Skin Game

  “Not if we do it smooth,” Ascher said.

  “You’re going to have to trust me on this one,” I replied. “There’s always something. It doesn’t matter how smooth you are, or how smart the plan is, or how plain the mission—something goes wrong. Nothing’s ever simple. That’s how it works.”

  Ascher eyed me. “You have a very negative attitude. Just relax and we’ll get this done. Try not to look around so much. And for God’s sake, smile.”

  I smiled.

  “Maybe without clenching your jaw.”

  The doors opened and we walked down a hallway to the grand ballroom. There were a couple of security guys outside the door dressed in the hotel’s colors, trying to look friendly and helpful. I breezed up and presented them with our engraved invitation and fake IDs. I’d say this for Nicodemus—he didn’t do things halfway, and his production values were outrageous. The fake driver’s license (in the name of Howard Delroy Oberheit, cute) looked more real than my actual Illinois driver’s license ever had. They eyed me, and then my license, closely, but they couldn’t spot it as a fake. Ascher (née Harmony Armitage) gave the guards a big smile and some friendly chatter, and they didn’t look twice at her ID.

  I couldn’t really blame them. Ascher looked like exactly the kind of woman who would be showing up to a blue-chip evening event. In me, the hotel’s thugs recognized another of their kind—and one who was taller and had better scars than they did. But with Hannah on my arm, they let me pass.

  The interior of the ballroom had been decorated in a kind of Chinese motif. Lots of red fabric draped in swaths from the ceiling to create semi-curtained partitions, paper lanterns glowing cheerfully, stands of bamboo, a Zen garden with its sand groomed in impeccable curves. The hotel staff was mostly women in red silk tunics with mandarin collars. Caterers in white coats and black ties were just getting a buffet fully assembled. When we came in, I couldn’t see them, but I could hear a live band running through a number—seven pieces of brass, drums, and a piano, playing a classic ballroom piece.

  I scanned the room slowly as we entered, but I didn’t see Anna Valmont standing around anywhere.

  “So this thief we’re meeting,” Ascher asked. “What’s her story?”

  “She used to belong to a gang called the Churchmice,” I said. “Specialized in robbing churches in Europe. Nicodemus hired them to swipe the Shroud of Turin for him a few years back.”

  Ascher tilted her head. “What happened?”

  “The three of them got it,” I said. “I suspect they tried to raise their price. Nicodemus and Deirdre killed two of them, and he would have killed Anna if I hadn’t intervened.”

  Her eyes widened slightly. “And now Nicodemus wants her to help him?”

  I snorted softly through my nose. “Yeah.”

  Ascher studied me for a moment with her eyes narrowed. “Oh.”

  “What?” I asked her.

  “Just . . . admiring the manipulation,” she said. “I mean, I don’t like it, but it’s good.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Don’t you see?”

  “I try not to think like that,” I said. The caterers uncovered the silver trays holding the meat, and a moment later the smell of roasted chicken and beef wafted up to my nose. My stomach made an audible sound. I’d been cooking for myself over a fireplace for a long, long while. It had been sustenance, but given my culinary skills, it hadn’t really been food, per se. The buffet smelled so good that for a minute I half expected to hear the pitter-patter of drool sliding out of my mouth.

  “If you don’t, someone else will,” Ascher said. “If nothing else, you’ve got to defend yourself . . . Hey, are you as hungry as I am?”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. “And we’ve apparently got some time to kill.”

  “So it wouldn’t be unprofessional to raid the buffet?”

  “Even Pitt and Clooney had to eat,” I said. “Come on.”

  We raided the buffet. I piled my little plate with what I hoped would be a restrained amount of food. Ascher didn’t bother. She took a bit of almost everything, stacking food up hungrily. We made our way to one of many tables set up around the outskirts of the ballroom while the band went through another number. I picked one that gave us a view of the door, and watched for Anna Valmont to arrive.

  She didn’t appear over the next few moments, though a few of Chicago’s luminaries did, and the numbers in the room began to slowly grow. The hotel staff began taking coats and drifting through the room with trays of food and drink, while the caterers began to briskly move back and forth through the service entrances, like a small army of worker ants, repairing the damage to the buffet almost the moment it was done. It seemed to mean so much to them that I was considering doing a little more damage myself, purely to give them a chance to repair it, you understand. I try to be nice to people.

  I was just gathering my empty plate to show my compassionate, humanitarian side when one of the hotel staff touched my arm and said, “Pardon me, Mr. Oberheit? You have a telephone call, sir. There’s a courtesy phone right over here.”

  I looked up at the woman, wiped my mouth with a napkin, and said, “All right. Show me.” I nodded to Ascher. “Be right back.”

  I got up and followed the staffer over to a curtained alcove by one wall, where there was a phone. We were more or less out of the way of everyone else in the room there.

  “Miss Valmont,” I said to the staffer, once we were there. “Nice to see you again.”

  Anna Valmont turned to face me with a small and not terribly pleasant smile. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been a peroxide blonde. Now her hair was black, cut in a neat pageboy. She was leaner than I remembered, almost too much so, like a young, feral cat. She was still pretty, though her features had lost that sense of youthful exuberance, and her eyes were harder, warier.

  “Dresden,” she said. “‘Mr. Oberheit,’ seriously?”

  “Did you hear me criticizing your alias?” I asked.

  That got a flash of a smile. “Who’s the stripper?”

  “No one you know, and no one to mess with,” I said. “And there’s nothing wrong with strippers. How’ve you been?”

  She reached into her tunic and carefully produced a thickly packed business envelope. “Do you have my money or not?”

  I arched an eyebrow at that. “Money?”

  That got me another smile, though there was something serrated about it. “We have history, Dresden, but I don’t do freebies and I’m not hanging around for chitchat. The people I had to cross for this aren’t the forgiving type and have been on my heels all week. This envelope is made of flash paper. Cough up the dough or the data and I turn to smoke.”

  My mind was racing. Nicodemus had set up a job for Anna Valmont—it was the only way he could know that she would be here, and that she would be meeting the guy with the sunset-colored rose. So it stood to reason that whatever information he’d had her take, it might be valuable, too.

  I checked around me quickly. I couldn’t see the table from where I stood, but Ascher wasn’t in sight. “Do it,” I said, turning back to Valmont. “Destroy it, now, quick.”

  “You think I won’t?” she asked. Then she paused, frowning. “Wait a minute . . . What’s the con here?”

  “No con,” I said low. “Look, Anna, there’s a lot going on and there’s no time to explain it all. Blow the data and vanish. We’ll both be better off.”

  She tilted her head, her expression suddenly skeptical, and she drew the envelope up close against her in an unconscious protective gesture. “You give me a hundred grand up front for this with another hundred on delivery, and then tell me to wreck the data? It’s not like this is the only copy.”

  “I wasn’t the one who hired you,” I said intently. “Hell’s bells, you stole my car once. You think I’ve got that kind of cash? I’m just the pickup guy,
and you don’t want to be involved with this crew. Get out while you can.”

  “I did the job, I get my money,” she said. “You want to trash the data, fine. You pay for it. One hundred thousand.”

  “How about two million?” Ascher said. She eased into the alcove, holding a champagne flute with no lipstick marks on the rim.

  Anna looked at her sharply. “What?”

  “Two million guaranteed,” Ascher said. “As much as twenty if we pull off the job.”

  I ground my teeth.

  Valmont looked back and forth between us for a second, her expression closed. “This job was an audition.”

  “Bingo,” Ascher said. “You’ve got the skills and the guts. This is a big job. Dresden here is doing what he always does, trying to protect you from the big bad world. But this is a chance at a score that will let you retire to your own island.”

  “A job?” Anna said. “For who?”

  “Nicodemus Archleone,” I said.

  Anna Valmont’s eyes went flat, hard. “You’re working with him?”

  “Long story,” I said. “And not by choice.” But I realized what Ascher had been talking about before. Nicodemus had picked Anna Valmont and sent me to get her because he’d been calculating her motivations. Anna owed me something, and she owed Nicodemus something more. Even if she didn’t pitch in to help me, she might do it for revenge, for the chance to pull the rug out from under Nicodemus’s feet at the worst possible moment. He’d given her double the reasons to get involved. The money was just the icing on the cake.

  Valmont wasn’t exactly a slow thinker herself. “Twenty million,” she said.

  “Best-case scenario,” Ascher said. “Two guaranteed.”

  “Nicodemus Archleone,” I said. “You remember what happened the last time you did a contract with him?”

  “We tried to screw him and he screwed us back harder,” Anna said. She eyed Ascher, as a couple more hotel staff flitted by the alcove. “What happens if I say no?”

  “You miss the score of a lifetime,” Ascher said. “Nicodemus has to abandon the job.” She looked at me. “And Dresden is screwed.”

  Which was true, now that Ascher was here and had seen me trying to derail the job. Unless I killed her to shut her up, something I wasn’t ready to do, she’d tell Nicodemus and he’d put the word out that Mab’s word was no good anymore. Mab would crucify me for that, no metaphor involved. Worse, I was pretty sure that such a thing would be a severe blow to Mab’s power in more than a political sense—and Mab had an important job to do.

  All of which, I was certain, Nicodemus knew.

  Jerk.

  “Is that true?” Valmont asked.

  I ground my teeth and didn’t answer. A crew of four caterers carrying a large tray went by.

  “It’s true,” Valmont said. “The job. Is it real?”

  “It’s dangerous as hell,” I said.

  “Binder is in,” Ascher said. “Do you know who that is?”

  “Mercenary,” Valmont said, nodding. “Reputation for being a survivor.”

  “Damn skippy,” Ascher replied. “He’s my partner. I’m along to keep Dresden here from getting all noble on you.”

  “That true?” Valmont asked me.

  “Son of a bitch,” I said.

  Valmont nodded several times. Then she said, to Ascher, “Excuse us for a moment, would you?”

  Ascher smiled and nodded her head. She lifted her glass to me in a little toast, sipped, and drifted back out of the alcove.

  Valmont leaned a little closer to me, lowering her voice. “You don’t care about money, Dresden. And you aren’t working for him by choice. You want to burn him.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Something hot flared in Valmont’s eyes. “Can you?”

  “The job is too big for him to do alone,” I said.

  “A lot of things could happen,” she said.

  “Or you walk,” I said, “and it doesn’t happen at all. He’s out millions of bucks he’s already paid, and there’s no job.”

  “And he just crawls back into the woodwork,” Valmont said. “And maybe he doesn’t come out for another fifty years and I never have another chance to pay him back.”

  “Or maybe you get yourself killed trying,” I said. “Revenge isn’t smart, Anna.”

  “It is if you make a profit doing it,” she said. She clacked her teeth together a couple of times, a nervous gesture. “How bad is it for you if I walk?”

  “Pretty bad,” I said, as a second crew of caterers went by with another huge tray. “But I think you should walk.”

  A hint of disgust entered her voice. “You would. Christ.” She shook her head. “I’m not some little girl you need to protect, Dresden.”

  “You’re not in the same weight class as these people either, Anna,” I said. “That’s not an insult. It’s just true. Hell, I don’t want to be there.”

  “It isn’t about how big you are, Dresden,” she said. “It’s about how smart you are.” She shook her head. “Maybe you need my help more than you know.”

  I wanted to tear out my hair. “Don’t you get it?” I asked. “That’s exactly what he wants you to think. He’s a player who’s been operating since before your family tree got started, and he’s setting you up.”

  Naked hatred filled her voice. “He killed my friends.”

  “Dammit,” I said. “You try to screw him over, he’ll kill you just as fast.”

  “And yet you’re doing it.” She put the envelope carefully away in her tunic. “Last time around, I thought I had it all together. I didn’t think I needed your help. But I did. This time, it’s your turn. Get the stripper and tell her we’d better get moving.”

  “Why?”

  She touched the envelope through the tunic. “Like I said. The former owners have been kind of persistent since I took this from their files.”

  “Who?”

  “The Fomor.”

  “Balls—those guys?” I sighed, just as the horns blared and the band revved up into a swing number. “Okay, let’s g—”

  The caterers came by again, all eight of them this time, in their identical uniforms, moving industriously. They were carrying two big trays, and abruptly dumped them onto their sides. The shiny metal covers clanged and clattered onto the floor, the sound lost in the rumble of drums, and from beneath them came two squirming, slithering things.

  For a second, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It was just two mounds of writhing purple-grey flesh mottled with blotches of other colors. And then they just sort of unspooled into writhing, grasping appendages and a weird bulbous body, and suddenly two creatures that looked like the torso of a hairless, gorilla-like humanoid grafted to the limbs of an enormous octopus came scuttle-humping over the floor toward us, preceded by a wave of reeking, rotten-fish stench and followed by twin trails of yellowish mucus.

  “Hell’s bells,” I swore. “I told her so. Nothing’s ever simple.”

  Ten

  So, what do you call abominations like that? I wondered in an oddly calm corner of my brain as adrenaline kicked it into high gear. Octogorillataurs? Gorilloctopi? How are you going to whale properly on a thing if you don’t even have a name for it?

  More to the point, nameless hideous monsters are freaking terrifying. You always fear what you don’t know, what you don’t understand, and the first step to having understanding of something is to know what to call it. It’s a habit of mine to give names to anything I wind up interacting with if it doesn’t have one readily available. Names have power—magically, sure, but far more important, they have psychological power. Something horrible with a name holds less power over you, less terror, than something horrible without one.

  “Octokongs,” I pronounced grimly. “Why did it have to be octokongs?”

  “Are you kid
ding me?” breathed Anna Valmont. Her body tensed like a quivering power line, but she didn’t panic. “Dresden?”

  At the other end of the hall, the band hit the first chorus of the swing number, drums rumbling. The octokongs came a-glumping toward us, ten limbs threshing, octopus and gorilla both, nearly human eyes burning with furious hate, but they weren’t what had me the most worried. The Fomor were a melting pot of a supernatural nation, the survivors of a dozen dark mythologies and pantheons that had apparently been biding their time for the past couple of thousand years, emerging from beneath the world’s oceans in the wake of the destruction of the Red Court of Vampires. They’d spent the last couple of years giving everyone a hard time and making thousands of people vanish. Nobody knew why, yet, but the Fomor’s covert servitors on land looked human, had gills, and acted like exemplary monsters—and they were what I was more worried about.

  Behind the octokongs, the servitors in the caterer uniforms crouched down into ready positions, drawing out what looked chillingly like weighted saps, and every one of them was focused on Valmont. The beasties were just the attack dogs. The servitors were here to make Anna Valmont vanish—alive. One could only have nightmares about what people who get their kicks stitching gorillas to octopi might do to a captive thief.

  I didn’t have any of my magical gear on me. That limited my options in the increasingly crowded public venue. Worse, they’d gotten close to us before coming at us. There was nowhere to run and no time for anything subtle.

  Lucky for me.

  I’m not really a subtle guy.

  I summoned forth my will, gathering it into a coherent mass, and crouched, reaching down and across my body with my right hand. Then I shouted, “Forzare!” as I rose, sweeping my arm out in a wide arc and unleashing a slew of invisible force as I did.

  A wave of raw kinetic force lashed out from me in a crescent-shaped arc, catching both octokongs and all eight of the servitors, sending them tumbling backward.

  The sudden, widely spread burst of magic also sent the heavy covered platters flying, and one of them hit edge-on and slashed right through one of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the ballroom. A genuine hotel staffer caught the edge of the spell and went sprawling as though clipped by an NFL linebacker. Hanging sheets of red fabric blew in a miniature hurricane, some of them tearing free of their fastenings and flying through the room. A couple of small tables and their chairs went spinning away—and almost every lightbulb in the place abruptly shattered in a shower of sparks.