Skin Game

Twenty-nine

We were two blocks from Michael’s place, back in the residential neighborhoods, when a cab all but teleported out of the sleet, moving too fast. It rolled through a stop sign and forced Karrin to slam on the brakes and swerve to avoid a collision.

The little SUV did its best, but it slid on the sleet-slickened street, bounced over the curb, through a wooden privacy fence, and wound up with its front wheels in someone’s emptied pool.

Karrin slapped the vehicle into reverse and tried to pull out, but the rear tires spun uselessly on the ice. “Dammit!” she snarled. “Go. I’m right behind you!”

I grabbed my staff and leapt out into the sleet without hesitating, wrapping myself in Winter as I went running through the storm and into the hazy pseudo-darkness. I went straight for Michael’s place, sprinting down a sidewalk briefly, and then cutting through yards, bounding over fences and parked cars (Parkour!) as I went.

I got to the Carpenters’ home just as the cab that had caused our wreck slid to a gradual stop a few houses past Michael’s. Butters popped out of the back and threw several wadded bills at the driver, then put his head down and sprinted toward Michael’s house. He looked pale and shaky. I sympathized. That potion had left me feeling like I’d just ridden a couple of dozen roller coasters, all at once, with a bad hangover. He hadn’t run five steps before one of his feet went out from under him on the frozen, slippery sidewalk, and he went down hard. I heard his head rap the concrete, and then felt a sympathetic pang at the explosion of air from his lungs as the fall knocked the wind out of him.

I didn’t slow down until I was close to Butters, sweeping my gaze around the neighborhood, and finding it quiet and still.

“Jesus!” Butters blurted out as I got close. He flinched away from me, raising one hand as if to ward off a blow, reaching for something inside his coat with the other.

“Hell’s bells, Butters,” I said on a note of complaint. “If I was going to hurt you, I’d have blasted you from way the hell over there.”

“You tried. .,” he wheezed, hand still poised inside his coat. “Stay. . back. I. . mean it.”

“Hell’s bells, you are smarter than this.” I sighed and offered him my hand. “Come on. They’re bound to be right behind you. You can’t stay out here. Let me help you up.”

He stared up at me for a second, clearly a little dazed from the fall, and just as obviously terrified.

I made an impatient clucking sound and stepped forward.

Butters fumbled what looked like a glass Christmas ornament from his coat’s inner pocket and flicked it at me weakly.

Winter was still upon me. I bent my knees a little and caught it on the fly, careful not to break it. “Whoa,” I said. “Easy there, killer. I’d rather not have us both forget why we’re standing out here in the sleet.”

He stared up at me, struggling to draw a steady breath. “Harry. .”

“Easy,” I said. “Here.” I passed the ornament back to him.

He blinked at me.

“Come on,” I said. I bent down, got a hand under his arm, and more or less hauled the little guy to his feet. He slipped again at once, and would have fallen if I hadn’t held him up. I steadied him, guiding his steps off the treacherous concrete and onto the grass in front of one of the houses. “There, easy. Come on, let’s get you out of the cold at least.”

He groaned and said, “Oh, God, Harry. You’re not. . You haven’t. .” We stumbled a few more steps and then he said, “I’m an idiot. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I said, looking around us warily. “Be inside.”

“How bad have I screwed things up?” he asked.

“We move fast enough, nothing that can’t be fixed,” I said. Impatient, I ducked down enough to get a shoulder beneath his arm and more or less lifted him up, dragging him along with his feet barely touching the ground toward the Carpenters’ yard.

Twenty yards.

Ten.

Five.

The wind rushed. Something shaped like black sails billowed in the sleet, and then swirling shadow receded, and Nicodemus Archleone stood between us and safety, a slender-bladed sword held in his right hand, blade parallel with his leg. He faced me with a small smile.

Behind him, his shadow stretched out for twenty yards in every direction, writhing in slow waves.

I drew up short. Butters’s legs swung back and forth.

I took a step back and looked over my shoulder.

The Genoskwa blurred into vision through the thick sleet, maybe twenty feet back, staying in the shadows of a large pine tree, his enormous shaggy form blending into its darkness. I could see the gleam of his eyes, though.

“Ah, Dresden,” Nicodemus purred. “You caught him. And in the nick of time.”

I set Butters down warily, and kept him close to my side. The little guy didn’t move or speak, though I could feel him shuddering with sudden intelligent terror.

“The little doctor,” Nicodemus said. “Quite a resourceful rabbit, is he not?”

“He’s quick,” I said. “And not much of a threat. There’s no reason not to let him go.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Nicodemus said. “He’s heard entirely too much-and my files on him say that he’s been associated with Marcone’s Chicago Alliance. Only an idiot wouldn’t recognize a potentially lethal security leak.” He tilted his head to one side. “He dies.”

The Genoskwa let out a hungry, rumbling growl.

Butters stiffened. He did not look behind him. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t want to look back there either.

Nicodemus was enjoying this. “It seems, Dresden,” he said, “that it is time for you to make a choice. Shall I make it easier for you?”

“What’d you have in mind?” I asked.

“Practicality,” Nicodemus said. “Give him to me. I will take him from here. It will be quick and merciful.” His eyes shifted to Butters. “It’s nothing personal, young man. You became involved in something larger than you. That is the price you pay. But I’ve no grudge with you. You will simply stop.”

Butters made a quiet, terrified sound.

“Or,” Nicodemus said, “you can breach Mab’s given word, wizard.” He smiled. “In which case, well, I have no need of you.”

“Without me,” I said, “you’ll never get through the second gate.”

“Once I kill you,” Nicodemus said, “I’m quite certain Mab will loan me her next Knight or another servant as readily as she did you, if it means a chance to make good on her word. Choose.”

“I’m thinking about it,” I said.

Nicodemus opened one hand, a gracious gesture, inviting me to take my time.

Giving him Butters wasn’t on the table. Period. But fighting him did not seem like a good idea either. With Nicodemus on one side and the Genoskwa on the other, I did not like my chances at all. Even with the Winter Knight’s mantle, I didn’t know if I could have beaten either of these guys, let alone both of them at once.

If I gave him Butters, I might live. If I didn’t, both of us were going to die, right here next door to Michael’s house.

I was out of options.

“You take the guy behind us,” I muttered to Butters.

The little guy swallowed, and jerked his head in a tiny nod, gripping his Christmas ornament carefully.

Nicodemus nodded, his dark eyes glittering. The point of the slender sword swept up, lithe as a snake’s flickering tongue, and his shadow began to dance and waver in sudden agitation. The Genoskwa let out another rumbling growl and stepped forward. I gripped my staff, and Butters’s tremors abruptly stilled into an electrified tension.

And then Karrin stepped out of the sleet with her rocket launcher prepped and resting on her shoulder, aimed directly at Nicodemus.

“Hi,” she said. “I really don’t like you very much, Denarian.”

“Hah,” I said to Nicodemus. “Heh, heh.”

His eyes slid from me to Karrin and back. His smile widened. “Ms. Murphy,” he said. “You won’t shoot.”

“Why not?” Karrin asked brightly.

“Because it is obvious to me that you love him,” Nicodemus said. “That weapon will kill the wizard, as well as your friend the doctor, if you fire it. At that range, I’m not at all certain that you would survive the blast, either.”

Karrin seemed to regard that offering thoughtfully. Then she said, “You’re right,” and took several steps closer. “There. That should just about do it, don’t you think?”

Nicodemus narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t.”

Karrin spoke in a very low, very calm voice. “People do crazy things for love. I’d rather kill us all and take you with us than let you harm him.” Her voice became a bit sharper, and she took another pair of quick strides nearer Nicodemus. “Take one step closer, Tall, Dark and Furry, and I blow us all to hell right now.”

I checked over my shoulder, to see the Genoskwa pause in the act of slipping a little closer. Its cavern-eyes glittered in silent rage.

Karrin took a couple of slow steps toward Nicodemus, her eyes strangely bright. “Crazy, crazy things. Don’t push me.”

Nicodemus’s smile turned into a smirk. “You proceed from a false assumption,” he said. “You assume that your toy can actually threaten me or my companion.”

Guy had a point, even if I didn’t want to admit it. With that Noose around his neck, I was pretty sure Nicodemus would smirk just as hard at a flamethrower, or a giant meat grinder, for that matter.

“Actually, you’re the one proceeding from a false assumption,” Karrin countered in that same deathly calm voice, a decidedly odd light in her eyes, still approaching. “You think I’m holding a rocket launcher.”

And with that she knocked some kind of concealed cap off the back of the rocket launcher’s tube, and from its length withdrew a sword.

Check that. She withdrew a Sword.

It was a Japanese-style katana blade, set into a wooden cane sheath, in the same style as that of the apocryphal Zatoichi. Even as the false rocket launcher casing fell to the ground, the Sword’s blade sprang free of its sheath, and as it did, Fidelacchius, the Sword of Faith, blazed with furious white light.

But more important, the presence of the Sword suddenly filled the night, a nearly subaudible thrumming like the after-vibration of a bass guitar string. It wasn’t something that could be heard, precisely, or seen, or felt on the skin-but its presence was absolute, unquestionable, filling the sleet-streaked air. It was power, bone-deep, earth solid, and terrible in its resolution.

I think it was that power that wiped the smirk from Nicodemus’s face.

His eyes widened in dismay. Even his shadow abruptly went statue-still.

Karrin’s bid to narrow the distance between them as she had been speaking meant that she was only a few strides away. She closed in, her feet sure, barely seeming to touch the icy ground, and he barely lifted his blade to a defensive counter in time. The swords met in a clash of steel and a blaze of furious light, and she carried her momentum into him with a full-body check against his center of gravity.

“Watch the big guy,” I hissed to Butters, and took a step toward Nicodemus and Karrin-then froze in place.

Nicodemus slipped on the treacherous ground as Karrin slammed into him, but he swept a leg back, dropped one knee to the ground, and prevented himself from falling. She pressed her advantage, their swords locked, each blade exerting lethal pressure against the other.

I didn’t dare intervene. The least slip or mistake in balance from either of them would mean that the two razor-sharp blades would slice like scalpels into unprotected flesh.

I watched them strain silently against each other, strength against strength. Karrin wasn’t relying on upper-body strength to get it done. Her arms were locked in tight against her body, her weight and her legs pressing forward against Nicodemus, and her two-handed grip on Fidelacchius gave her a significant leverage advantage against his one-handed grip. The edge of her sword pressed closer to his face with each straining heartbeat, until a thin, bright ribbon of scarlet appeared on Nicodemus’s cheek.

He showed her his teeth, and the strain on his arm quivered through his entire body as he pushed the Sword back a precious half inch from his skin. “So,” he hissed, “the burnout thinks she has found her new calling.”

She didn’t say anything back. Karrin’s never been a big one for backtalking the bad guys without a damned good reason. It’s not her fault. She’s a practical soul. She took a slow, contained breath, and kept up the pressure, veering the blades, altering the direction slightly, so that the locked swords began a slow descent toward Nicodemus’s throat.

“And you think you deserve to join the ranks of real Knights of the Sword,” Nicodemus said, his voice smooth and confident. “You battered, scarred, broken thing. In my centuries I’ve learned exactly what is needed in a real Knight. You haven’t got what it takes. And you know that. Or you’d have taken up the Sword before now.”

Her eyes blazed, bright blue in her pale, frightened face, and she leaned forward, pressing the Sword closer to his neck, and the beating artery there. I’d seen how sharp the katana’s blade was. It would take a feather’s pressure and the movement of a blade of grass to open Nicodemus’s neck once that steel reached his skin.

“You’ve never done this before,” he said. “Been this close, this tense, this still-not in earnest. Do you know how many times I’ve talked to novices exactly like you, in situations almost exactly like this? I’ve forgotten more about real sword fighting than this pale modern world knows.”

Karrin ignored him. She shifted her hips the barest fraction, seeking a slightly different angle of pressure. The blazing Sword dipped another fraction of an inch closer.

“Dresden,” Nicodemus said, “I’m giving you ample chance to call off your dog before I put her down.” His eyes flicked to me. “End the little doctor and come back to headquarters. There’s no reason I should have to kill all three of you.”

I ground my teeth. Getting myself killed defending Butters was one thing. Taking Karrin with me was something else. But I knew her. I knew what choice she would make, without needing to talk to her about it.

Karrin didn’t let the monsters take her people, either.

But there just wasn’t a good option open to me. The Genoskwa wasn’t far from us, and the damned thing was fast. Even if Butters ran for the safety of Michael’s place right now, he’d never get there before it caught him-and I couldn’t slow the huge thing down with magic, either.

I only had one choice.

“All right,” I croaked. “Dammit, all right.”

I grabbed Butters and threw him out in front of me, pointing my staff at him and calling forth my will. The runes blazed up with the pale green-white light of the crystals beneath Demonreach, from whence the wood for the staff had come.

“Sorry about this, Butters,” I said. “Nothing personal.”

Nicodemus’s eyes widened. Karrin’s gaze flicked toward me for an instant, disbelieving and then resolute.

“Harry?” Butters asked.

“Forzare!” I thundered, and unleashed a blast of unseen force from the staff.

It took Butters full in the chest, hitting him like a charging bull and hurling him through the sleet-and over the little white picket fence into the nearest corner of the Carpenters’ yard.

Everything happened in the same instant.

Nicodemus’s left arm blurred and produced a short-barreled pistol from somewhere on his body. He jammed it into Karrin’s belly and pulled the trigger half a dozen times.

I let out a scream of defiance and drew that monster revolver from my duster even as the Genoskwa came charging toward me. The Winter mantle made me faster than I could ever have been on my own, but even so there was no time for anything but a hip shot. The Genoskwa was maybe three feet away when the gun went off, thundering like a high-powered rifle. Then the huge creature hit me like a freight train, picking me up in its onslaught like a piece of litter being towed along by the breeze, and carried me across the street and into the side of the neighbor’s minivan.

Metal crashed and crunched. Glass broke. Silver lightning ran through my body without causing me any real pain. The carnivore stench of the Genoskwa filled my nose. My arms slammed against the vehicle, but I hung on to the pistol, shoved it against the creature’s torso, but before I could shoot, it got hold of my wrist, its huge hands wrapping my forearm as if I’d been a toddler, and slammed it against the minivan, pinning the pistol there. Its other hand landed on my head, claws pressing into my skin as the thick fingers tightened on my skull like a nutcracker.

“Hold!” I heard Nicodemus shout, his voice sharp.

The Genoskwa let out a low growl. It had to turn its shoulders and twist at the waist to look back at him, a simian gesture-there was just too much muscle on that huge neck to allow it the full range of motion. As a result, I was able to see past it.

Karrin, apparently unhurt, still stood, and she had Fidelacchius pressed against Nicodemus’s throat.

I blinked, and felt a sudden surge of ferocious pride.

She’d beaten him.

“I may be no true Knight,” Karrin snarled into the sudden silence, her voice tight with pain. “But I’m the only one here. Tell the gorilla to let Dresden go or I take your head off and give the Noose back to the Church along with your Coin.”

Nicodemus stared at her for a moment. Then he opened his hands, slowly, and the sword and pistol both tumbled to the frozen ground. The sleet rattled down in silence.

“I surrender,” he said quietly, his voice mocking. He tilted his head slightly toward Butters. “And I relinquish my claim on the blood of the innocent. Have mercy on me, O Knight.”

“Tell the Genoskwa to let him go,” Karrin said.

Nicodemus held out his hand. The swarming shadows around him abruptly surged, condensed, flooded toward him. They gathered in his palm, and an instant later, a small silver coin gleamed there, marked with a black smudge in the shape of some kind of sigil. Without looking away from Karrin, he dropped the Coin, and it fell to the icy sidewalk without bouncing, as if it had been made from something far heavier than lead.

“Let Dresden go,” Karrin said.

Nicodemus smiled, still, his eyes and hands steady. He reached up and undid the Noose tied about his throat, and let it fall to the ground beside the Coin.

Karrin bared her teeth. “Let him go. I’m not going to ask again.”

Nicodemus smiled and smiled, and said, “Crush his skull. Make it hurt.”

The Genoskwa turned back toward me, his eyes blazing from back beneath his cavernous brow, and his fingers tightened on my skull. I dropped my staff and tried to reach up to pry his hand off my head, but quickly realized that I was hilariously outclassed in the physical strength department. If I strained with my entire body, I might have a chance against one of the Genoskwa’s fingers. I tried that. The vise tightened. My breathing turned harsh as red cracks began to spread through the silvery sensation.

“But I’ve surrendered,” Nicodemus assured Karrin. “It’s very clear, what you must do.” His smile had returned, and his voice dripped contempt. “Save me, O Knight.”

“You son of a bitch,” Karrin snarled. Her breath had begun to come in gulps. “You son of a bitch.”

Pain finally began to hammer through the mantle of Winter. I heard myself make an animal sound as the Genoskwa’s grip tightened. His breathing was getting faster and harsher, too. He was enjoying this.

My groan shook Karrin, visibly, her body reacting to the sound.

I saw it coming, what Nicodemus was doing. I tried to warn her, but as I began to speak, the Genoskwa rapped my head back against the minivan and nothing came out.

“Save me,” Nicodemus said again, “and watch him die.”

“Damn you!” Karrin snarled.

Her hips and shoulders twisted, to deliver the lethal slash.

The light of the blade died away as abruptly as that of an unplugged lamp. The thrum of power that resonated through the very air vanished.

Nicodemus rolled, moving like a snake, anticipating her perfectly and flowing away from the Sword with a sinuous motion of spine and shoulder. Karrin was thrown slightly off-balance by the lack of resistance, and his hands swept up and seized her wrists.

The pair of them struggled for a second, and then Fidelacchius swept up high, over Karrin’s head. Her expression whitened in horror as she saw the Sword, now gleaming with nothing more than ordinary light.

Then, guided by Nicodemus’s hands, the ancient Sword came smashing down onto the concrete of the sidewalk, the flat of the blade striking the frozen stone.

It shattered with a rising shriek of protesting metal, shards flickering in the streetlights. Pieces of the blade went spinning in every direction, sparkling reflected light through the darkness. Karrin stared at it with unbelieving eyes.

“Ah,” Nicodemus said. The wordless sigh was a slow, deep expression of utter satisfaction.

Awful silence fell.

The Sword of Faith was no more.