Skin Game

  SHUT UP AND DO YOUR JOB.

  But what i—

  And the script ended in a hasty scrawl.

  I finished reading it and eyed Jordan. “You have to wonder about it when your boss doesn’t want any questions, kid.”

  Karrin cleared her throat, pointedly.

  “Oh, I want them,” I drawled. “I’m just not answering them right away.” I passed the notebook back over to Jordan. “That what Nick has the goats in here for, then, eh? He’s feeding something.”

  Jordan’s face went pale but he didn’t respond in any way.

  “Your boss, kid,” I said. “He’s hurt a lot of good people. Killed some of them.”

  For a second I flashed back on a memory of Shiro. The old Knight had given his life in exchange for mine. Nicodemus and company had killed him, horribly.

  I still owed them for that.

  Something of that must have shown in my face, because Jordan took a step back from me, swallowed, and one of his hands slipped toward the sling of his shotgun.

  “If you were smart,” I said, “you’d get away from this place. Comes time for the balloon to go up, Nicodemus is going to feed you into the meat grinder the second it becomes convenient for him. I don’t know what he’s promised you guys—maybe Coins of your own, someday. Your very own angel in a bottle. I’ve done that. It’s not all it’s cracked up to be.”

  Jordan, in addition to looking worried, also looked skeptical.

  Not a lot of guys who pick up a Blackened Denarius manage to put it back down again, I guess.

  “Take it from me,” I said. “Whatever you’ve been told—the Fallen are bad news.” I nodded to him and walked past him. Karrin and Valmont hurried to keep pace with me as I descended toward the factory floor.

  “What was the point of that?” Karrin asked.

  “Sowing seeds of discord,” I replied.

  “They’re fanatics,” she said. “Do you really think you’re going to convince them of anything now?”

  “He’s a fanatic,” I said. “He’s also a kid. What, maybe twenty-three? Someone should tell him the truth.”

  “Even when you know he isn’t going to listen?”

  “That part isn’t mine to choose,” I said. “I can choose to tell him the truth, though. So I did. The rest is up to him.”

  She sighed. “If he gets the order, he’ll gun you down without blinking.”

  “Maybe.”

  “There are only ten goats in the pen today,” she noted.

  “Yeah. The guards think something is in here with them, taking them.”

  “They think? But they haven’t seen whatever it is?”

  “Apparently not.”

  Karrin looked around the warehouse. At least eight or ten hard-looking men with weapons were standing with a clear view of the goat pen. “I find that somewhat disturbing.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Tell me about it. There’re only so many ways to hide. I’ll see if I can spot it.”

  “Do you think it was here with us yesterday?”

  “Yeah. Probably.”

  She muttered something under her breath. “That’s not too creepy or anything. Can’t you just wizard-Sight it?”

  “I could,” I said. A wizard’s Sight, the direct perception of magic with the mind, could cut through any kind of illusion or glamour or veil. But it had its drawbacks. “But the last time I did that, I got a look at something that had me curled into a ball gibbering for a couple of hours. I don’t think we can afford that right now. I’ll have to use something more subtle.”

  “Subtle,” Valmont said. “You.”

  I sniffed and ignored that remark, as it deserved.

  “Ah,” Nicodemus said, as we reached the pool of light around the conference table. “Mr. Dresden. I’m glad to see you here on time. Will you have doughnuts?”

  I looked past him to the snack table. It was indeed piled with doughnuts of a number of varieties. Some of them even had sprinkles. My mouth started a quick impression of a minor tributary.

  But they were doughnuts of darkness. Evil, damned doughnuts, tainted by the spawn of darkness . . .

  . . . which could obviously be redeemed only by passing through the fiery, cleansing inferno of a wizardly digestive tract.

  I walked around the table to the doughnut tray, eyeing everyone seated there as I did.

  Nicodemus and Deirdre were present, looking much as they had yesterday. Binder and Ascher sat there, too, a little way down the table, speaking quietly to each other. Binder, in his dark, sedate suit, was eating some kind of pastry that didn’t look familiar to me.

  Ascher had a plate covered in the remnants of doughnuts that she was apparently struggling to redeem from the hellfire even now. She had changed back into her jeans-and-sweater look, and bound up her hair. A few ringlets escaped here and there and bounced slightly as she spoke. She gave me a small nod as I went by, which I returned.

  Seated at the table a little apart from everyone else was an unremarkable-looking man who hadn’t been there yesterday. Late thirties, if I had to guess, medium height, solid-seeming, as if he had more muscle to him than was readily apparent beneath jeans and a loose-fitting designer athletic jacket. His features were clean-cut, pleasant without being particularly handsome. He had a slightly dark complexion, and the right bone structure to pass for a resident just about anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, and in chunks of the rest of the world. His dark hair had a few threads of grey in it.

  One thing about him wasn’t average—his eyes. They were kind of golden brown with flecks of bronze in them, but that wasn’t the strange part. There was a sheen to them, almost like a trick of the light, a semi-metallic refraction from their surface, there for a second and then gone again. They weren’t human eyes. They looked human in every specification, but something about them was just off.

  Something else about him bothered me, too . . .

  He was entirely relaxed.

  Nobody in that damned building was relaxed. It was an inherently disturbing place, riddled with dark energy. It was filled with dangerous beings. I know I looked tense. Karrin was walled up behind her poker face, but you knew she was an instant away from violence. Binder looked like he was trying to watch everyone at once, the better to know when to beat a prudent retreat, and Ascher’s gaze kept hunting for targets. Nicodemus and his daughter sat with a kind of studied air of disinterest, feigning confidence and relaxation, but they were the paranoid type by nature. When I looked at them, I knew they were ready to throw down at a moment’s notice. Even Valmont looked like she was ready to dart suddenly in any direction necessary, like a rat daring a trip across open floor for something it wanted to eat.

  Every one of us was exuding body language that warned the others that we were potentially violent or at least hyperalert.

  Not the new guy.

  He sat slouched in his chair with his eyes half-closed as though he could barely keep them open. There was a half-empty Styrofoam cup of coffee in front of him. He’d drawn hash marks in it with his thumb and played a few rounds of tic-tac-toe with himself in a gesture of pure boredom. There was no sense of violence or alertness in him, no wariness, no caution. None at all.

  Now, that made the hairs on my neck stand up.

  Either this guy was stupid or insane, or he was dangerous enough that he genuinely was not bothered by this roomful of people—and Nicodemus did not seem the type to recruit the stupid or insane for a job like this one.

  I secured a doughnut and coffee. I checked with Karrin and Valmont. Neither wanted to save the doughnuts from Nicodemus’s corruptive influence. Not everyone can be a crusader like me.

  “I was pleased to hear that you were successful last night,” Nicodemus said. “Welcome to our enterprise, Miss Valmont.”

  “Thank you,” Valmont said, her tone carefully neutral. “I cann
ot tell you how pleased I am to have this opportunity.”

  That brought a knife-edged smile to Nicodemus’s face. “Are you?”

  She smiled back, a pretty and empty expression. Then as I sat, she settled into the chair next to me, making it a statement to the room. Karrin took up her stance behind me, as before.

  “You have the files, I trust?” Nicodemus asked.

  I reached into my duster and paused with my hand there for a moment too long before beginning to draw the file out again, a shade too quickly.

  Everyone jumped, or performed some vague equivalent of the gesture. Binder flinched. Nicodemus’s fingers tightened slightly on the tabletop. Deirdre’s hair twitched, as though thinking about becoming animate and edged. Ascher’s shoulder rolled in a tiny back-and-forth motion, as though she’d stopped herself from lifting a hand in a defensive gesture.

  The new guy remained lazily confident. He might have smiled, very slightly.

  I put the file on the tabletop, tilted my head at the new guy, and asked, “Who’s he?”

  Nicodemus stared at me for a moment before answering. “Everyone, please meet Goodman Grey. Mr. Grey has kindly consented to assist us in our endeavor. I’ve already briefed him on each of you.”

  Grey looked up and swept those odd eyes up and down the table.

  They stopped and locked on Karrin.

  “Not everyone,” he said. His voice was a resonant baritone, with a very gentle accent on it that might have been from somewhere deep in the American South. “I don’t believe you mentioned this woman, Nicodemus.”

  “This is Karrin Murphy,” Nicodemus replied. “Formerly of the Chicago Police Department.”

  Grey stared at her for a long time and then said, “The loup-garou videotape. You were in it with Dresden.”

  “Set the Wayback Machine for a damned long time ago,” I said. “That tape went missing.”

  “Yes,” Grey said, not quite amicably. “And I wasn’t actually talking to you, wizard, was I now?”

  That made everyone at the table notice. It got quiet and they got still, waiting to see what would happen next.

  One thing you learn hanging out with people like Mab—you don’t show weakness to predators. Especially not to the really confident ones.

  “Not yet. I should ask you,” I replied, “how thick do you think that wall behind you might be? When you go flying through it a few seconds from now, do you think you’ll knock out a whole section, or just a little chunk the size of your head and shoulders?”

  Grey blinked at that, and then turned a wide smile on me. “Seriously? You want to whip them out already? You’ve been here for about two minutes.”

  I took a bite of my doughnut, swallowed it (heavenly), and said, “You’re not the toughest thing I’ve ever seen. You’re not even close.”

  “Oh,” Grey said. “You don’t say.”

  Though he didn’t rise or stir, the air got thick.

  Karrin broke the silent tension by putting a small, restraining hand on my shoulder. “That was me in the video,” she said.

  Grey’s eyes went back to her. “You took a shot right past this idiot’s ear to take out that guy behind him. That takes some resolve. Good for you.”

  “I’m a better shot now,” she said.

  Grey lifted an eyebrow. “Damn, threats from both of you?” He turned his gaze on Valmont. “How about you, sister? Want to jump on this train?”

  Valmont didn’t meet his gaze. “I don’t know you,” she said.

  Grey snorted. He considered me for a moment. Then he said, “Nicodemus?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Do you need the wizard for the rest of the plan?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “What about Murphy?”

  “Not particularly.”

  Grey exhaled through his nose, his eyes glittering. “I see.” Then he nodded and said, “Shall we put a pin in this, Dresden, until later?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Nicodemus?”

  This time Nick’s reply was warier. “Yes?”

  “What is this jerk good for?”

  “I’m the only person in the world who can get you where you want to go,” Grey drawled.

  “Yeah?” I asked. “Why? What do you do?”

  Grey smiled. “Anything. This week, I’m opening doors.”

  “You’ve already opened the one that said AN ASS KICKING,” I assured him. “We’ll get to it eventually.”

  Grey regarded me levelly. Then he got up, moving lazily, and settled down in the chair next to Deirdre and Nicodemus, another statement. He took a slow sip of his coffee and studied Karrin the way a recently fed mountain lion might watch a baby mountain goat taking its first steps: with calm, patient interest.

  “Thank you, gentlemen, for putting that aside for the nonce,” Nicodemus said smoothly. He did not seem displeased either by Grey’s choice of seats or by the focal point of his attention. “Dresden, may I assume you are ready to get to work?”

  “When you assume,” I said, “you make an ass out of you.” I took another bite of doughnut and said, “Yeah, fine.”

  “The file, please.”

  I grunted and slid it down the table. Nicodemus promptly passed it over to Grey.

  Grey opened the file and started reading it. Those odd eyes of his flicked over pages as if he could take in their entire contents with a glance, then moved to the next. He finished it in maybe six or seven seconds.

  “Well?” Nicodemus asked.

  “For the simple part, that’s enough,” Grey replied. “But to pull it off properly, I’ll need a sample. A fresh one.”

  “We’ll add that to today’s list,” Nicodemus said. He nodded to Deirdre, who got up and went around the table, passing out thin manila folders labeled DAY TWO. We each got one. I opened mine up to find a top page that simply read:

  PHASE ONE PREPARATION:

  WEAPONS

  SPELLS

  ENTRY

  “We have considerable work in front of us today,” Nicodemus said. “Binder, I’ve already had the weapons brought in for your associates to use, but we’ll need to see to their maintenance and loading. Perhaps Miss Murphy will be willing to assist with that.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Why not.”

  Nicodemus smiled. “Miss Valmont, you’ll find a schematic for a vault door in your folder. You’ll need to be able to open it without damaging it. Today will be the day you plan your approach and requisition whatever equipment you need. Just make a list and give it to one of the squires.”

  Valmont flipped to the next page, frowning, and studied a diagram. Then she said, “This is a Fernucci.”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m not going to say it’s impossible,” she said. “But what I will say is that I’ve never cracked one successfully before and I don’t know anyone who has. Easier to blow it.”

  “But we will not be doing so,” Nicodemus replied calmly. “Life is challenge. Rise to it.”

  “Great.” She shook her head. “What, are we hitting Vegas or something? Who has a vault door like this around this town?”

  “We’ll discuss that at the evening meeting,” Nicodemus said. “Miss Ascher, Mr. Dresden. Phase One will require us to breach a secure building. We may need to make entry through a wall, neatly, without an explosion, and we will certainly need a loud and obvious distraction to occupy the attention of local security forces while we enter. Those tasks will fall to you two.”

  I grunted and eyed Ascher. “You want walls or noise?”

  “He said loud and obvious,” Ascher replied, her voice light. “That screams Dresden to me.”

  “And we don’t want the building collapsing on us,” Karrin added in a murmur.

  I sniffed and said, “Fine. I’ll make the noise, then.”

  “Relea
sing enough energy to open a hole without an explosion? That’s tricky,” Ascher said. “I can adapt a spell I know, but I’ll need some time to practice it.”

  “You have until sundown,” Nicodemus said. “Deirdre, you will take Mr. Grey to the factor’s address and assist him in obtaining a sample.”

  “No,” I said. “These two stay. I’ll go get the sample.”

  Nicodemus looked up at me sharply.

  I showed him my teeth. “Grey’s a shapeshifter, isn’t he?” I asked. “You’re going to use him to duplicate poor Harvey there.”

  “If we are?” Nicodemus asked. There was an edge of frost to his words. He didn’t like that I’d figured out the next step of his plan.

  “Harvey lives in my town,” I said. “You turn these two psychos loose on Chicago, and Harvey winds up dead somewhere. So I’ll do it. I’ll get the sample your doppelgänger needs without killing anyone.”

  “Where’s the fun in that?” Grey wondered aloud.

  “The fun part is where you get to live,” I replied. “Besides. If his death is discovered before we pull the job, don’t you think someone’s going to be able to put two and two together and figure out that the place is about to get hit? So we do it smart.”

  Grey sighed and looked at Nicodemus. “Honestly. Where do you find these people?”

  Nicodemus never took his eyes off me. “Agreed,” he said finally. “Finesse seems a wiser option.” His dark eyes sparkled maliciously. “The three of you should have no problem accomplishing the task.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Grey, Deirdre, and Dresden will run this particular errand,” he said, “while the rest of us busy ourselves here.” He paused. “Unless, of course, Dresden, you wish to cease lending me your support.”

  I ground my teeth. I wanted to give him a solid punch in the nose—but that would not be upholding Mab’s honor. “No,” I said.

  “Deirdre and Mr. Grey will bear witness to your sincerity.”

  My eyes tracked over to Deirdre, who was regarding me with a wide, intense smile that made her dark eyes too bulgy and conveyed a number of awful things. Her hair had begun to slither back and forth over her suit jacket’s shoulders.