Skin Game

Thirty-six

Tessa’s wings blurred and she came at me, scythe-hook arms raised to strike.

The voice inside my head was screaming a high-pitched, girly scream of terror, and for a second I thought I was going to wet my pants. There wasn’t any time to get cute, there wasn’t any space to run, and without the superstrength of the Winter mantle, I was as good as dead.

Unless. .

If Butters was right, then the strength I’d gained as the Winter Knight was something I’d had all along-latent and ready for an emergency. The only thing that had been holding me back was the natural inhibitors built into my body. Not only that, but I had another advantage-during the past year and a half or so, since I’d been dead and got better, I’d been training furiously. First, to get myself back on my feet and into shape to fight if I had to, and then because it had provided a necessary physical outlet for the pressures I was under.

The thing about training of any kind is that you get held back by an absolute limit-it freaking hurts. Little injuries mount up, robbing you of your drive, degrading the efficiency of whatever training you’re into, creating imbalances and points of relative weakness.

But not me.

For the duration of my training, I’d been shielded from pain by the aegis of the Winter mantle. It wasn’t just that it made me physically stronger-it also allowed me to train longer and harder and more thoroughly than I could possibly have done without it. I wasn’t faster and stronger than I’d been before solely because I wore the Winter Knight’s mantle-I’d also worked my ass off to do it.

I didn’t have to beat Tessa. I just had to survive her. Anna Valmont would already be on the vault door, finessing it open again, and now that she’d done it once, I was pretty sure that her repeat performance would be even faster. How long had it taken her to take the door the first time? Four minutes? Five? I figured she’d do it in three. And then Michael would be through the door and this situation would change.

Three minutes. That was one round in a prizefighting ring. I just had to last one round.

Time to make something awesome happen, sans magic, all by myself.

As Tessa closed in, I flung my mostly empty duffel bag at her, faked to my right, and then darted to my left. Tessa bought the fake and committed, sliding past me on the smooth floor. I jumped up on top of a money cube and, without stopping my motion, bounded up again to the top shelf of a storage rack of artwork, got my feet planted, and turned with my staff raised over my head as she came blurring through the air toward me.

I let out a shout as I swung the heavy quarterstaff, giving it everything I had. I tagged her on the triangular head, hammering her hard enough to send the shock of the blow rattling through my shoulders. She might have been fast and psycho-angel strong, but she was also a bitty thing and even in her demonform she didn’t have much mass. The blow killed her momentum completely and she plunged toward the floor.

But instead of dropping, she slammed her hooks into the metal shelf, their points piercing steel as if it had been cardboard, and she let out a shriek of fury as she started hauling herself up toward me.

I didn’t like that idea. So I jumped on her face with both of my big stompy boots.

The impact tore the hooks free of the shelf and we both plunged to the floor. I came down on top, and the landing made my ankles scream with pain, and drove a gasping shriek from Tessa. I tried to convert the downward momentum into a roll and was only partly successful. I scrambled away on my hands and knees about a quarter of an instant before Tessa slammed a scythe down right where my groin had been. She’d landed on her back, and for an instant her limbs flailed in a very buglike fashion.

So I dropped my staff, grabbed one supporting strut of the steel shelving, and heaved.

The whole heavy storage rack and all its art came crashing down onto her head with a tremendous crash and a deafening sound of shattering statuary. I grabbed my staff and started backpedaling toward the entrance to Hades’ strong room.

Tessa stayed down for maybe a second and a half. Then the shelves heaved and she threw them bodily away from her and scrambled back to her feet with another shriek of anger. She turned toward me and came leaping my way.

I stopped in my tracks, drew the big.500 out of my duster pocket, took careful aim, and waited until Tessa was too close to miss. I pulled the trigger when she was about six feet away.

The gun, in the confined space of the vault, sounded like a cannon, and the big bullet crashed into her thorax, smashing through her exoskeleton in a splash of ichor, and staggering her in her tracks. Behind her, a money cube suddenly exploded into flying Benjamins.

I took two or three steps back before she got moving again, and then I stopped and aimed once more, slamming another round into her. I stepped back and then fired a third round. Back again, and a fourth. After the fifth, my gun was empty and Tessa was still coming.

The bullets hadn’t been enough to do more than slow her down, but they’d bought me what I needed most-time.

I stepped back into Hades’ strong room and slammed the barred door closed just as Tessa came at me again. She hit the far side of the door with a violent impact and wrenched at it with her scythes but it had locked when it closed, and it held fast. She shrieked again and her scythes darted through the bars toward me. I reeled back in time to avoid perforation, and my shoulders hit the wall behind me.

“Hell’s bells!” I blurted. “At least tell me why!”

The mantis’s scythe-hooks latched onto two of the bars and began straining to tear them apart. Metal groaned and began to bend, and I suddenly felt one hell of a lot less clever. Tessa wasn’t all that big, and it wouldn’t take much of a bend in the bars to allow her into the strong room with me, without leaving an opening big enough for me to use to escape. If she opened them enough to come in, I was going to die a savagely messy death. Seconds ticked by in slow motion as the demon mantis quivered with physical strain and pure hatred.

“Why?” I demanded. My voice might have come out a little bit high-pitched. “What the hell are you doing screwing around with this mission?”

She didn’t answer me. The bars groaned and slowly, slowly bent maybe an inch, but they’d been built extra thick, as if they’d been precisely intended to resist superhuman strength, which in all probability was exactly the case. Tessa threw back her insect’s head and let out a screech that pressed viciously on my ears.

Halfway through, the mantis’s head and face just boiled away, and the screech turned into a very human, utterly furious scream as Tessa’s head appeared, both sets of her eyes wide and wild.

“I have not invested fifteen centuries to see it thrown away!” she shrieked.

I stared at her helplessly, my heart pounding furiously in my chest. I tried to think of something clever or engaging or disarming to say, but what came out was a helpless flick of my hands and the words “Psycho much?”

She focused on me, utterly furious and she spat several words that might have been an incantation of some kind, but her fury was too great to allow her to focus it into a spell. Instead, she just opened her mouth and screamed again, a scream that could never have come from a simple set of human lungs, one that went on and on and on, billowing out of her mouth along with particles of spittle, and then clots of something darker, and then of larger bits of matter that I realized, after a few seconds, had legs and were wriggling.

And then her scream turned into a gargle and she began vomiting a cloud, a swarm of flying insects that poured through the bars of the cage and came at me in an almost solid stream, slamming into me like water issuing from a high-pressure hose.

The impact drove the air from my lungs, and I couldn’t suck it back in right away-which was just as well. The insects that hit my body clung on, roaches and beetles and crawling things that had no names, and swarmed up my neck toward my nose and mouth and ears as if guided by a malign will.

A few got into my gaping mouth before I clamped it shut and covered my nose and mouth with one hand. I chewed them to death and they crunched disgustingly and tasted of blood. The rest went for my eyes and ears and burrowed beneath my clothing to begin chewing at my skin.

I kept my cool for maybe twenty seconds, slapping them away from my head, getting a few strangled breaths in through my barely parted fingers, but then the insects got between my fingers and into my eyes and ears at almost the same time, and I let out a panicked scream. Burning agony spread over my body as the swarm chewed and chewed and chewed, and the last thing my stinging eyes saw was Tessa’s body emptying like a deflating balloon as the insect swarm kept flooding out of it, and I had a horrified second to realize that she was in the strong room with me.

And then my mental shields against pain fluttered as panic began to settle in, and agony dropped me to my knees-putting me hip-deep in the focused malice of thousands and thousands of tiny mouths.

I dropped my hands desperately to fumble with the key to the thorn manacles, because without the use of magic I was going to die one of the more ugly deaths I’d ever considered, but my hands were one burning sheet of flame and I couldn’t find the damned manacles and their keyholes under the layers and layers of swarming vermin, which seemed devilishly determined to keep them hidden from me.

Seconds later, the swarm filled my nostrils and started chewing at my lips, and forced me to close my eyes or lose them, and even then I could feel them chewing at the lids, ripping at the lashes.

I have been trained in mental disciplines most people could hardly imagine, much less duplicate. I have faced terrors of the same caliber without flinching. But not like this.

I lost it.

Thought fled. Pain came flooding through my shields. Terror and the urgent desire to live filled every thought, blind instinct taking over. I thrashed and crawled and writhed, trying to escape the swarm, but I might as well have been holding completely still for all the good it did me, and after time, the lack of air forced me to the floor on my side, curled up in a fetal position, just trying to defend my eyes and nose and mouth. Everything turned black and red.

And voices filled my ears. Thousands of whispering voices, hissing obscene, hateful things, vicious secrets, poisonous lies and horrible truths in half a hundred tongues all at once. I felt the pressure of those voices, coursing into my head like ice picks, gouging holes in my thoughts, in my emotions, and there was nothing, nothing I could do to stop them. I felt a scream building, one that would open my mouth, fill it with tiny, tearing bodies, and I knew that I couldn’t stop it.

And then a broad hand slammed down onto the crown of my head, and a deep voice thundered, “Lava quod est sordium!”

Light burned through my closed eyelids, through the layers of insects covering them, and a furious heat spread down from the crown of my head, from that hand. It spread down, moving neither quickly nor slowly, and wherever it passed over my skin, as hot as scalding water in an industrial kitchen sink, the swarm abruptly vanished.

I opened my eyes to find Michael kneeling over me, Amoracchius in his left hand, his right resting on my head. His eyes were closed and his lips were moving, words of ritual Latin flowing from them in a steady stream.

Pure white fire spread down over my body, and I remembered when I had seen something similar once before-when vampires had attempted to manhandle Michael, many moons before, and had been scorched and scarred by the same fire. Now, as the light engulfed me, the swarm scattered, outer layers dropping away, while the slower inner layers were incinerated by the fire. It hurt-but the pain was a harsh, cleansing thing, somehow honest. It burned over me, and when the fire passed, I was free, and the swarm was scattering throughout the vault, pouring toward the tiny air vents spread throughout.

I looked up at Michael, gasping, and leaned my head forward. For a second, the pain and the fear still had me, and I couldn’t make myself move. I lay there, simply shuddering.

His hand moved from my head to my shoulder, and he murmured, “Lord of Hosts, be with this good man and give him the strength to carry on.”

I didn’t feel anything mystic. There was no surge of magic or power, no flash of light. Just Michael’s quiet, steady strength, and the sincerity of the faith in his voice.

Michael still thought I was a good man.

I clenched my jaw over the sobbing scream that was still threatening me, and pushed away the memory of those tiny, horrible words-the voice of Imariel, it must have been. I forced myself to breathe in a steady rhythm, despite the pain and the burning of my skin and my lungs, despite the stinging tears and tiny drops of blood in my eyes. And I put up the shields again, forcing the pain to a safe distance. They were shakier, and more of the pain leaked through than had been there before-but I did it.

Then I lifted my eyes to Michael and nodded.

He gave me a quick, fierce smile and stood up, then offered me his hand.

I took it and rose, looking past Michael to where Grey stood, melting back from Harvey’s face to his own, one last time. He’d opened the door to Hades’ vault again. Behind him, the rest of the crew, minus Binder, was approaching, while the huge, vague shape of the Genoskwa closed the door to the vault with a large, hollow boom of displaced air.

“She came through fast, during the firefight,” Michael said to me. “There wasn’t any way for me to stop her.”

My throat burned and felt raw, but I croaked, “It worked out. Thanks.”

“Always.”

Nicodemus approached us with his expression entirely neutral, and eyed Michael.

“We needn’t fear further interference from Tessa. It will take her time to pull herself together. How did you do that?” he demanded.

“I didn’t,” Michael said simply.

Nicodemus and Deirdre exchanged an uneasy glance.

“All of you, hear me,” Michael said quietly. He turned and stood between them-Fallen angels and monsters and scoundrels and mortal fiends-and me. “You think your power is what shapes the world you walk in. But that is an illusion. Your choices shape your world. You think your power will protect you from the consequences of those choices. But you are wrong. You create your own rewards. There is a Judge. There is Justice in this world. And one day you will receive what you have earned. Choose carefully.”

His voice resonated oddly in that space, the words not loud, but absolutely penetrating, touched with something more than mortal, with an awareness beyond that of simple space and time. He was, in that moment, a Messenger, and no one who heard him speak could doubt it.

Silence settled on the vault, and no one moved or spoke.

Nicodemus looked away from Michael and said calmly, “Dresden. Are you capable of opening the Way?”

I took a steadying breath, and looked around for the key to the manacles. I’d dropped it while being simultaneously eaten, smothered, and driven insane. Hell, I was lucky there hadn’t been any anaphylactic shock involved.

Or, all things considered, maybe luck had nothing to do with it.

Michael spotted the key and picked it up. I held out my hand and he began unlocking the manacles.

“What did that mean?” I asked him in a whisper.

“You heard it as well as I did,” he replied, with a small shrug. “I suppose it wasn’t a message for us.”

I looked slowly over the others as the manacles came off and thought that maybe it had been.

Uriel, I thought. You sneaky bastard. But you weren’t telling me anything I didn’t already suspect.

The thorn manacles fell away and the icy power of Winter suffused me again. The pain vanished. The raw, chewed skin became nothing. The exhaustion fell away and I drew a deep, cleansing breath.

Then I summoned my will, spun on my heel, slashed at the air with my staff, and called, “Aparturum!”

And with a surge of my will and power, and a sudden line of sullen red light in the air, I tore an opening into the Underworld.