Skin Game

Thirteen

Open your eyes, you fool. She’s right in front of. .

I jerked my head up off the table, blinking. There had been a voice in my ear, as clear as day, speaking in a fearful, angry tone. “What?”

Time had gone by. Butters stood at the sink, cleaning his gear. He paused and looked over his shoulder at me, scowling, and said with perfect authority, “Lay. Down.”

I did. The earring felt like a chip of ice, so cold that I was about to start shivering. “Did you say something?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, frowning. “You were pretty out of it, man. I was letting you rest.”

“Someone else in here?”

“No, Harry,” he said.

“I could have sworn. .”

He looked at me expectantly, raising one eyebrow. “Sworn what?”

I shook my head. “Beginning of a dream, maybe.”

“Sure,” Butters said.

“Am I going to make it, doc?”

He snorted. “Barring infection, you should be fine. No, wait-you should be in a hospital on an IV and then in a bed for a week. But knowing you, you’re probably going to keep doing whatever stupidly dangerous thing you’re doing. You probably won’t bleed to death while you’re doing it, now.”

I lifted my head enough to examine myself. My clothes were gone, except for my pants, and they’d lost most of the right leg. Take that, Nicodemus’s heist budget. I had several cuts bandaged. I had fresh stitches in two of the cuts, plus at both ends of the hole in my leg, maybe a dozen altogether, and. .

“Is that Super Glue holding these cuts closed?”

“Super Glue and sutures, and if I could figure out a way to duct-tape them all shut, I’d do that, too.”

“I’ll take the roll with me, just in case,” I said. “Can I get dressed, then?”

He sighed. “Try not to move too fast, okay? And be careful standing up. I don’t think the blood loss was too serious, but you might be a little dizzy for a while.”

I got up, slowly, and found my duffel bag. I pulled a set of fresh clothes out, ditched the rest of the tux, and tugged them on.

“So what are you doing?” Butters asked as I did. “Karrin’s been more tight-lipped than usual.”

“It’s better if I don’t say, for now,” I said. “But before I do anything else, I need to pay off a debt.”

He frowned at me. “What?”

I finished dressing, reached into the duffel bag, and withdrew a block of oak wood. It had taken me most of a month and several botched attempts to get the proportions correct, but in the end I had finally managed to carve a modestly accurate replica of a human skull. Once I’d gotten it carved, I’d boned it with tools I’d made from several curved and pointed sections of a deer’s antler Alfred had found for me, and then I’d gone to work. Now, the wooden skull was covered in neat, if crowded, inscriptions of runes and sigils much like those on my staff.

“Four months it took me to make this,” I said, and held it out to Butters. I didn’t know exactly who else was in the house, or how much they might hear, so I didn’t want to mention Bob the Skull out loud. The adviser-spirit was far too valuable and vulnerable a resource to advertise. “Give this to our mutual friend and tell him we’re even. He’ll be able to tell you what to do with it.”

Butters blinked several times. “Is this. . what I think it is?”

I stepped closer to him and lowered my voice to a near whisper. “A backup vessel for him,” I confirmed. “Not as nice as the one he has, but it should protect him from sunrise and daylight if he needs it. I made a deal with him. I’m paying up.”

“Harry,” Butters said. He shook his head slowly. “I’m sure he’ll be very pleased.”

“No, he won’t,” I snorted. “He’ll bitch and moan about how primitive it is. But he’ll have it, and that’s the important thing.”

“Thank you,” Butters said in a carefully polite tone, and slipped the wooden skull into his bag. “I’ll get it to him.”

I blinked a couple of times. “Uh, man? Are you okay?”

He looked at me for a moment before turning back to the sink and continuing to wash things. “It’s been a long year,” he said. “And I haven’t slept in a while. That’s all.”

That wasn’t all. I mean, I’m not exactly a social genius, but I could see that he was clearly anxious about something.

“Butters?” I asked.

He shook his head and his voice came out harder and cooler than I would have expected. “You should probably stop asking, Harry.”

“Yeah, I should probably eat more vegetables, too,” I said, “but let’s face it. That isn’t going to happen. So what’s up?”

He sighed. Then he said, “Harry. . did you ever read Pet Sematary?”

I frowned. “Yeah, like, a long time ago. .” My stomach twisted a little. “What are you saying exactly? You think I came back wrong?”

“You were dead, man,” Butters said. “People were. . Look, when you were here, you were the sheriff in town, in a lot of ways. You died and things started moving on Chicago. Not just the Fomor. Ghouls have been lurking around. Stuff came out of Undertown. The vampires started putting people in their pockets. Even the straights started to notice. Molly did what she could, but the price she was obviously paying to do it. .”

I watched his face as he spoke. His eyes were focused out at a thousand yards, his hands moving more and more slowly. “And your ghost showed up, and that was. . you know. Weird. But we all figured that, hey, you hadn’t lived like the rest of us. It figured you wouldn’t die the same way, either.”

“Technically, it was more of a code-blue situation. .,” I began.

“You didn’t say that at the time,” Butters said.

I opened my mouth and then closed it again. He was right. I hadn’t. I mean, I hadn’t known back then, but he’d had a considerable amount of time to get used to the idea of me being an ex-wizard.

“Then you show up again, when things are getting worse and worse,” he said, smiling faintly. “I mean, badass big brother Harry, back from the dead, man. I don’t think you can know what that was like for us. You’ve had the kind of power you have for so long, I think maybe you’ve got very little clue what it feels like to walk around without it. You don’t know what it was like to sit there helplessly as bad things happened to people while you couldn’t do more than fumble around and maybe help someone once in a blue moon.” He let out a bitter little laugh. “Oh, the skull could tell me all kinds of things. I’m not sure that made it any better, knowing all about what was happening, without having the strength to do anything but slink around and do little things when you could-just hardly ever when you wanted to.”

“Butters,” I said.

He didn’t hear me. “And then to suddenly see that protector back, when you thought he was gone for good, when things were getting even worse.” He shook his head, his eyes welling. “It was like an IV of pure hope, man. Superman had his cape again. The sheriff was back in town.”

I bowed my head. I was pretty sure I knew what was next, and I didn’t like it at all.

“Except. . you weren’t back in town, were you,” he said. “You stayed out on Creepy Island. You didn’t do anything. And then Molly was gone, too, so we didn’t even have that going for us. Will and Georgia both got put in the hospital last year, you know. For a while we weren’t sure they were going to make it. They have a little girl now. She almost wound up an orphan. Everyone’s lost someone over the past couple of years, or knows someone who has. And you stayed on Creepy Island.”

“I had to,” I said.

Butter’s jawline hardened. “Try to see this from my perspective, Harry,” he said. “Ever since Chichén Itzá, you haven’t been you. Do you even get that?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You made a deal. With Mab,” he said simply. “You apparently died. Your ghost showed up claiming you had died, and got us all to do things. Then you show up alive again, only you’ve got freaky Winter faerie powers. You were here for a day before Molly was gone, with freaky Winter faerie powers of her own. And you’ve been back for a year, living out on that island where hardly anyone can get to you, not talking, not helping, not here.” He looked at me for the first time. “Not you. Not the you we all know. The guy who came to gaming every week. Who we went to drive-in movies with.”

I stuffed my hands in my pockets.

“I know that things happen to people,” he said. “And maybe you’ve got excellent and real reasons for doing what you’ve done. But. . at the end of the day, there’s just no replacement for being here. We’re losing people. Kids. Old folks. Hell, there was this thing killing people’s pets for a while.” He turned back to his washing. “It’s enough to make a guy a little bit cynical. And now you show up again, only you’re not talking about what you’re doing. People are worried that you’re going to go bad like the other Winter Knights have.” He spun back to me, his dark eyes hard and pained. “And when you sit up from being sewn up, what’s the first thing you do? Hey, Butters? How you doing, Butters? Sorry about beating up your girlfriend? Didn’t mean to wreck your computer room, man? No. The first thing you start talking about is paying off a debt. Just like one of the Fae.”

Which made a cold chill go through my stomach. Butters might not have all the facts, he might not have the full story, but. .

He wasn’t wrong.

He started slapping his stuff back into his bag, though his voice stayed gentle. “I’m afraid, man. I know what’s going on out there now, and it’s scary as hell. So you tell me, Harry. Should I be anxious about Superman hanging out with Luthor? When I find out more about what you’re dragging Karrin into, is it going to make me less worried? Because I’m not sure I know you anymore.”

It was maybe fifteen seconds before I could answer.

“It isn’t going to make you any less worried,” I said quietly. “And I still can’t talk to you about it.”

“Honesty,” he said. He nodded a couple of times. “Well. At least we’ve got that much. There’s orange juice in the fridge. Drink some. Get a lot of fluids in the next few days.”

Then Butters took his bag and walked out of the kitchen.

He looked at least as tired as I felt. And I could see how afraid he was, and how the fear had worn him down. He had doubts. Which, in this world, was only smart. He had doubts about me. That hurt. But they were understandable. Maybe even smart. And he’d been up-front with me about it all. That had taken courage. If I truly had been turning into the monster he feared, by being honest with me about it, he would’ve just painted a huge target on his face. He’d done it anyway-which meant that he wasn’t sure, and he was willing to risk it.

And most important, when I’d needed his help, he’d shown up and given it.

Butters was good people.

And he wasn’t wrong.

I heard quiet talking going on in the living room, between Butters and Karrin and another female voice-Andi, presumably. A moment later, the door opened and closed again. The quiet of an emptier house settled over the place.

Karrin appeared in the doorway.

“You heard that, huh?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I did.” She crossed to the refrigerator, opened it, and took out a jug of orange juice. She got a plastic drinking glass out of the cupboard and poured it full. Then she passed the juice to me.

I grimaced and drank some, then stared down at the rest. “You agree with him?”

“I understand him,” she said.

“But do you agree?”

“I trust you,” she said.

Three words. Big ones. Especially coming from her. For a moment, they filled the room, and I felt something tight in my chest ease out of me.

I looked up at her and smiled with one side of my mouth. She answered it.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” I said.

The smile deepened around her eyes. “Maybe I’m a big girl who can make up her own mind.”

“Maybe you are,” I allowed.

“It’s been a hard year,” she said. “They’re tired, and scared. People lose faith sometimes. They’ll come around. You’ll see.”

“Thanks,” I said quietly.

She put her hand on my arm and squeezed, then let go of me. “I set Valmont up in the guest bedroom,” she said. “You’re in my room. I’m on the couch.”

“I’ll take the couch,” I said.

“You don’t fit on it, bonehead. You’re the one who got shot, remember? And I need you in the best shape possible if we’re going to do this.”

I swirled the orange juice in the glass. She had a point.

Mister appeared in the doorway, then flung himself at my shins. I pulled the injured one back so that his shoulder hit my left shin alone. I leaned down to rub his notched ear. “Where have you been, fuzzball?”

“It’s funny,” Karrin said. “He vanishes whenever Andi shows up for some reason.”

I remembered a scene of perfect havoc in the living room of my old apartment, and it made me smile. “Maybe she’s not a cat person,” I said.

“Drink your juice,” she said. I did. She filled up the glass and watched me drink it down again before she was satisfied.

“Okay,” she said. “Valmont’s already gone to bed. Go sleep. We’re getting an early start tomorrow, and you need to be sharp.”

This wasn’t my first rodeo, and Karrin had a point. You don’t survive situations like this by shorting yourself on vital rest for no reason. Besides, I’d already dealt with enough for one evening. Let the day’s trouble be enough for the day.

I headed back toward Karrin’s bedroom and paused as I entered the living room.

There were guns on the coffee table. Like, a lot of them, broken out on cloths, being cleaned, leaned against a nearby chair, where a large equipment bag waited to receive them. Karrin’s favorite little Belgian carbine was there, along with what looked like a couple of space guns. “New toys?” I asked.

“I’m a girl, Harry,” she said, rather smugly. “I accessorize.”

“Is that a bazooka?”

“No,” she said. “That is an AT4 rocket launcher. Way better than a bazooka.”

“In case we have to hunt dinosaurs?” I asked.

“The right tool for the right job,” she answered.

“Can I play with it?”

“No. Now go to bed.”

She settled down on the couch and started reassembling one of her handguns. I hesitated for a moment. Did I have the right to drag her into the kind of conflict I was about to start?

I bottled that thought real quick, with a follow-up question: Did I have the capability to stop her from being involved, at this point?

Karrin looked up at me and smiled, putting the weapon together as swiftly and as automatically as other people tie their shoes. “See you in the morning, Harry.”

I nodded. The best way to get her through this was to focus and get it done. She wouldn’t leave my side, even if I wanted her to. So stop dithering around, Harry, get your head in the game, and lay Nicodemus and company out so hard that they never have the chance to hurt her.

“Yep,” I said. “See you in the morning.”