Skin Game

  I pushed Harvey into the hallway, then stepped into the doorway between him and the rest of the shop, raising my staff to the horizontal and preparing a shield spell. It wasn’t anything like ideal, but it was a better defensive position than I could get on the street outside. They’d all have to come at me from the same direction. “Stay low,” I advised him. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  “We should be running,” he panted. “Shouldn’t we? Calling the police?”

  “Cops got better things to do than get killed,” I said.

  He blinked. “What?”

  “Seriously, you don’t recognize that reference either? Hell’s bells, Harvey, do you even go to the movies?”

  Shadows moved in the shaft of light provided by my impromptu portal, and figures entered the abandoned store. Three gunmen, then four—and then something that might have been a praying mantis, only hundreds of times too large, complete with googly, faceted bug eyes and a second set of glowing green eyes open above them.

  It took Tessa only a second to spot me. Then she darted toward me over the floor, moving with terrible, insectlike speed, and I triggered the shield spell. The runes on my staff flared green-white again, and a fine curtain of blue-green light washed out from the oak, covering the doorway.

  Tessa stopped in front of it, maybe ten feet away. Then she pointed at the door with one long leg and said, in a perfectly normal human voice, “Open fire.”

  The gunmen didn’t hesitate. Their silenced weapons went clickity-clack, and sparks and flashes of light bounced up from my shield where the bullets struck. Foiling them wasn’t a terrible strain. Subsonic ammunition is slow-moving by its very nature, and each individual round carried considerably less force when it struck than it would have at full speed.

  “Hold,” the mantis-thing said.

  The gunmen stopped firing.

  The giant bug stared at me for a long moment. Then its jaws opened, and opened, and opened some more, and Tessa’s face and head emerged from its mouth, flaccid chitin peeling back like a hood. Her skin and hair were covered in some kind of glistening slime. She was an odd one to look at. She didn’t look like she could be out of her teens when she didn’t have wardrobe to lend her its gravitas, and her apparent youth was magnified by the fact that she was a tiny woman, under five feet tall. She was pretty, the high school girl next door.

  Of course, she’d been walking the earth for more than a millennium before there were any high schools.

  “Hello, Dresden,” Tessa said.

  “Hi, Tessa,” I replied.

  “The upright hero Harry Dresden,” she said, “working for Nicodemus Archleone. Did Lasciel finally talk you into taking up her Coin?”

  “Pretty sure you know that she didn’t,” I said.

  She shrugged one shoulder. The motion was absolutely eerie on her insectoid body. “True. But I cannot imagine what else might compel a man like you to work for the likes of my husband.”

  “Long story,” I said. “Now go away.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t do that, I’m afraid. You have something I want. I want you to give it to me.”

  “It would never work out for us,” I said sadly. “I’d be too worried about you biting my head off afterward to live in the moment.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself,” she said. “Give the mortal to me. Make me take him from you and you will share his fate.”

  “Who are you?” Harvey asked in a shaking, bewildered voice. “What on earth have I done to you?”

  Tessa clicked her tongue. “Don’t trouble yourself with such questions, little man. You won’t have them for very much longer.”

  “Oh, God,” Harvey said.

  “I’ll make you a deal,” I said. “Walk away and I won’t call the Orkin man.”

  In reply she lifted an insect leg and hissed a word. A shaft of rotten-looking greenish light streaked toward my shield. I gritted my teeth and held it steady, turning back the attack, feeling the strain of holding the shield beginning to build.

  “This isn’t a negotiation,” she said. “You’ve already lost. You’re trapped, and you can’t keep that shield up forever. Give him to me and I will grant you safe passage.”

  She was right, of course. I couldn’t hold the shield forever, or even for long. The moment it dropped, she and her boys would cut loose with everything they had and that would be that. She might or might not be sincere about the offer of free passage, but if she was . . .

  If she was, then this was my chance to derail Nicodemus’s heist. If Tessa, one of Nicodemus’s own circle, interfered and overpowered me, that wouldn’t be my fault. I could end this mess and get out while still preserving Mab’s reputation. Mab would applaud this solution.

  And all I had to do was let Tessa kill Harvey.

  No. I wasn’t ready to hand over anyone to one of the monsters if I could help it. I might have made some bad choices along the way, but I wasn’t that far gone. Besides, I couldn’t trust her word anyway. She was just as likely to kill me for the fun of it as to let me walk away in one piece.

  “Why don’t you go back to the roach motel you crawled out of?” I replied.

  She shook her head and sighed. “Such a waste of potential.” Then she turned her head to one of her minions and nodded. “Take them both.”

  The gunmen did something I hadn’t expected, at that point—they dropped their weapons and started shucking out of their coats and jackets. As they did, they began to jerk and contort. Joints popped and flesh rippled. Their shirts distended as their shoulders hunched to inhuman proportions, and their faces stretched out into almost canine muzzles, teeth extending into fangs and tusks. Their hands thickened and lengthened, with long claws extending from their tips.

  “OhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGod,” Harvey whispered, his breath coming in panicked gasps. “What is that?”

  “Ghouls,” I said grimly. “Strong, fast, hard to kill.”

  “What are they going to do?”

  “Rip through the walls, come at us from all sides, kill us, and eat us,” I said.

  And, in professional silence, the ghouls started ripping at the drywall on both sides of my defensive position in the doorway, to do exactly that.

  Eighteen

  Tearing through drywall is a surprisingly noisy process. It breaks with loud crunching, snapping noises. Ghouls have been known to claw their way through inches of stone mausoleum wall to get to a nice rotten corpse to eat, and they had very little trouble with drywall and wood, their claws and hunched shoulders ripping through it at a steady pace.

  We had maybe sixty seconds, at most, before they would be romping through the wall and into the building on either side of us.

  “They’re coming,” Harvey gasped. “They’re going to get us. What do we do?”

  My own heart was beating a lot faster than it had been a moment ago. Ghouls were no joke. And a close, confined space like this was the worst possible situation in which a wizard could take them on. My spell-armored duster wouldn’t be of much help when one of them was chewing on my head. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve faced danger. When your life is under threat and you know it, you’re scared, end of story.

  Fear—real, silvery, adrenaline-charged fear—rocketed through me.

  “Um,” I said, not panicking. “We . . .”

  I was going to say “back up.” I really was. But Tessa was staring at me with a smug, gloating expression on her face, and I was suddenly infuriated. Tessa was special. The last time I’d seen her, she’d put a good man in the hospital for months and left him permanently maimed. It was a miracle, literally, that he’d lived at all.

  She hurt my friend.

  The Winter surged up inside me in time with my rage, and I suddenly put a much higher priority on the fact that I still owed her for that.

  “Get behind me and stay close,” I growle
d instead.

  “What?” Harvey blurted.

  I had the satisfaction of seeing Tessa’s gloating expression falter for a fraction of a second, tipped off by something in my face, maybe, before I dropped my shield, extended my staff in my right hand, called upon Winter, and snarled, “Infriga!”

  A howl of arctic air billowed out onto the display floor, blanketing every object in it—the floor, the ceiling, and the walls—in an instant layer of flash-frost. The sudden shift in temperature condensed the air into frozen mist, a fog thick enough to cut visibility to five or six feet—a situation that would be much more to the advantage of the team with fewer members, making it harder for the enemy to coordinate their superior numbers.

  I strode forward through the fog, closing the distance on Tessa so that I could get her in sight again before she recovered and started maneuvering on me. In a perfect world, I would have found her frozen into a block of bitterly cold Winter ice—but she was a sorceress, and not a dime-store amateur, either. As I came in sight through the fog, I saw her stumbling back, her foremost insect-arms crossed in a defensive gesture, her image blurry on the other side of a C-shaped wall of ice that had not quite managed to engulf her entirely.

  I gestured with the staff and snarled, “Forzare!”

  The frozen wall exploded into chunks and shards of knife-edged, crystalline ice, as deadly as a cloud of shrapnel. She tried to fling herself to one side, but stunned by the intensity of the attack, she didn’t account for the ice-coated tile floor beneath her legs—floor that provided me with footing as sure and solid as a basketball court. Insect legs skittered wildly, and the ice tore into her chitin-covered body, sending splatters of dark green ichor everywhere, even as the mantis-head half slithered up over her human face, swallowing it down again. Hotly glowing green eyes opened above the insectoid mantis-eyes of Tessa’s demonform, blazing with immortal rage, and as the swirling mists closed around them, the eyes of Tessa’s patron Fallen angel were all that I could see of her.

  “Hey, Imariel!” I snarled. “I got some for you, too! Fuego!”

  As I spoke the words, I hurled the fusion of my will and elemental flame through my staff, imbuing the spell that ran through it with the silver-white fire of Creation itself. A basketball-sized comet of blazing soulfire soared through the air like a chord of triumphant choir music and detonated upon those glowing eyes in thunder and fury, in steam and even more mist. The eyes vanished in time with a teakettle scream of hellish fury and a thunderous crash of shattering brick from the far end of the building.

  That bought me a little time, at least. I whirled and dragged Harvey behind me just as the quickest or luckiest of the ghouls loomed out of the mist and flung itself bodily at my head.

  No time for a spell. No need for one. With the full power of Winter still singing through my limbs, I whirled my heavy oaken quarterstaff and met the leaping ghoul with a strike that used the full power of my arms, shoulders, hips, and legs. I struck it across one shoulder, and there was a wet, sickening crack of breaking bone and limbs being torn out of joint. I hammered the ghoul to the floor with the same blow, as if it had been an overeager kitten jumping at me, and drew a yowling shriek of surprised anguish from it as it landed.

  My mind flashed to a pair of young wizards, brother and sister, tormented to death by ghouls on my watch, a few years back—and I remembered that I owed them a debt, collectively, as well. I kicked the downed ghoul hard enough to send it sliding away over the icy floor, and though it was already taxing my reserves to call up that kind of power, I again unleashed Winter, snarling, “Infriga!”

  The ghoul had no defenses against that kind of magic. An instant later, there was a white, vaguely ghoul-shaped block of ice where the creature had been. The block kept sliding, grinding over the icy floor . . .

  . . . and fetched up against the clawed feet of the other three ghouls.

  The three stared at the block of ice for a startled quarter-second, and then, as one, fixed me with hate-filled eyes and let out snarls of utter fury.

  Yikes.

  Time slowed down as they crouched to spring toward me.

  Entombing one ghoul in ice was one thing. Doing it to three of them was something else entirely. If I took the time to take out one of them, the other two would be upon me almost before the words had left my lips, and four ghouls minus two ghouls is two ghouls too many. When you’re outnumbered as badly as I was, inflicting two-to-one casualties is just another way to say that you lost and got eaten.

  I had to change the footing of this fight.

  The ghoul on my left was a shade faster than his two fellows, and I sprang to my left, drawing him with me, creating a little more space between him and his companions. As his clawed feet left the ground, I gestured with my staff, calling upon Winter again and shouting, “Glacivallare!”

  With a shriek, a sheet of ice a foot and a half thick rose from floor to ceiling in a ruler-straight line cutting diagonally across the sales floor. The ice clipped the lead ghoul’s heels as it shot upward, slamming into the ceiling in front of the other two with an ear-tearing grinding noise.

  My timing had been solid. It was a one-on-one fight again. I felt a surge of triumph.

  That lasted for maybe a quarter of a second, and then the leaping ghoul hit me like a professional linebacker. Who was also a hungry cannibal.

  He slammed into me hard enough to break ribs, and I had to hope that the crackling sound I heard was shifting ice. We went down hard, with me on bottom, my duster now sliding over the hard surface, dispersing some of the energy of the hit.

  The ghoul knew exactly what it was doing. I’d tangled with them a few times before, and in a fight, ghouls are mostly all unfocused ferocity and brute strength, ripping and tearing at whatever they can reach. This one didn’t do that. He got both hands on my staff, wrenching it aside with that hunched, fantastic strength, and ducked his head in close, going for my throat, for the immediate kill. I knew enough about hand-to-hand fighting to recognize technique and discipline when I saw it. It was the difference in fighting a furious drunken amateur and taking on a trained soldier or a champion mixed martial artist.

  Over the years, I’d picked up some technique of my own, from Karrin and the others. I provided an instant’s resistance against the ghoul’s wrenching of my quarterstaff, then released it as I doubled up my body, pushing the ghoul up as hard as I could with my legs, trying to shove him to one side.

  I didn’t fling him off me or anything, but simultaneously taking his balance and giving him a solid impetus in a new direction let me dump him to the ice just as his jaws began to snap closed on my throat. I felt a flash of sensation there as his weight vanished, and I rolled frantically in the opposite direction, using the momentum of the push to get me going.

  I came to my feet, a hair faster than the ghoul warrior, already reaching for a fire spell in my mind—but without the aid of my staff to focus the energy of the spell more efficiently and effectively, I was a shade too slow getting it together. The ghoul came back to his feet, his claws digging at the ice, and promptly came at me with my own damned staff, whirling it like he knew how to use it.

  I let out a yelp and started dodging. If we’d been standing on the street, he’d have tenderized me into a pulpy mess that he’d barely need to chew. But we weren’t standing on the street. We fought in the frozen arctic air of the little store coated in Winter ice. The ice betrayed him at every movement, forcing him to constantly keep his balance in check, while to the Winter Knight it was as smooth and safe as a dance studio’s floor. I ducked around empty clothes racks, dumping a couple of them at the ghoul as he came at me, hoping to knock him down, and changed direction constantly, hoping to open the gap between us or force him to lose his balance. All I needed was a portion of a second to bring another spell into play and end the fight.

  Problem was, the ghoul knew it. He came at me smart and fast and
balanced, and as long as he could keep doing it, he had me in a stalemate. All he had to do was hold me until his friends either ripped through the wall or loped around it, and I was done.

  Stars and stones, I was missing my force rings right about then. And my blasting rod, and shield bracelet, and every other little magical craft tool I’d ever designed. But when my lab and its accompanying gear had been destroyed, it had severely cut down my options on what I could manufacture—and being stuck out on the island the whole winter with harshly limited resources, limited by what my brother could round up and bring on a boat, I’d not yet had a chance to set up anything as elaborate and as extensively personalized as a new lab. I’d managed the staff and the wooden skull, working at a laboriously glacial pace, but practically all I’d had to work with was a small set of knives and some sandpaper left over from the construction of the Whatsup Dock.

  Preparation! Dammit, Harry. The key to survival as a wizard is preparation!

  I could hear sledgehammer blows being delivered to my ice wall, and though I couldn’t see it in the fog, I could hear the change of pitch in each impact, as the ice began to crack and shatter.

  “Oh God!” Harvey shouted in a panic. I couldn’t see him either, and I’d forgotten about him for a second. He was probably right where I’d left him, within a few feet of the wall, and able to see exactly what was happening.

  The other two ghouls were coming through.

  Something inside me started screaming along with poor Harvey.

  It was time for a desperate risk.

  I abruptly shifted direction and charged the warrior ghoul.

  My staff flickered at my head. I raised my left arm to block, trying to take the blow on the meaty muscle of my forearm. Though I didn’t feel any pain, the impact sent a flash of white light across my vision. My duster’s sleeve caught some of the blow, but not much. Its defensive spells were really meant to slow and disperse fast-moving objects like bullets, or to stop the penetration of sharp things. A big blunt instrument had no subtlety, but it was merry hell to defend against.