Skin Game

Seventeen

“Grey,” I said, hurrying to catch up.

“Hmm?”

“How is walking up and starting a fight with Tessa any better than doing it with Harvey?”

“It isn’t,” he said. “But the alternative may be losing him. Unacceptable.”

“Then we don’t lose him,” I said. “How good is your Nicodemus impersonation?”

Grey narrowed his metallic eyes. “What did you have in mind?”

“You two go up and distract them,” I said. “One big happy family. I go in the front door and get Harvey the hell out of there. Quietly.”

Grey considered it for a moment and then nodded once. “I doubt I’ll be able to fool his wife for more than a moment. But then, you only need a moment.”

Deirdre grimaced. “Just press your lips together as hard as you can and keep quiet. He gets like that when he’s angry. I’ll talk.”

Grey’s mouth turned up into a grin. Then he winked at me and just melted.

One second, the plain man in jeans and an athletic jacket was there. The next, it was Nicodemus, head to toe, black suit and all-and not just in appearance. Grey’s posture changed, along with his walk, the way he held his head, right down to the smug, wary eyes. “Why, thank you, Deirdre,” he said in a perfect imitation of Nicodemus’s gravelly voice. “Such a dear child.”

Deirdre stared at Grey for a second in something between fascination and disgust. Then she said to me, “Hurry. Imariel will realize Anduriel isn’t there before long.”

I nodded and took off at a jog. I vaulted a large cast-iron fence behind the building (Parkour!) and hustled down an alley no wider than my shoulders between the bank building and its neighbor, keeping the bank between me and the approach of Tessa and her goons, the way a squirrel will circle and hide behind the trunk of a tree. I stopped at the corner to check and be sure that they’d gone out of sight, found the coast clear, then ran down the length of the front side of the bank and went up the stairs to Harvey’s office three steps at a time.

The front door had a simple logo on it that read: MORRISON FIDUCIARY SERVICES. I went on in and found myself in an office decorated with tastefully spartan sensibilities. There was a receptionist’s desk, though no one was at it, and an open door leading into what was obviously a working office.

“Just a moment,” called a man from the other room. “I’ll be right with you.”

I didn’t give him a moment. The way the office was laid out, the rear entrance had to open directly into Harvey’s office, and Tessa and company might appear there anytime.

Harvey’s office was as elegant as his entry, but more crowded with the tools of his trade-computers and office equipment and bookshelves and files. The man himself sat behind the desk with his shirtsleeves rolled up, hunched over a computer keyboard, fingers flying as he watched figures and diagrams of some kind rolling by on his screen.

No sooner did I set foot in the office than the computer started making an odd buzzing noise and the scent of scorched insulation filled the air. An instant later, Harvey’s screen turned blue, covered in white text.

“What?” he said, baffled. Then he slapped the side of the monitor and repeated, “What? You have got to be kidding me. .” He turned his gaze toward me, annoyance all over his face, and suddenly froze as he saw my expression and my quarterstaff. “Uh,” he said. “Who the hell are you?”

“Come with me if you want to live,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“No time,” I said. “It isn’t your fault, but you’re into some bad business, Harvey. There’s a woman with two hired goons about to come up your back steps, and they aren’t here to sell you a magazine subscription.”

“What?” he said. “Do you have an appointment?”

“Are you freaking kidding me?” I growled, and stalked over to his desk. “Get up and come with me.”

“Now see here, young man,” Harvey stammered. “I will not be ordered about in my own place of business. If you do not leave immediately, I will summon the authorities.”

There just wasn’t time for this dance. So I stepped around the desk, grabbed his upper arm in my left hand, and hauled him to his feet.

“Take your hands off of me at once!” he shouted.

“I’m trying to help you,” I told him, dragging him back out into the front room by main force. “You are going to thank me for this later-”

The front door opened, and two more goons stepped into the office, different men from the ones Tessa had with her. Dammit. I hadn’t been keeping an eye out for them on the way in. Of course, if we’d thought to cover both exits, Tessa and her people would have done the same.

The two men saw us and immediately plunged their hands into their jackets, going for their shoulder holsters.

I was quicker. I thrust Harvey behind me with my left hand and pointed my staff at the two men with my right, summoning up a burst of will and snarling, “Forzare!”

The runes carved into the staff flared into a pale green-white light, and a wave of force caught both men. One of them was slapped against the wall hard enough to dent the drywall, while the other went reeling back out the door and was thrown down the steps.

The thug who hit the drywall was tough. He bounced off it, completed drawing his silenced pistol, dropped to a knee, and aimed at Harvey.

No time to pull together a shield, not without the advantage of a specialized magical tool to make it happen. So I spun, putting my back between the shooter and Harvey, bowed my head forward as far as I could, and hunched my shoulders.

The gun coughed, clack, clack, clack. Slugs smashed against my back, only to be defeated by the painstaking protective energies I had spell-wrought into the leather duster I wore. I counted eight hits, all of which felt like taking a Little League fastball to the back-painful but not debilitating. Then the gun fell silent and I heard the metallic click of a magazine being released.

I whirled and slashed the end of my staff at the gunman. The heavy oak smashed against the wrist of his gun hand and knocked away the fresh magazine he’d been about to load. I followed up with a backswing and hit him on the jaw right below his ear and sent him sprawling to the floor, the gun tumbling free.

I kicked the gun away from him, and hauled Harvey to his feet. He was staring at the downed gunman, aghast.

“That. . that man just tried to kill you.”

“No,” I said. “He just tried to kill you. Seriously, dude, what part of come with me if you want to live did you not understand?”

I hauled Harvey along with me again, and this time he wasn’t resisting me. We headed for the door just as the sound of breaking glass cut in from the office.

“What was that?” he panted.

“Trouble,” I said. “Hurry.”

I led the way, staff in hand, a shield spell ready to leap into reality if the second gunman proved to be waiting for us, but there was no sign of him.

“You’re in pretty good shape, Harvey,” I said as I led him down the stairs. “You a jogger by any chance?”

“Uh,” he said. “I swim. And do yoga.”

“No, Harvey,” I said. “You run. You run marathons every morning before breakfast. Make me believe it. Move.” I broke into a run down the sidewalk, dodging a little bit of foot traffic now and then. Harvey hurried to keep up, breathing harder than was strictly warranted by the exercise. We’d gotten past the bank and to the next strip of brownstone buildings before I heard a shout behind me. Tessa had appeared in the doorway to Harvey’s office. She focused on me, and even from that distance I could feel the malice in her gaze. She pointed a finger at me and two goons took up the chase.

I ducked down the next alley between buildings, circling back toward where I hoped Grey and Deirdre would be waiting to give me some backup, but they were not to be found. As I looked, I saw Tessa emerge from the back door of Harvey’s office and begin hurrying after us. There wasn’t much foot traffic on this block, and I saw Tessa shuck out of her overcoat on the run. In another moment, she’d take her demonic form and close in on us.

If she was truly out to disrupt her husband’s plans, Tessa wasn’t worried about causing a scene. If she could stir up the city’s police forces, so much the better. She’d happily become that hideous bug thing she turned into and rip Harvey’s skull apart.

“Dammit,” I said, fleeing down the street, away from Harvey’s office and my compatriots. I didn’t have much choice. Tessa had me outnumbered. I might have been able to take my chances in a fight with her and some armed thugs, but I couldn’t fight them and protect Harvey at the same time. If I stood my ground, they’d take him. So I ran, to buy myself some time to think.

As I did, I realized that I didn’t have to beat them in a fight. All I had to do was stall them, or hold them off long enough for Deirdre and Grey to catch up with me. While I didn’t trust either of my companions to give a damn about me, they needed Harvey to carry out the plan, and the farther I ran, the more likely it was that I might accidentally lose my own backup.

We reached a building that had been abandoned; its windows were boarded up and covered with graffiti. It would have to do. I whirled toward it, unleashed another blast of energy from my staff, and blew a hole the size of a garbage can in the plywood and the glass beyond.

“Come on,” I said. “Stay close.”

“What are you doing?”

“We’re playing hide-and-seek,” I said, and lunged into the building. Harvey stared slack-jawed at me for a second, but then glanced back toward Tessa.

His face went pale, and his eyes widened. He made a few strangled noises, and then thrust himself through the hole, almost sprawling into the broken glass. I caught him and set him on his feet.

The building had been a retail store of some kind, and most of it was one large room. There were still clothing racks scattered around the place, along with the detritus of long-term abandonment. The only light came in around the edges of its boarded-up windows, and through the hole I’d blasted. Shadows crawled everywhere.

I headed deeper into the building, stumbling blindly over things on the floor while my eyes struggled to shift from the light of the spring morning to the gloom of the store’s interior. I almost ran into a wall before I saw it, but once I had, I was able to make out just enough shapes to realize that the shop had a doorway leading back to some restrooms and what were probably managerial offices of some kind.

I pushed Harvey into the hallway, then stepped into the doorway between him and the rest of the shop, raising my staff to the horizontal and preparing a shield spell. It wasn’t anything like ideal, but it was a better defensive position than I could get on the street outside. They’d all have to come at me from the same direction. “Stay low,” I advised him. “Don’t go anywhere.”

“We should be running,” he panted. “Shouldn’t we? Calling the police?”

“Cops got better things to do than get killed,” I said.

He blinked. “What?”

“Seriously, you don’t recognize that reference either? Hell’s bells, Harvey, do you even go to the movies?”

Shadows moved in the shaft of light provided by my impromptu portal, and figures entered the abandoned store. Three gunmen, then four-and then something that might have been a praying mantis, only hundreds of times too large, complete with googly, faceted bug eyes and a second set of glowing green eyes open above them.

It took Tessa only a second to spot me. Then she darted toward me over the floor, moving with terrible, insectlike speed, and I triggered the shield spell. The runes on my staff flared green-white again, and a fine curtain of blue-green light washed out from the oak, covering the doorway.

Tessa stopped in front of it, maybe ten feet away. Then she pointed at the door with one long leg and said, in a perfectly normal human voice, “Open fire.”

The gunmen didn’t hesitate. Their silenced weapons went clickity-clack, and sparks and flashes of light bounced up from my shield where the bullets struck. Foiling them wasn’t a terrible strain. Subsonic ammunition is slow-moving by its very nature, and each individual round carried considerably less force when it struck than it would have at full speed.

“Hold,” the mantis-thing said.

The gunmen stopped firing.

The giant bug stared at me for a long moment. Then its jaws opened, and opened, and opened some more, and Tessa’s face and head emerged from its mouth, flaccid chitin peeling back like a hood. Her skin and hair were covered in some kind of glistening slime. She was an odd one to look at. She didn’t look like she could be out of her teens when she didn’t have wardrobe to lend her its gravitas, and her apparent youth was magnified by the fact that she was a tiny woman, under five feet tall. She was pretty, the high school girl next door.

Of course, she’d been walking the earth for more than a millennium before there were any high schools.

“Hello, Dresden,” Tessa said.

“Hi, Tessa,” I replied.

“The upright hero Harry Dresden,” she said, “working for Nicodemus Archleone. Did Lasciel finally talk you into taking up her Coin?”

“Pretty sure you know that she didn’t,” I said.

She shrugged one shoulder. The motion was absolutely eerie on her insectoid body. “True. But I cannot imagine what else might compel a man like you to work for the likes of my husband.”

“Long story,” I said. “Now go away.”

She shook her head. “I can’t do that, I’m afraid. You have something I want. I want you to give it to me.”

“It would never work out for us,” I said sadly. “I’d be too worried about you biting my head off afterward to live in the moment.”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “Give the mortal to me. Make me take him from you and you will share his fate.”

“Who are you?” Harvey asked in a shaking, bewildered voice. “What on earth have I done to you?”

Tessa clicked her tongue. “Don’t trouble yourself with such questions, little man. You won’t have them for very much longer.”

“Oh, God,” Harvey said.

“I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “Walk away and I won’t call the Orkin man.”

In reply she lifted an insect leg and hissed a word. A shaft of rotten-looking greenish light streaked toward my shield. I gritted my teeth and held it steady, turning back the attack, feeling the strain of holding the shield beginning to build.

“This isn’t a negotiation,” she said. “You’ve already lost. You’re trapped, and you can’t keep that shield up forever. Give him to me and I will grant you safe passage.”

She was right, of course. I couldn’t hold the shield forever, or even for long. The moment it dropped, she and her boys would cut loose with everything they had and that would be that. She might or might not be sincere about the offer of free passage, but if she was. .

If she was, then this was my chance to derail Nicodemus’s heist. If Tessa, one of Nicodemus’s own circle, interfered and overpowered me, that wouldn’t be my fault. I could end this mess and get out while still preserving Mab’s reputation. Mab would applaud this solution.

And all I had to do was let Tessa kill Harvey.

No. I wasn’t ready to hand over anyone to one of the monsters if I could help it. I might have made some bad choices along the way, but I wasn’t that far gone. Besides, I couldn’t trust her word anyway. She was just as likely to kill me for the fun of it as to let me walk away in one piece.

“Why don’t you go back to the roach motel you crawled out of?” I replied.

She shook her head and sighed. “Such a waste of potential.” Then she turned her head to one of her minions and nodded. “Take them both.”

The gunmen did something I hadn’t expected, at that point-they dropped their weapons and started shucking out of their coats and jackets. As they did, they began to jerk and contort. Joints popped and flesh rippled. Their shirts distended as their shoulders hunched to inhuman proportions, and their faces stretched out into almost canine muzzles, teeth extending into fangs and tusks. Their hands thickened and lengthened, with long claws extending from their tips.

“OhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGod,” Harvey whispered, his breath coming in panicked gasps. “What is that?”

“Ghouls,” I said grimly. “Strong, fast, hard to kill.”

“What are they going to do?”

“Rip through the walls, come at us from all sides, kill us, and eat us,” I said.

And, in professional silence, the ghouls started ripping at the drywall on both sides of my defensive position in the doorway, to do exactly that.