Skin Game

Forty-five

I hadn’t quite finished the “r” sound in “game over” before Grey had crossed forty feet of intervening space and was on top of Ursiel and the Genoskwa.

One second, Grey was standing there, looking smug and anticipatory. The next, there was a blur in the air and then a creature was clawing its way up Ursiel’s back. It was about the size and vaguely the shape of a gorilla, but the head on its shoulders might have belonged to some kind of hideous werewolf-bulldog hybrid, and grotesquely elongated claws tipped its hands. Its weird golden eyes were Grey’s. Before Ursiel could realize that he was under attack, the Grey-creature was astride its ursine back, fangs sinking into the huge hump of muscle there, oversized jaws locked into place. The huge bear-thing reared up onto its hind legs, only for Grey to reach around to its head with gorilla-length arms and sink nine-inch claws like daggers into its eyes.

Ursiel and the Genoskwa let out an ear-tearing roar of agony.

I whirled the heavy end of my staff toward Nicodemus and snarled, “Forzare!” The hailstone flew at him like a bullet, but though the shock of Grey’s betrayal was still evident on his face, Nicodemus’s superb reflexes were still in fine operating order, and he dropped into a lateral roll, dodging the missile.

Michael shouted, “Harry!” and hauled me to one side an instant before an orb of absolutely searing white heat appeared precisely where my head had been. The blast coming off of it was so intense that it singed the hair on that side of my head. I turned my head to see Ascher and Lasciel lifting her other hand, preparing to hurl a second sphere at me.

“You get Nick,” I panted.

“Seems fair,” Michael said.

In the background, Ursiel continued to roar and thrash. I couldn’t see how it was going for Grey, but Ursiel crashed off of the stage and into a display featuring at least a dozen statues of various saints and holy figures, reducing them to rubble and scattering fabulously valuable gems in every direction.

The second sphere came flying at me and I countered by lifting my staff and shouting, “Defendarius!” A broad wall of force shimmered into being in front of me, and the sphere smashed against it and exploded into a cloud of flame that spread out along its length and breadth, as if seeking a way around it. The heat was viciously intense, and enough of it would have burned through the shield-but it was a question of volume. Ascher had struck at me with pinpoint precision and intensity. I’d countered her with raw power, using a shield big enough to spread the heat over a wide enough area to keep it from burning through.

Ascher let out a snarl of frustration and hurled another sphere. Her thinking was obvious-if she could keep pouring fire onto me and force me to hold up shield after shield against it, eventually she could either burn through it or exhaust my ability to keep holding it up. I’d have taken that fight against a lot of practitioners: There are relatively few wizards on the White Council who can stay with me in terms of pure magical horsepower. But while there are plenty of wizards who could wear themselves out pounding on my shields, I had a pretty solid intuition that Ascher could keep throwing fire until I was a gasping heap on the ground, especially with Lasciel’s knowledge and experience backing her up. Worse, Lasciel knew me, inside and out.

Or at least, she had known me. So it was time to use a few tricks I’d developed since we’d parted ways.

In the past, I’d worn rings designed to store a little excess kinetic energy every time I moved my arm. Then I could let loose the saved energy all in one place to pretty devastating effect when I really needed to do it. I hadn’t had the resources I needed to make new rings, but I’d carved the same spell in my new wizard’s staff.

Seventy-seven times.

It wasn’t as handy as my layered rings had been-instead of being broken up into multiple units, the energy of the spell was all stored in one reservoir, so I only had the one shot.

But it was a doozy.

So as another white-hot sphere splashed into flame against my shield, I whirled the butt end of the staff where the energy storage spells were carved toward Ascher, focused my concentration on the shield, braced my feet, and shouted, “Arietius!”

The staff bucked in my hands like a living thing and shoved my shoes several inches across the floor as the stored energy unleashed itself and drove into the rear of my shield. For a second, I worried about the staff shattering-I had never tried it with this much stored energy before, and there was always the chance that I had exceeded the design tolerance of the spell at some point. If I had, I would be the center of my own spectacular and splintery explosion. But my work was good and the staff functioned perfectly. I held the structure of the shield together and let the energy from the staff drive it forward, toward Ascher, and suddenly a large, obdurate, and extremely solid invisible wall was rushing at her like an oncoming freight train, shedding a trail of fire in its wake.

I had never lowered the shield, and my actions had been obscured by all the fire chewing away at it-so Ascher recognized the danger a second too late, and that was where her inexperience showed. She might have real power and a gift with fire, but in a fight there’s no time to think your way through spells and counterspells. Either you’ve done your homework or you haven’t, and despite the advantage of having Lasciel in her corner, Ascher wasn’t ready for something like this. She was focused entirely on offense, not on protecting herself as well, and couldn’t come up with a counter in time.

The wall hit her with about the same force as an oncoming garbage truck, and blew her right out of the veil of purple mist that clung to her naked form. She flew back off the stage in a windmill of flailing limbs, and crashed into a display of particularly fine ecclesiastical robes and garments, most of which burst into flame as the sheath of shimmering heat around her body brushed against them.

As that happened, the light in the great vault changed. The fire in the hands of the two triple statues flared into large, dangerous-looking scarlet bonfires, painting everything in shades of sudden blood. I shot a glance up at the statues, and their mouths were moving. No voices were coming out, but the damned things were talking and a raw instinct told me what had happened. The wanton destruction of part of the collection had set off some kind of alarm.

And we were all standing, more or less, in one enormous prison for the shades of the dead.

Michael and Nicodemus, meanwhile, were engaged in a furious exchange of blows. Amoracchius glowed like a beacon, and its humming power filled the air. Nicodemus’s shadow danced and threatened and obscured his form as he moved like some oily and poisonous liquid, sword flickering-but I had seen all of that before.

I had never seen Michael going all out.

Michael was a big guy, built broad and strong, and the contrast between him and Nicodemus was striking. There’s an old truism in fighting that says a good big man will beat a good small man. The advantage gained from having superior height, reach, and greater physical mass and power is undeniable, and for the first time, I saw Michael using it all.

Blow after blow rained down on Nicodemus, a furious attack, and the smaller man had no choice but to give way before the assault, driven step by step backward before the onslaught of the Knight of the Sword. His lighter blade managed to flick out once, then twice, but each time Michael twisted his body to catch the blow on his mail, trusting the armor Charity had forged for him to protect him-and it did. He kept coming forward, and none of his blows was aimed to wound or incapacitate. Amoracchius swept down at Nicodemus’s head, his throat, his belly, his heart, and any one of the strikes could have delivered a mortal wound.

I flicked a glance toward where Ascher was, for all I knew, on fire. I thought about going over and making sure she stayed down and it made me feel sick enough that I decided I wasn’t quite that far gone yet. Besides, dangerous as she was, she didn’t hold a candle to Nicodemus. Michael had him on the ropes. This was our chance to put that monster away.

Michael drove Nicodemus to the edge of the stage, until the Denarian had to twist with a snarl and dive off to the ground below. He tucked into a roll and came back up again, neat as an acrobat.

And I tagged him with another hailstone before he could turn around and see it coming.

I hadn’t had time to get together as much ice as I’d used on the first two, but the hailstone that hit him was the size of a very large apple and moving considerably faster than a major-league fastball. It didn’t break when it hit. Nicodemus did. There was a wet thump of impact when it hit him in the left side, below the ribs, and he went up onto his toes in reaction, his body drawing to one side in a bow of pain. Then he staggered to one side and fell to a knee.

Michael took two steps and leapt from the stage, Sword grasped over his head, and brought it down on Nicodemus like a headsman’s ax. No demonic power or Fallen angel could save Nicodemus from that blow, delivered by that man, with that Sword.

Nick saved himself with pure nerve.

As Amoracchius swept down, Nicodemus, his face twisted in pain, lifted not his sword to block Michael’s-but the Holy Grail.

Michael let out a cry and twisted at the hips, pulling his blade to one side, and the blow swept past Nicodemus without touching him. Michael landed off-balance and fell into a heavy roll. From the ground, Nicodemus thrust his slender blade at Michael’s back, and sank the tip into the back of one of his thighs. Michael cried out in pain, and came up to his feet heavily, favoring his wounded leg.

Nicodemus rose, his dark eyes glittering, holding his left arm in close to his ribs, where the hailstone had hit him, favoring that side, and moving stiffly. He turned to make sure he could see both me and Michael, and had visible trouble shifting his weight. He was hurt.

But not nearly hurt enough to suit me.

I called another hailstone to my staff. I raised it and aimed.

Nicodemus lifted the Grail again, a small smile on his face as he held it between me and him as a hostage. “Careful, Dresden,” he said. “Are you willing to accept such a loss?”

“Yep,” I said, and snarled, “Forzare!” again, sending another hailstone at him.

Nicodemus’s eyes widened, but he turned his body to shield the Grail, and the hailstone struck him in the right shoulder blade. He let out another breathless cry-and then sudden blackness engulfed him and a tide of shadow swept him away.

“Michael,” I said, and hurried to my friend’s side.

Michael’s eyes were busy, roaming left and right, looking for Nicodemus. He turned so that I could see the wound. It was a thrust, narrow but deep. There wasn’t an inordinate amount of blood staining the leg of his jeans, and I didn’t think it had gone into the artery.

“What happened there?” I asked. “Is he gone?”

“I’m. . I’m not sure. .,” Michael said. “I’ve never seen him forced to run before.”

“We should finish him.”

“Agreed,” Michael said. “How? He just flew away.”

“Gimme a minute,” I said, and felt myself baring my teeth in a grin. “How does the leg feel?”

“I’ve had worse,” Michael said, his voice strained. He shifted his weight, testing the leg, and made a hissing sound-but it supported his weight. “Only a flesh wound.”

“Yeah,” I said. “’Tis but a scratch. Come on, ya pansy.”

He blinked and looked at me. “Pansy?”

“Oh,” I said. “You weren’t quoting the movie. Sorry.”

“Movie?”

“Holy Grail?”

“Nicodemus still has it.”

I sighed. “Never mind.”

From the other side of the amphitheater, there was a roar of collapsing stone, and I looked up in time to see a couple of sets of Corinthian columns falling, to the accompaniment of Ursiel’s furious roars.

“So,” Michael said, “to be clear, Grey is on our side?”

“Yeah. I hired him before this started.”

“But he killed Miss Valmont!”

“No, he didn’t,” I said. “He lied to Nicodemus. She must be outside the vault somewhere, waiting for us.”

Michael looked nonplussed. “Oh. Still. I don’t care for the man.”

“Hey, we’re alive right now.”

“True,” he said. He drew a deep breath. “And if he’s kept faith with you, we should help him.”

Just then, Ursiel went up on its hind legs. Grey was still in that same monstrous form, and still hanging on. The Genoskwa’s physical eyes were a bloody ruin, but Ursiel’s glowing green orbs were furious and bright. The giant bear-thing roared, a sound guaranteed to haunt my nightmares, should I live long enough to have any, and toppled over backward, into another Corinthian column, attempting to smash Grey upon it. They went down with another huge crash and a spray of glittering gems. The sound of the impact was. . just freaking huge. The kind of noise you associate with the demolition of buildings, not with a brawl.

I swallowed. “Yeah. I guess we sh. .”

I paused, as cold that had nothing to do with the movement of molecules crawled up my spine.

I knew the feeling. I’d gotten the sensation before, when surrounded by hostile specters, back when I’d been mostly dead. It was a creepy, thoroughly nasty sensation that gathered around them like body heat.

Which might not be a big deal in the physical world. Specters often could not interact with the material realm, or could do so only in specific and limited ways. But we weren’t in the physical world. This was the Nevernever, the Underworld, and down here spiritual forms would be every bit as real and as deadly as physical foes-actually, much more so.

In fact, given how many truly horrible monsters the various Greek heroes had slain, Hades might have a very, very nasty crew of guardians indeed. The guy might, in fact, be the only one in the universe who could actually give the order “Release the kraken.” But why would they be coming toward us? I mean, the guy had wished me well. Sure, he hadn’t interfered, but. .

I looked up at the moving lips on the statues and winced. “Oh, crap.”

“What?” Michael asked.

“I think we’ve tripped some kind of automatic fail-safe,” I said. “I think there’s a load of dangerous spirits on their way toward us right now.”

“Then we should leave.”

“Posthaste. Let’s go get Grey and boogie.”

We both turned and started moving toward Grey-Michael’s best speed was a trot-but I hadn’t gotten a dozen steps before a cry of pure fury rose up behind me.

“Dresden!” howled Lasciel through Ascher’s mouth. I looked back to see a form rising up from the small inferno consuming the garment display, violet glowing eyes blazing. She planted her feet and seemed to inhale-and the flames all around her suddenly burned low, and blazed the same ugly shade of purple as her eyes. The smell of brimstone filled the air.

“Oh, crap,” I breathed.

And then a lance of pure Hellfire roared toward me.