Skin Game

by Jim Butcher

  I blinked and looked at her.

  She gave me a calm, indecipherable look. “All for one,” she said. “I want out of this, too.”

  She was right. I was nearing the end of my rope. Binder looked exhausted as well. If we just ran out the door all willy-nilly, pure chance would decide our fates. Dark or not, foggy or not, Chicago patrol cops were heavily armed, and given the gunfire and explosions and so forth, they had to think that this was some kind of terrorist attack in progress. They’d shoot first, and second, and third and fourth, and ask questions to fill the time while they reloaded.

  Some buckshot through the skull would not improve my response time to the attack on the Carpenter house—and I owed Valmont and Michael a lot more than to let them get shot whilst fleeing the scene of a crime. More than anything, I wanted to be moving toward Michael’s home—but to do that, I had to get us out of the building in one piece first. The only way to do that was to work together.

  “Binder,” I said. “Nicodemus screwed us all. But I’m offering you a new deal, right here, a mutual survival pact. We split the pack evenly between the five of us once we’re out of here. They aren’t red ones, but twenty percent of them are yours if you sign on with us to get us all the hell out of here.”

  “Your word on it?”

  “My word,” I said.

  “Dunno,” Binder said. “Seeing as how you didn’t follow through on that promise to kill me if you saw me here again . . .”

  I glowered.

  “Sir Knight?” Binder asked. “Will you give your word?”

  “You have it,” Michael said.

  “Are you in or not?” I asked.

  Binder regarded Michael for a moment, then nodded once. “’Course I’m in. What choice do I have?”

  “Everyone else?”

  There was a general murmur of agreement.

  “Right, then, listen up,” I said, feeling the urge to go sprinting after Nicodemus in every fiber of my body. But I used my head. First things first. Get out of the death trap we were in—then save Maggie from hers. “Here’s the plan.”

  Forty-nine

  The plan didn’t take long to put into effect.

  Binder’s goons poured out of all sides of the bank building in a howling horde, crashing through windows and sprinting through doorways. They ran straight into gunfire from two dozen patrol cars surrounding the place. Binder’s goons died hard, but die they did, after taking several rounds each. They leapt onto cars. They waved their arms threateningly. They brandished their empty Uzis with malicious intent.

  But they didn’t actually hurt anybody. Binder’s share was forfeit if they had. And when they went down, they splattered back into the ectoplasm they’d been formed from in the first place—a clear, gelatinous goo that would rapidly evaporate, leaving nothing behind but empty Uzis and confusion.

  Most of the goons went out the west side of the building. Our little crew went out several seconds behind them, covered in my best veil—which is to say, looking slightly blurrier and more translucent than we would have normally appeared.

  Veils aren’t really my thing, all right? Especially not covering that many people all at once.

  In that light, in that weather, in the howling confusion of an apparent assault by demons of corporate dress code, my paltry veil was enough. I took the lead, Michael brought up the rear, and we all held hands in a chain, like a group of schoolchildren traveling from one place to another. We had to—the veil would only have covered me, otherwise.

  Outside the ring of police cars was a perimeter of other emergency vehicles—fire trucks and ambulances and the like, parked on whatever uneven slew they had managed on the ice. The press had begun to arrive, while an insufficient number of other cops tried to cordon off the block around the Capristi Building. Every single person there was straining to see through the fog, to get an idea of what was happening during the howling chaos of the attack and the subsequent hail of gunfire. I kept the veil around us as we hobbled through the confusion at Michael’s best pace. It didn’t stop people from noticing that someone was hurrying by, but at least it would prevent anyone from identifying us.

  Michael’s bad leg lasted for another block and then he dropped out of the chain, gasping, to stumble to a halt and lean against a building.

  Once his grip was broken, my veil faltered and fell apart, and the five of us flickered fully back into sight.

  “Right,” I said. “You three keep moving, fast as you can, before Marcone’s people twig to what’s going on. Find a phone soonest.”

  “We should split up as quick as may be,” Binder said. He looked pale and shaken. He’d been born in an age before the invention of cardio, and he’d been summoning demons all night.

  Valmont added a firm, silent nod to Binder’s opinion.

  “When you’re doing crime, listen to the crime pros,” I said. “Take your share and give Michael what’s left.”

  “God go with you, Harry,” Michael said.

  “Grey,” I said, “with me.”

  And I turned, called upon Winter, and started running.

  It took several seconds for Grey to catch up with me, but he did so easily enough. Then he let out an impatient sound and said, “Try not to clench up.”

  “What?” I blurted.

  “Parkour,” he said impatiently. And he caught me by the waist and flung me into the air.

  I went up, flailing my arms and legs and looked down to see something that was basically impossible.

  Grey smoothly dropped to all fours, blurred, and suddenly there was a large, long-legged grey horse running beneath me, and I came down on his back. I managed to angle it to minimize the, ah, critical impact zone, catching most of my weight on my thighs, but doing so nearly sent me tumbling off, and I had to flail pretty wildly to hang on.

  I did it, though, and set myself. I hadn’t ridden a horse since my days on Ebenezar’s farm down in the Ozarks, but I’d done it every day down there, and the muscle memory was still in place. Riding a running horse bareback isn’t easy when you’re feeling a little croggled from seeing someone completely ignore the laws of physics and magic as you know them.

  Shapeshifting I could deal with, but Grey had done something more significant than that—he’d altered his freaking mass. Rearranging a body with magic, sure, I basically knew how that worked. You just moved things around, but the mass always remained the same. Granted, I’d seen Ursiel shift into his bear form and add oodles of mass, so I knew it could be done somehow, but I’d figured that was maybe a Fallen angel thing. Though that didn’t make sense, either. I’d seen Listens-to-Wind reduce his mass pretty significantly in a shapeshifting war with a naagloshii, but I’d figured he had managed to make some materials denser and heavier, crowding the same mass into a smaller area.

  Grey hadn’t just made himself bigger. He’d made himself seven or eight times bigger, and done it as quick as blinking. My pounding head was making it hard for the thoughts to get through, but I got my staff tucked under my arm so that I could hold on to the horse’s mane with the fingers of my good hand, and realized that I was babbling them aloud.

  “Oh,” I heard myself realize, “ectoplasm. You bring in the mass the same way Binder’s goons make some for themselves.”

  Grey snorted, as if I had stated the very obvious.

  And then he shook his head and started running.

  When I’m running with Winter on me, I can move pretty fast, as fast as any human being can manage, and I can do it longer. Call it twenty-five or thirty miles an hour. A Thoroughbred horse runs a race at about thirty-five. Quarter horses have been clocked at fifty-five miles an hour or so, over short distances.

  Grey started moving at quarter-horse speed, maybe faster, and he didn’t stop. I just tried to hang on.

  The ice storm had brought Chicago to a relative standstill, but there
were still some cars out moving, a few people on the sidewalks. Grey had to weave through them, as none of them was fast enough to get out of the way by their own volition. By the time they could see Grey moving toward them through the fog, it was too late for them to avoid him, and there was very little I could do but hang on and try not to fall off. At the pace Grey was moving, a tumble would be more like a car wreck than anything else, only I wouldn’t have the protection of, you know, a car around me when it happened. The experience gave me a new appreciation for Karrin and her Harley—except that her Harley didn’t freaking jump over mailboxes, pedestrians, and one of those itty-bitty electric cars when they got in its way.

  I noticed, somewhere along the line, that Grey was as subject as anyone else to the slippery ice on the streets and sidewalks of the town. At some points, he was more skating than running, though he seemed to handle it all with remarkable grace.

  If it wouldn’t have reduced my odds of surviving the ride, I’d have closed my eyes.

  We were moving in the right direction, and it didn’t occur to me until we were nearly there that I’d never told Grey where to find Michael’s house.

  By the time we got there, Grey was breathing like a steam engine, and the hide beneath me was coated with sweat and lather and burning hot. His wide-flared nostrils were flecked with blood. As remarkable as he was, moving that much mass that quickly for that long apparently had a metabolic cost that not even Grey could escape. We thundered past Karrin’s little SUV—still stuck where she’d crashed it yesterday evening—and it was as he tried to turn down Michael’s street that Grey’s agility met his exhaustion and faltered.

  He hit a patch of ice, and we went sideways toward the house on the corner.

  I felt his weight leave the ground and we started to tumble in midair. It was going to be an ugly one. Most of a ton of horse and about two hundred and fifty pounds of wizard were going to bounce along the frozen earth together and smash into a building, and there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot I could do about it.

  Except that it didn’t happen that way.

  As we tumbled, the horse blurred, and suddenly Grey was back, along with a great, slobbering heap of steaming ectoplasm. He grabbed me in midair, pulling my shoulders back hard against his torso, and when we first hit the ground, his body cushioned the shock of impact, taking it on his back instead of on my skull. We bounced and it hurt, spun wildly once, and then slammed into the side of the house about a quarter of a second after all the ectoplasmic goo. Again, Grey took the impact on his body, sparing mine, and I heard bones snapping as he did. Between him, some thick bushes at the base of the house, and the cushion of slime, I came to a bone-jarring, but nonfatal halt.

  I pushed myself up and checked on Grey. He was lying in a heap, his eyes closed, his nose and mouth bloody, but still breathing. His chest was grotesquely misshapen, but even as I watched, he inhaled and a couple of ribs seemed to expand back toward a more natural shape. Hell’s bells, that guy could take a beating. And that was me saying that.

  “The things . . . I do . . . ,” he rasped, “for . . . Rent money.”

  I lifted my head, blearily, to see the big unmarked vans Nicodemus had used for transport at the start of the job turn the corner at the other end of the street and lumber slowly toward Michael’s house.

  Grey had gotten me there in time, if only barely.

  Of course, now that I was here, the question was what I was going to do about it.

  I stood up, calling my veil about myself again. It might not accomplish much, but at least it didn’t take a lot of energy to do it, and I started moving quietly toward the enemy. The Winter Knight’s feet were absolutely soundless on the ice.

  My head was killing me, a steady pounding. My arm, ditto, even through the insulation offered by the Winter mantle. Fatigue and hard use had tied knots in my back, and I didn’t know how many more spells I could pull off before I fell over—if any.

  So why, I asked myself, was I walking toward the vans, preparing for a fight?

  I blamed the Winter mantle, which continually pushed at my inner predator, egging me on to fight, hunt, and kill my way to a solution. There was a time and a place for that kind of thing, but as I watched the vans begin to slow carefully on the icy streets, my sanity told me that it wasn’t here or now. I might be able to drop an explosive fire spell on the vans, but explosions are hardly ever as neat and as thorough as the people who create them hope for—and the effort might just drop me unconscious onto the sleet-coated ground. I could lie there senseless while the survivors murdered my daughter.

  Too many variables. Why duke it out with the bad guys when maybe I could grab the Carpenters and Maggie and slip out ahead of them?

  So instead of starting a rumble, I kept the veil up and sprinted around the house on the corner, and started leaping fences, moving through backyards to the Carpenter house. I came up to the back door and tried the doorknob. It didn’t move, and I risked a light rap on the glass of the storm door. “Charity!” I said in a hushed, urgent tone. “Charity, it’s me!”

  I checked the corners of the house, in case the squires had deployed people on foot, to move through the backyards the way I had. And when I looked back to the storm door, the heavy security door beyond it had been opened and, the twin barrels of a coach gun gaped in front of my eyes.

  I dropped my veil in a hurry and held up my hands. I think I said something clever, like “Glurk!”

  Charity lowered the shotgun, her blue eyes wide. She was wearing pajamas and one of her handmade tactical coats over them—a layer of titanium mail between two multilayered coats of antiballistic fabric. She had what looked like a Colt Model 1911 in a holster on her hip. “Harry!” she said, and hurriedly opened the storm door.

  I hurried in and said, “They’re coming.”

  “Michael just called,” she said, nodding, and shut the security door behind me, throwing multiple bolts closed as she did.

  “Where are the kids?”

  “Upstairs, in the panic room.”

  “We’ve got to get them out,” I said.

  “Too late,” said a voice from the front room. “They’re here.”

  I padded forward intently, and found Waldo Butters crouching by the front windows, staring out. He was wearing his Batman vest with all its magical gadgets, and holding a pump-action shotgun carefully, as if he knew how to use it, but only just.

  In the doorway to the kitchen stood Uriel. He was wearing an apron. There was what appeared to be pancake flour staining his shirt. Instead of looking dangerous and absolute, the way an archangel should, he looked slender and a little tired and vulnerable. He didn’t have a gun, but he stood holding a long kitchen knife in competent hands, and there was a quiet balance to his body that would have warned me that he might be dangerous if I hadn’t known him.

  Mouse sat next to Uriel, looking extremely serious. His tail thumped twice against the vulnerable archangel’s legs as he saw me.

  “Da . . . ,” Charity began, when she saw Uriel. “Darn it,” she continued, her voice annoyed. “You’re supposed to be upstairs with the children.”

  “I was fighting wars when this planet was nothing but expanding gasses,” Uriel said.

  “You also didn’t leak and die if someone poked a hole in you,” I said.

  The angel frowned. “I can help.”

  “Help what?” I asked him, drawing the monster revolver from my duster pocket. “Slice up bananas for pancakes? This is a gunfight.”

  “Harry,” Butters said urgently.

  “Ennghk,” I said in frustration, and went to Butters. “Mouse, stay with him, boy.”

  “Woof,” Mouse said seriously. That was obviously the mutt’s plan, but I read somewhere that a good commander never gives an order he knows won’t be obeyed. It therefore stood to reason that he might as well give orders that he knows will be obeyed whenever poss
ible.

  “Kill the lights,” I said to Charity.

  She nodded. Most of the lights were already out, but a few night-lights that could double as detachable flashlights glowed in power outlets here and there. She went around detaching them, and the interior of the home became darker than the predawn winter light outside.

  I moved to Butters’s side and peered out through the translucent drapes while I reloaded my big revolver. I could dimly see squires unloading from the two vans, now parked in front of the house. They carried shotguns and rifles, as they had before.

  “Nine,” Butters said quietly, counting gunmen. “Ten. Eleven. Jesus.”

  “Keep counting,” I said. “It might matter.”

  Butters nodded. “Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen? Sixteen.”

  “Stay down,” I told everyone. “Stay away from the windows. Don’t let them know anything.”

  Someone moved through the dark and crouched quietly next to me. “I called the police already,” Charity said.

  “They’re responding to a big emergency,” I replied. “Be a while before they get here.” I noted two pairs of gunmen splitting off from the others, heading around either side of the house. “They’re going around.”

  “I’ll take the back,” Charity said.

  “You know how to use guns, too, huh?” I asked her.

  I saw her teeth gleam in the dimness. “I like hammers and axes better. We’ll know in a minute.”

  “Luck,” I said, and she vanished back into the rear of the house.

  Michael’s house had been fortified the same way mine had been, with heavy-duty security doors that would resist anything short of breaching charges or the determined use of a ram. With anything like a little luck, they might try the doors, find them tough, and waste some time figuring it out.

  But Nicodemus didn’t leave room for luck in his plans. Eight men started carefully toward the front door over the lawn. Two of them were carrying small charges of plastic explosives. Of course, he’d already scoped the place out. Or maybe he just planned to blow the door off its hinges even if it was made of painted paper.