty-eight

  “Get back,” Anna Valmont said sharply, and knelt to flick her tool roll open on the ground in front of the broken handle. “Dresden, get out of my way.”

  I moved aside and said, “Hur
ry, hurry, hurry.”

  She started jerking tools out of the roll. “I know.”

  “Hurry.”

  “I know.”

  “Can’t you just cut it open?”

  “It’s a vault door, Dresden, not a bicycle chain,” Valmont snapped. She gave Michael an exasperated look and jerked her head toward me.

  Michael looked like he wanted to tell her to hurry, too, but he said, “Let her work, Harry.”

  “Won’t be long,” she promised.

  “Dammit,” I said, dancing from one foot to the next.

  “Dresden?” Grey asked.

  “What?”

  A chorus of moaning wails echoed through the vault as if from a great distance.

  Grey pursed his lips. “Should that Way be standing open like that?”

  I whipped my head around and stared at the Way. The only light on the other side came from the Way itself, but that was just enough to show me a huge figure step to the Way. Its hairy kneecap was level with my sternum. Then it knelt down, and a huge, ugly humanoid face with a monobrow and one enormous eye in the center of its forehead peered hungrily at me.

  I gripped my staff and drew together my will. “Just once I want something go according to plan,” I snarled. “Disperdorius.”

  Energy left me in a dizzying wave, and the outline of the Way folded in on itself and vanished, taking the cyclops with it. I turned from the collapsing Way back to the vault door, even before the light show had finished playing out.

  There was a little phunt sound, followed by a hissing, and I turned to find Valmont holding a miniature welding torch of some kind, hooked to a pair of little tanks by rubber hoses. She passed a steel-shafted screwdriver to Grey and said, “I need an L-shape.”

  Grey grunted, took the thing in both hands, and narrowed his eyes. Then, with an abrupt movement and a blur in the shape of his forearms, he bent the screwdriver’s shaft to a right angle.

  “Slide it inside the socket where he broke it off, here, and hold it,” she said.

  Grey did. Valmont slid a strip of metal of some kind into the hole, held a little square of dark plastic up to protect her vision from the brilliant light of the torch, and sparks started to fly up from the door. She worked on it for about five hundred years that probably fit inside a couple of minutes, and then the torch started running out of fuel and faltered.

  “Hold it still,” she said. “Okay, let go.”

  Grey released the screwdriver’s handle, which now stuck out of the original fitting in approximately the same attitude as the original handle.

  “Do it. Let’s go,” I said.

  “No,” Valmont snapped. “These materials aren’t proper and I’m none too sanguine about that braze. We’ve got to let it cool or you’ll only break it off and I haven’t the fuel for a second try. Sixty seconds.”

  “Dammit,” I said, pacing back and forth. “Okay, when we get out, I’m heading for the house as fast as I can get there. Michael, I want you to get to a phone and—”

  “I’m going with you,” Michael said.

  I turned to face him and said in a brutally flat, practical tone, “Your leg is hurt. You’ll slow me down.”

  His jaw clenched. A muscle twitched. But he nodded.

  “And you’ll need to help the others get clear of the bank. Hopefully without getting shot to pieces on the way. Get clear, find a phone and warn Charity. Maybe she’ll have time to get them to the panic room.”

  “He’ll burn the house down around them,” Michael said quietly.

  “Like hell he will,” I said. “Follow along as quick as you can.”

  He nodded. Then, silently, he offered me the hilt of Amoracchius.

  “Can’t take that from you,” I said.

  “It’s not mine, Harry,” he said. “I just kept it for a while.”

  I put my fingers on the hilt, and then shook my head and pushed it back toward him. The Sword had tremendous power—but it had to be used with equally tremendous care, and I had neither the background nor the disposition for it. “Murphy knew she shouldn’t have been using Fidelacchius, but last night she drew it anyway and now it’s gone. I’m no genius. But I learn eventually.”

  Michael smiled at me a little. “You’re a good man, Harry. But you’re making the same mistake Nicodemus always has—and the same one Karrin did.”

  “What mistake?”

  “You all think the critical word in the phrase ‘Sword of Faith’ is ‘sword.’”

  I frowned at him.

  “The world always thinks that the destruction of a physical vessel is victory,” he said quietly. “But the Savior was more than merely cells and tissue and chemical compounds—and Fidelacchius is more than wood and steel.”

  “It’s gone, Michael,” I said quietly. “Sometimes the bad guys win one.”

  “Sometimes they seem to. But only for a time.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “I can’t know,” he said, his face lighting with a sudden smile. “That’s why they call it faith, Harry. You’ll see.”

  Grey, I noticed, was staring at Michael intently.

  “Time,” Valmont said. She reached up and braced the shaft of the screwdriver with her fingers. Then, very gently, she turned the handle.

  The vault door let out a heavy click, and swung open.

  “Let’s get moving,” I said.

  “Assuming Binder lets us,” Grey added.

  We pushed out of the vault and into the secure room, and found the place absolutely wrecked. The exterior of the vault had been pocked with dents half an inch deep. More dents and smears covered the security boxes on the other two walls. The wall that had contained the mines was simply gone, bared to the concrete beneath, and that had been chewed and mangled by ricocheting ball bearings, some of which were still visible, buried in the wall. The floor was covered in gravel and debris.

  Also, thirty of Binder’s goons were in formation around the vault door, covering every possible angle. They were all pointing Uzis at us.

  “Whoa!” I said, gripping my staff. “Binder, wait!”

  “Move another inch and you’re slurry!” came Binder’s voice from the hallway outside the security room. By some minor miracle, the door was still on its hinges, and the little mercenary was staying out of sight behind it. “Where’s Hannah?”

  My first instinct was to say Binder’s partner was coming along right behind us, but something told me that would be a bad idea. So I swallowed and said, “Dead.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then Binder’s voice came back, roughened. “What happened?”

  “She forgot Rule Number One,” I said. “She took one of the Coins. I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Didn’t have a choice. You White Council boys say that a lot,” Binder said in a very mild tone that sounded infinitely more frightening than a harsh one would have been. “Nicodemus says your crew betrayed us, killed Deirdre, Hannah, and the big monkey, and that you’re keeping all the loot.”

  “He told you some of the truth,” I said. “But he’s lying about who tried to stick the knife in first. We played it straight. He turned on us.”

  Part of Binder’s face appeared from behind the door, and he grunted. Then he jerked his chin at Michael and said, “Sir Knight, is that what happened?”

  “Your partner took the Coin of Lasciel,” Michael said firmly. “Nicodemus murdered his own daughter to open the Gate of Blood. Once we were inside, he ordered Miss Ascher and the Genoskwa to turn on the rest of us. We fought. They lost.”

  Binder squinted at Grey, a disapproving scowl coming over his features. “You turned your coat, then?”

  “Dresden contracted me before Nicodemus did. I did what he hired me to do.”

  Binder lifted an eyebrow. “Ah. That explains it.”

  Grey shrugged.
<
br />   “Hannah,” Binder said, his eye going back to me. “You killed her?”

  “I did,” I said. “I offered to let her back down. She wouldn’t. I’m sorry. She was too strong to handle any other way.”

  Binder spat a quiet, vicious oath, and looked away. “Stupid kid. Not a bad partner. But not a scrap of sense.”

  “Just curious,” Grey said. “You going to shoot us or what?”

  “Eh?” Binder said. Then he glanced at the goons, and they lowered their weapons and began filing back out. “Ah, no, the lads ran out of ammunition at least twenty minutes ago. It was hand-to-hand after that, but then the coppers started to arrive and Marcone’s people backed off to think about things for a bit.”

  “More like to get the Einherjaren as backup,” I muttered. Binder’s goons were formidable, but they weren’t going to be able to stand up to a crew of genuine Norsemen with a dozen centuries of experience each, who hadn’t been impressed by death the first time around. “What’s the status out there?”

  Binder’s eyes seemed to glaze over for a moment. Then he reported, “A dozen patrol cars have blocked off the area. Some fire trucks are here. Parts of the building above us are on fire. There’re a million more vehicles on the way, one presumes, but the streets are one big sheet of ice, and for now the cops are just covering the exits. The weather’s turned foul. There’s a heavy fog coming off the Lake.”

  “Ice and fog,” I said. “I like it.”

  “Sun’s not up yet,” Binder said. “And some evil, handsome old bloke hexed all the streetlights and spotlights out. We get out of here now, we might do it in one piece.”

  “What happened to Nicodemus?” Michael asked.

  “He flew out,” Binder spat. “Told me you’d killed Hannah and left me to rot.”

  I grunted.

  “The bit about the money,” Binder asked. “How true is that?”

  “We’ve got one backpack,” Valmont said quietly. “Small stones, easy to move. We’ll have to split it once we’re all clear.”