Skin Game

  “You’re a good man, Waldo. I like you. I respect you. I think you’ll figure it out.”

  A long silence followed.

  “Andi’s waiting on me to eat,” he said. “I’d better get going.”

  “Okay,” Karrin said. “Thank you again.”

  “I . . . Yeah, sure.”

  Footsteps. The front door opened and closed. A car started up and then drove away.

  I sat up in bed, and fumbled until I found Karrin’s bedside lamp with my right hand. The light hurt my eyes. My head felt funny—probably the result of being bounced off of walls. I’d lost my shirt, again. Butters had added some more bandages and the sharp scent of more antibiotics to my collection of medical trophies. My arm had been bandaged again, inside its aluminum brace, and the brace was held in a sling tied around my neck.

  I got out of bed and wobbled for a minute and then shambled across the floor to the bedroom door. Karrin opened it just as I got there, and stood looking up at me, her expression worried.

  “God, you are turning into a monster,” she said. “A mummy. One bit at a time.”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Ish.”

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. “How much of that did you hear?”

  “Everything after his usual ‘I’m not really a physician’ disclaimer.”

  Her mouth twitched. “He’s just . . . He’s worried, that’s all.”

  “I get it,” I said. “I think you handled it right.”

  That drew a sparkle from her eyes. “I know I did.”

  “Batman?” I asked.

  “He’s been . . .” She folded her arms. “You-ing, I suppose. With you gone from the city and Molly gone, the streets haven’t been getting any safer. Marcone’s crowd have taken up the fight against the Fomor, whenever their territory is threatened, but their protection costs. Not everyone can afford it.”

  I grimaced. “Dammit,” I muttered. “Damn Mab. I could have been back here months and months ago.”

  “Waldo does what he can. And because he has the skull, that’s more than most.”

  “Bob was never meant to be used in the field,” I said. “He’s a valuable resource—until he attracts attention to himself. Once he’s been identified, he can be countered or stolen, and then the bad guys get that much stronger. It’s why I tried not to take him out of the lab.”

  “The Fomor started taking children last Halloween,” Karrin said simply. “Six-year-olds. Right off the streets.”

  I grimaced and looked down from her steady gaze.

  “We’ll sort something out,” Karrin said. “You hungry?”

  “Starving,” I said.

  “Come on.”

  I followed her to the kitchen. She took a pair of Pizza ’Spress pizzas from the oven, where she’d had them staying warm. They had almost settled onto the table before I started eating, ravenous. The pizza was my favorite. Not good, but my favorite, because it had been the only pizza I could afford for a long, long time, and I was used to it. Heavy on the sauce, light on the cheese, and the meat was just hinted at, but the crust was thick and hot and flaky and filled with delicious things that murdered you slowly.

  “Present for you,” Karrin said.

  “Mmmmnghf?” I asked.

  She plopped a file folder down on the table beside me and said, “From Paranoid Gary the Paranetizen.”

  I swallowed a mouthful and delayed getting another long enough to ask, “The one who found the deal with the boats last year? Crazy-but-not-wrong guy?”

  “That’s him,” she said.

  “Huh,” I said, chewing. I opened the folder and started flipping through printed pages of fuzzy images.

  “Those are from Iran,” Karrin said. “Gary says that they show a functioning nuclear power plant.”

  The images were obviously of some sort of installation, but I couldn’t tell anything beyond that. “Thought they had big old towers.”

  “He says they’re buried in that hill behind the building,” Karrin said. “Check out the last few images.”

  On the last pages of the folder, things in the installation had changed. Columns of black, greasy smoke rolled out from multiple buildings. In another image, the bodies of soldiers lay on the ground. And in the last image, up on the hillside, which was wreathed in white mist, or maybe steam . . .

  Three figures faced one another. One was a large man dressed in a long overcoat and wielding a slightly curved sword in one hand, an old cavalry saber. He carried what might have been a sawed-off shotgun in the other. His skin was dark, and though his head hadn’t been shaved like that the last time I’d seen him, it could really have been only one person.

  “Sanya,” I said.

  The world’s only Knight of the Cross was standing across from two blurry figures. Both were in motion, as if charging toward him. One was approximately the same size and shape as a large gorilla. The other was covered in a thick layer of feathers that gave an otherwise humanoid shape an odd, shaggy appearance.

  “Magog and Shaggy Feathers,” I muttered. “Hell’s bells, those Coins are slippery. When were these taken?”

  “Less than six hours ago,” Karrin said, “according to Paranoid Gary. The Denarians are up to something.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Deirdre said that Tessa was supposed to be in Iran. That makes sense.”

  “In what way does that make sense?”

  “Nicodemus wants to pull a job over here,” I said. “He knows there’s only one Knight running around. So he sends Tessa and her crew to the other side of the world to stir up major-league trouble. Let’s say Gary’s right, and Iran has a nuclear reactor running. And something goes horribly wrong with it. You’ve got an instant regional and international crisis. Of course a Knight gets sent to deal with it—where he can’t get to Chicago, or at least not in time to do any good.”

  Karrin took that in silently, and I went back to eating. “So you’re saying, we’re on our own.”

  “And the bad guys keep stacking up higher and higher,” I said.

  “The Genoskwa, you mean,” Karrin said.

  “Yeah.”

  She shuddered. “That thing . . . seriously, a Bigfoot?”

  “Some kind of mutant serial killer Bigfoot, maybe,” I said. “Not like one of the regular Forest People at all.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Karrin said.

  “It’s no weirder than any number of—”

  “Not that,” she said. “I can’t believe you met a Bigfoot and you never told me about it. I mean, they’re famous.”

  “They’re kind of a private bunch,” I said. “Did a few jobs for one, a few years back, named River Shoulders. Liked him. Kept my mouth shut.”

  She nodded understanding. Then she got up and left the kitchen, and came back a moment later with her rocket launcher and an oversized pistol case. She set the rocket launcher down and said, “This will take out something Bigfoot-sized, no problem.”

  I opened my mouth and then closed it again. “Yeah,” I admitted. “Okay.”

  She gave me a nod that did not, quite, include the phrase “I told you so.” “I like to be sure I’ve got enough firepower to cover any given situation.” She put the case on the table and slid it over to me. “And this is for you.”

  I took the case and opened it a little awkwardly, using mostly one hand. In it was a stubby-looking pistol that had been built with a whole hell of a lot of metal, to the point where it somehow reminded me of a steroid-using weight lifter’s gargoylish build. The damned thing could have been mounted on a small armored vehicle turret. There were a number of rounds stored with it, each the size of my thumb.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked, beaming.

  “Smith and Wesson five hundred,” she said. “Short barrel, but that round is made for taking on big game. Big, Grey, and Ugly come
s at you to make another friendly point, I want you to give him a four-hundred-grain bullet-point reply.”

  I whistled, hefting the gun and admiring the sheer mass of it. “I’ve got one broken wrist already, and you give me this?”

  “Ride the recoil, Nancy,” she said. “You can handle it.” She reached out and put her hand on the fingers of my left hand, protruding from the sling. “We’ll handle it. We’ll get this thing with Nicodemus done, and get that parasite out of your head. You’ll see.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “We’ve got a problem there.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We can’t kill the parasite,” I said. “We have to save it.”

  Karrin gave me a flat look and, after a brief pause, said, “What?”

  “We, uh . . . Look, it’s not what I thought it was. My condition isn’t what we thought it was, either.”

  She eyed me carefully. “No? Then what is your condition, exactly?”

  I told her.

  * * *

  “Come on,” I said. “Get up.”

  She sat on the floor, rocking back and forth helplessly with laughter. Her plate with its slice of pizza had landed beside her when she’d fallen out of her chair a few minutes before, and hadn’t moved.

  “Stop it,” she gasped. “Stop making me laugh.”

  I was getting a little annoyed now, as well as embarrassed. My face felt as though it had a mild sunburn. “Dammit, Karrin, we’re supposed to be back at the slaughterhouse in twenty minutes. Come on, it’s just not that funny.”

  “The look”—she panted, giggling helplessly—“on your . . . face . . .”

  I sighed and muttered under my breath and waited for her to recover.

  It took her only a couple more minutes, though she drifted back into titters several times before she finally picked herself up off the floor.

  “Are you quite finished?” I asked her, trying for a little dignity.

  She dissolved into hiccoughing giggles again instantly.

  It was highly unprofessional.

  Twenty-five

  By the time we got back to the slaughterhouse, the sun had gone down, and the night had come on cold and murky. Rain had begun to fall in a fine mist, and the temperature had dropped enough that I could see it starting to coat the city in a fine sheet of ice.

  “Ice storm,” Karrin noted as she parked the car. “Perfect.”

  “At least it’ll keep people in,” I said.

  “Depending on how this goes, that might cut down on innocent bystanders,” she said. “Is Mab messing with the weather again?”

  I squinted out at the weather. “No,” I said, immediately and instinctively certain of the answer. “This is just winter in Chicago being winter in Chicago. Mab doesn’t care about innocent bystanders.”

  “But she might care about giving you an advantage.”

  I snorted and said, “Mab helps those who help themselves.”

  Karrin gave me a thin smile. “That thing you did, with the Genoskwa. You threw magic at it.”

  “Yep.”

  “It didn’t work, I guess.”

  “Nope,” I said. “I hit him with my best shot, something Mab gave me. Just drained off him, grounded out.”

  “Grounded,” she said. “Like with a lightning rod?”

  “Exactly like that,” I said. “The Forest People know magic, and they’re ridiculously powerful, but they understand it differently than humans do. The one I knew used water magic like nothing I’d ever seen or heard of before. This Genoskwa . . . I think he’s using earth magic the same way. On a level I don’t know a damned thing about.”

  “Pretend I don’t know a damned thing about earth magic either,” Karrin said, “and bottom-line it for me.”

  “I threw the most potent battle magic I know at him, and he shut it down with zero trouble. I’m pretty sure he’ll be able to do it as much as he wants.”

  “He’s immune to magic?” Karrin asked.

  I shrugged. “If he senses it coming and can take action, pretty much,” I said. “Which makes me think that he’s not all that bright.”

  “Hell of a secret to give away when his goal wasn’t to actually kill you.”

  “No kidding,” I said. “Maybe he gave me too much credit and assumed I already knew. Either way, I know now.”

  “Right,” Karrin said. “Which gives you an advantage. You won’t bother trying to blast him with magic the next time.”

  I shuddered, thinking of the creature’s sheer speed and power, and of exactly how little he feared me. I touched the handle of my new revolver, now loaded and in my duster pocket. “With any luck, there won’t be a next time.”

  Karrin turned to me abruptly, her expression earnest. “Harry,” she said quietly, “that thing means to kill you. I know what it looks like. Don’t kid yourself.”

  I grimaced and looked away.

  Satisfied that she’d made her point, she nodded and got out of the car. She’d slung one of her space guns (she’d called it a Kriss) on a harness under her coat, and you almost couldn’t see it when she moved. She rolled around to the trunk, looked up and down the street once, and then took out the rocket launcher and slung it over her shoulder. In the dark, in the rain, it looked like it might have been one of those protective tubes that artists use, maybe three and a half feet long.

  “Really think you can hit him with that thing?” I asked.

  “It’s weapon enough to handle him,” she said. “If I have to.”

  I squinted up at the drizzling mist and said, “I’m getting tired of this job.”

  “Let’s get it done, then,” Karrin said.

  * * *

  This time, when we rolled in, Jordan wasn’t on duty. Maybe he’d been given a shift off to get some sleep. Or maybe Nicodemus was so sure I was about to break through his conditioning and suborn him that he’d moved the kid to a less vulnerable post. Yeah. That was probably it.

  When we came in, most of the crew was already downstairs, gathered around the conference table. Even the Genoskwa was standing around in plain sight, albeit in a deep patch of shadow that reduced his visible presence to an enormous, furry shadow. Only Nicodemus and Deirdre were absent—and I spotted Deirdre standing silently on one of the catwalks, looking down at the table, where Binder was telling some sort of animated anecdote or joke.

  She looked . . . disturbed. Don’t get me wrong—a girl who goes around biting the tongues out of men’s mouths is disturbed one way or another, but the Denarian killer looked genuinely troubled, or distressed, or something.

  Karrin caught me looking at her and sighed. “We can’t afford another damsel, Dresden.”

  “I wasn’t thinking that,” I said.

  “Sure you weren’t.”

  “Actually,” I said, “I was thinking she looked vulnerable. Might be a good time to confront her about how Harvey died.”

  Karrin clucked her tongue thoughtfully. “I’ll be at the table.”

  “Yeah.”

  She descended the stairs, and I ambled out along the catwalk to stand beside Deirdre.

  She looked up at me as I approached, her eyes flat. But then her gaze shifted back to the room below.

  “And then I said”—Binder snickered, evidently coming to the punch line—“why did you wear it, then?”

  Hannah Ascher burst out in a short, hearty belly laugh, and was joined, more quietly, by Anna Valmont. Even Grey smiled, at least a little. The expression looked somehow alien on his oddly unremarkable features.

  Deirdre stared down at them all, her expression dispassionate, like a scientist observing bacteria. Her eyes flickered toward me for a second as I approached, her body tensing slightly.

  Being a genius interrogator, I asked her, “So. Why’d you kill Harvey?”

  She looked at me for a few
seconds, then turned her eyes back to the room below, to watch Karrin come to the table. There was a moment of silence from everyone as they took in her armament. Then Grey rose, suddenly dapper, and offered to help her with the rocket launcher like it was a coat. Karrin let him, giving him an edged smile that she directed past him, to the shadows where the Genoskwa lurked.

  “I didn’t kill the accountant,” she said quietly. “Nicodemus said not to.”

  That surprised me a little. If she wanted to hide herself from me, she didn’t need to go to the effort of lying. All she had to do was stay silent.

  “He said that to all of us,” I said. “Maybe he said something else to you privately.”

  “He didn’t,” she said. “My mother killed him with a spell she calls the Sanguine Scalpel.”

  “The cuts looked a lot like the ones you would inflict,” I said.

  “A cut throat is a cut throat, wizard.”

  Tough to argue with that one. “And you chased her.”

  “I went to say . . . to talk to her, yes.”

  “What did she have to say?”

  “Personal things,” Deirdre replied.

  I narrowed my eyes.

  Something wasn’t jiving here. Deirdre was demonstrating absolutely no emotion about her mother, which in my experience is the next best thing to impossible for almost anyone. Hell, even Maeve had carried enormous mother issues around with her. If Tessa was really trying to beat Nicodemus and Deirdre to the Holy Grail, there should have been something there. Frustration, irritation, fear, anger, resignation, something.

  Not this distant, cool clarity.

  Tessa wasn’t after any Grail.

  But what else could motivate her?

  Deirdre looked up from below and studied me calmly. “He knows that you mean to betray him, you know.”

  “Makes us even,” I said.

  “No, it doesn’t,” she said, in that same distant voice. “Not even close. I’ve seen him disassemble men and women more formidable than you, dozens of times. You don’t have a chance of tricking him, out-planning him, or beating him.” She stated it as a simple fact. “Mab knows it, too.”

  “Then why would she send me?”