Skin Game

Twenty-five

By the time we got back to the slaughterhouse, the sun had gone down, and the night had come on cold and murky. Rain had begun to fall in a fine mist, and the temperature had dropped enough that I could see it starting to coat the city in a fine sheet of ice.

“Ice storm,” Karrin noted as she parked the car. “Perfect.”

“At least it’ll keep people in,” I said.

“Depending on how this goes, that might cut down on innocent bystanders,” she said. “Is Mab messing with the weather again?”

I squinted out at the weather. “No,” I said, immediately and instinctively certain of the answer. “This is just winter in Chicago being winter in Chicago. Mab doesn’t care about innocent bystanders.”

“But she might care about giving you an advantage.”

I snorted and said, “Mab helps those who help themselves.”

Karrin gave me a thin smile. “That thing you did, with the Genoskwa. You threw magic at it.”

“Yep.”

“It didn’t work, I guess.”

“Nope,” I said. “I hit him with my best shot, something Mab gave me. Just drained off him, grounded out.”

“Grounded,” she said. “Like with a lightning rod?”

“Exactly like that,” I said. “The Forest People know magic, and they’re ridiculously powerful, but they understand it differently than humans do. The one I knew used water magic like nothing I’d ever seen or heard of before. This Genoskwa. . I think he’s using earth magic the same way. On a level I don’t know a damned thing about.”

“Pretend I don’t know a damned thing about earth magic either,” Karrin said, “and bottom-line it for me.”

“I threw the most potent battle magic I know at him, and he shut it down with zero trouble. I’m pretty sure he’ll be able to do it as much as he wants.”

“He’s immune to magic?” Karrin asked.

I shrugged. “If he senses it coming and can take action, pretty much,” I said. “Which makes me think that he’s not all that bright.”

“Hell of a secret to give away when his goal wasn’t to actually kill you.”

“No kidding,” I said. “Maybe he gave me too much credit and assumed I already knew. Either way, I know now.”

“Right,” Karrin said. “Which gives you an advantage. You won’t bother trying to blast him with magic the next time.”

I shuddered, thinking of the creature’s sheer speed and power, and of exactly how little he feared me. I touched the handle of my new revolver, now loaded and in my duster pocket. “With any luck, there won’t be a next time.”

Karrin turned to me abruptly, her expression earnest. “Harry,” she said quietly, “that thing means to kill you. I know what it looks like. Don’t kid yourself.”

I grimaced and looked away.

Satisfied that she’d made her point, she nodded and got out of the car. She’d slung one of her space guns (she’d called it a Kriss) on a harness under her coat, and you almost couldn’t see it when she moved. She rolled around to the trunk, looked up and down the street once, and then took out the rocket launcher and slung it over her shoulder. In the dark, in the rain, it looked like it might have been one of those protective tubes that artists use, maybe three and a half feet long.

“Really think you can hit him with that thing?” I asked.

“It’s weapon enough to handle him,” she said. “If I have to.”

I squinted up at the drizzling mist and said, “I’m getting tired of this job.”

“Let’s get it done, then,” Karrin said.

* * *

This time, when we rolled in, Jordan wasn’t on duty. Maybe he’d been given a shift off to get some sleep. Or maybe Nicodemus was so sure I was about to break through his conditioning and suborn him that he’d moved the kid to a less vulnerable post. Yeah. That was probably it.

When we came in, most of the crew was already downstairs, gathered around the conference table. Even the Genoskwa was standing around in plain sight, albeit in a deep patch of shadow that reduced his visible presence to an enormous, furry shadow. Only Nicodemus and Deirdre were absent-and I spotted Deirdre standing silently on one of the catwalks, looking down at the table, where Binder was telling some sort of animated anecdote or joke.

She looked. . disturbed. Don’t get me wrong-a girl who goes around biting the tongues out of men’s mouths is disturbed one way or another, but the Denarian killer looked genuinely troubled, or distressed, or something.

Karrin caught me looking at her and sighed. “We can’t afford another damsel, Dresden.”

“I wasn’t thinking that,” I said.

“Sure you weren’t.”

“Actually,” I said, “I was thinking she looked vulnerable. Might be a good time to confront her about how Harvey died.”

Karrin clucked her tongue thoughtfully. “I’ll be at the table.”

“Yeah.”

She descended the stairs, and I ambled out along the catwalk to stand beside Deirdre.

She looked up at me as I approached, her eyes flat. But then her gaze shifted back to the room below.

“And then I said”-Binder snickered, evidently coming to the punch line-“why did you wear it, then?”

Hannah Ascher burst out in a short, hearty belly laugh, and was joined, more quietly, by Anna Valmont. Even Grey smiled, at least a little. The expression looked somehow alien on his oddly unremarkable features.

Deirdre stared down at them all, her expression dispassionate, like a scientist observing bacteria. Her eyes flickered toward me for a second as I approached, her body tensing slightly.

Being a genius interrogator, I asked her, “So. Why’d you kill Harvey?”

She looked at me for a few seconds, then turned her eyes back to the room below, to watch Karrin come to the table. There was a moment of silence from everyone as they took in her armament. Then Grey rose, suddenly dapper, and offered to help her with the rocket launcher like it was a coat. Karrin let him, giving him an edged smile that she directed past him, to the shadows where the Genoskwa lurked.

“I didn’t kill the accountant,” she said quietly. “Nicodemus said not to.”

That surprised me a little. If she wanted to hide herself from me, she didn’t need to go to the effort of lying. All she had to do was stay silent.

“He said that to all of us,” I said. “Maybe he said something else to you privately.”

“He didn’t,” she said. “My mother killed him with a spell she calls the Sanguine Scalpel.”

“The cuts looked a lot like the ones you would inflict,” I said.

“A cut throat is a cut throat, wizard.”

Tough to argue with that one. “And you chased her.”

“I went to say. . to talk to her, yes.”

“What did she have to say?”

“Personal things,” Deirdre replied.

I narrowed my eyes.

Something wasn’t jiving here. Deirdre was demonstrating absolutely no emotion about her mother, which in my experience is the next best thing to impossible for almost anyone. Hell, even Maeve had carried enormous mother issues around with her. If Tessa was really trying to beat Nicodemus and Deirdre to the Holy Grail, there should have been something there. Frustration, irritation, fear, anger, resignation, something.

Not this distant, cool clarity.

Tessa wasn’t after any Grail.

But what else could motivate her?

Deirdre looked up from below and studied me calmly. “He knows that you mean to betray him, you know.”

“Makes us even,” I said.

“No, it doesn’t,” she said, in that same distant voice. “Not even close. I’ve seen him disassemble men and women more formidable than you, dozens of times. You don’t have a chance of tricking him, out-planning him, or beating him.” She stated it as a simple fact. “Mab knows it, too.”

“Then why would she send me?”

“She’s disposing of you without angering your allies at her. Surely you can’t be so deluded that you don’t see that.”

A slow chill went through me at the words.

That. . could make a great deal of sense, actually. If Mab had decided not to use me after all, then my presence was no longer needed-but enough people thought well of me that they could prove extremely trying for her, should they set out to seek revenge.

Of course, that wasn’t how Mab played the game. When she set something up, she did it so that no matter what happened, she would run the table in the end. Mab probably intended me to do exactly what she’d told me she sent me to do. But what she hadn’t said was that she’d set it up so that it wouldn’t hurt her too badly if I failed. If I was too incompetent to work her will, she would regard me as a liability, to be dispensed with-preferably without angering my allies. Nicodemus would get the vengeance-level blame for my death if I failed, and Mab would be free and clear to choose a new Knight.

I felt my jaw tightening and loosening. Well. I couldn’t really have expected anything else. Mab struck me as the kind of mother who taught her children to swim by throwing them into the lake. My entire career with her would be shaped the same way-sink or swim.

“We’ll see,” I said.

She smiled, very slightly, and turned back to regard the table below. Grey was sitting with Karrin, speaking quietly, a smile on his face. She had her narrow-eyed expression on hers, but a smile also lurked somewhere inside it. He was being amusing.

Jerk.

“Is there anything else you’d like to ask me?” Deirdre asked.

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Why?”

“Why what?”

I gestured around. “Why this? Why do you do what you do? Why bite out the tongues and murder hirelings and whatnot? What makes a person do something like this?”

She fell silent. The weight of it became oppressive.

“Tell me, child,” she said. “What is the longest-lasting relationship in your life?”

“Uh,” I said. “Like, in terms of when it started? Or how long it continued?”

“Whichever.”

“My mentor in the White Council, maybe,” I said. “I’ve known him since I was sixteen.”

“You see him daily? You speak to him, work with him?”

“Well, no.”

“Ah,” she said. “Someone that close to you. Who shares your life with you.”

“Uh,” I said. “A girlfriend or two. My cat.”

A small smirk touched her mouth. “Temporary mates and a cat. One cat.”

“He’s an awesome cat.”

“What you are telling me,” she said, “is that you have never shared your life with another over the long term. The closest you have come to it is providing a home and affection for a being which is entirely your subject and in your control.”

“Well, not at bath time. .”

The joke did not register on her. “You have had nothing but firefly relationships, there and then gone. I have watched empires rise and fall and rise again beside Nicodemus. You call him my father, but there are no words for what we are. How can there be? Mortal words cannot possibly encompass something which mortals can never embrace and know. Centuries of faith, of cooperation, of trust, working and living and fighting side by side.” Her mouth twisted into a sneer. “You know nothing of commitment, wizard child. And so I cannot possibly explain to you why I do what I do.”

“And what is it that you think you’re doing with him, exactly?” I asked her.

“We,” she said, with perfect serenity, “are fighting to save the world.”

Which, if true, was about the creepiest thing I’d run into that day.

“From what?” I asked.

She smiled, very faintly, and finally fell silent.

I didn’t press. I didn’t want to hear anything else from her anyway.

I withdrew and went down to the table with the others.

“. . dinner,” Grey was saying. “Assuming we’re all alive and filthy rich afterward, I mean.”

“I certainly can say no,” Karrin replied, her tone light with banter. “You’re a little creepy, Grey.”

“Goodman,” Grey said. “Say it with me. ‘Goodman.’”

“I was a cop for twenty years, Grey,” Karrin said. “I can recognize a fake name when I hear it.”

I settled down next to Karrin and pulled the new revolver out of my pocket, put it on the conference table right where I could reach it and said to Grey, “Hi.”

Grey eyed me and then the gun. Then he said to Karrin, “Does he make these kinds of calls for you?”

“You’ll have to try a little harder with something a little less obvious than that,” Karrin said. “Honestly, I’m sort of hoping he shoots you a little. I’ve never seen a round from that beast hit somebody.”

Grey settled back in his seat, eyeing me sourly. “Bro,” he said, “you’re totally cockblocking me.”

In answer, I picked up the monster revolver. “No,” I said, and then I freaking cocked it, drawing the hammer back with my thumb. Rather than a mere click, it made a sinister ratcheting sound. “Now I’m cockblocking you.”

The table got completely quiet and still. Anna Valmont’s eyes were huge.

“Touché,” Grey said, nodding slightly. “Well, there was no harm in my asking the lady, was there?”

“None to her,” I agreed amiably. “Murphy, should I shoot him anyway?”

Karrin put a finger to her lips and tapped thoughtfully. “I’ve got to admit, I’m curious as hell. But it seems a little unprofessional, as long as he backs off.”

“Hear that?” I asked Grey.

“You people are savages,” Grey said. He shook his head, muttered something beneath his breath, and rose to stalk away from the table and settle down not far from the Genoskwa-who did not object. The two exchanged a very slight nod, and began to speak in low voices in a language I did not recognize.

I lowered the hammer carefully and put the revolver down. The table was silent for another long moment, before Binder said in a jovial tone, as if he had never stopped speaking, “So there I was in Belize with thirty monkeys, a panda, and a pygmy elephant. .”

He had begun to tell a story that everyone around the table thought was completely fabricated, while he insisted that every detail was absolutely true, when Nicodemus entered the factory through emergency doors on the floor level, letting in a blast of freezing mist and winter air. He had added a long coat to his ensemble, and he dropped it behind him as he strode forward across the floor. His shadow slid over the floor beside him, too large and never quite in sync with the rest of him.

“Good evening,” he said, as he took his seat at the head of the table. “Ladies and gentlemen, please give me your attention. Wizard Dresden, if you would, please give us a brief primer on the nature of Ways and how they open.”

I blinked as every eye on the table turned to me. “Uh,” I said. “Ways are basically passages between the mortal world and some portion of the Nevernever-the spirit world. Any point in the mortal world will open a Way to somewhere, if you know how to do it. The Way opens to a place that shares something in common with the point of origin in the mortal world. Uh, for example, if you wanted to open a Way to Hell, you’d have to find a hellish place in the mortal world and start from there. If you want to go to a peaceful place in the Nevernever, you start with a peaceful place here. Like that. Chicago is a great place for Ways-it’s a crossroads, a big one. You can get just about anywhere from here.”

“Thank you,” Nicodemus said. “Our goal is to open a Way into the secured facility containing our objective.” He accepted a large sheet of rolled paper from a squire who had hurried up to hand it to him. “Bearing all those factors in mind, I’m sure you’ll understand why we will begin the job here.”

With a flick of his wrist, he unrolled the large sheet of paper.

It proved to be blueprints, a floor plan. I frowned and stared at it, but it didn’t look familiar.

Karrin made a choking sound.

“Murph?” I asked.

“Ah,” Nicodemus said, smiling. “You know it.”

“It’s a vault,” Karrin said, looking up at me. “A vault that belongs to a lord of the underworld.”

I felt myself clench up in a place that didn’t bear much more clenching. “Oh,” I said weakly. “Oh, Hell’s bells.”

Binder jerked a thumb at me. “What is he on about?” he asked Karrin.

Karrin put a forefinger on the plans. “This is the Capristi Building,” she said. “It’s the second most secure facility in the city.” She took a deep breath. “It’s a mob bank. And it belongs to Gentleman John Marcone, Accorded Baron of Chicago.”