Skin Game: A Novel of the Dresden Files

by Jim Butcher

  “The Blue Beetle was not a clown car,” I said severely. “It was a machine of justice.”

  I wasn’t looking at her, but I heard the smile in her voice—along with something that might have been compassion. “You’re a creature of habit, Harry. And they took away all the familiar places and things in your life. They hurt you.”

  Something dark and furious stirred way down inside me for a moment, threatening to come out. I swallowed it back down.

  “So the idea of a fortress, someplace familiar that can’t be taken away from you, really appeals to you right now,” Karrin said. “Even if it means you cut yourself off from everyone.”

  “It isn’t like that,” I said.

  It wasn’t.

  Was it?

  “And I’m fine,” I added.

  “You aren’t fine,” Karrin said evenly. “You’re a long, long way from fine. And you’ve got to know that.”

  Mister’s fur was soft and very warm beneath my fingers. His paws batted gently at my hands. His teeth were sharp but gentle on my wrist. I’d forgotten how nice it was, the furry beast’s simple weight and presence against me.

  How could I have forgotten that?

  (“I’m only human.”)

  (“For now.”)

  I shook my head slowly. “This is . . . not a good time to get in touch with my feelings.”

  “I know it isn’t,” she said. “But it’s the first time in months that I’ve seen you. What if I don’t get another chance?” She put the cup of tea down on a coaster on the coffee table and said, “Agreed, there’s business to do. But you’ve got to understand that your friends are worried about you. And that is important, too.”

  “My friends,” I said. “So this is . . . a community project?”

  Karrin stared at me for a moment. Then she stood up and moved to stand beside the chair. She considered me for a few breaths, then pushed my hair back from my eyes with one hand, and said, “It’s me, Harry.”

  I felt my eyes close. I leaned in to her touch. Her hand felt feverishly warm, a wild contrast to the brush of Mab’s cold digits earlier in the day. We stayed like that for a moment, and Mister’s throaty purr buzzed through the room.

  There’s power in the touch of another person’s hand. We acknowledge it in little ways, all the time. There’s a reason human beings shake hands, hold hands, slap hands, bump hands.

  It comes from our very earliest memories, when we all come into the world blinded by light and color, deafened by riotous sound, flailing in a suddenly cavernous space without any way of orienting ourselves, shuddering with cold, emptied with hunger, and justifiably frightened and confused. And what changes that first horror, that original state of terror?

  The touch of another person’s hands.

  Hands that wrap us in warmth, that hold us close. Hands that guide us to shelter, to comfort, to food. Hands that hold and touch and reassure us through our very first crisis, and guide us into our very first shelter from pain. The first thing we ever learn is that the touch of someone else’s hand can ease pain and make things better.

  That’s power. That’s power so fundamental that most people never even realize it exists.

  I leaned my head against Karrin’s hand and shivered again. “Okay,” I said quietly. “Okay. This is important, too.”

  “Good,” she said. She left her fingers in my hair for another moment, and then withdrew her hand. She picked up my teacup, and hers, and carried them back to the kitchen. “So. Where did you go after you left the Hard Rock?”

  “Hmm?” I asked.

  Her voice drifted in from the kitchen. “Given what you told me, you left the meeting with Nicodemus about three hours ago. Where have you been since then?”

  “Um,” I said. “Yeah, about that.”

  She came back into the room and arched a golden eyebrow at me.

  “What if I told you that I needed you to trust me?”

  She frowned and tilted her head for a moment before the hint of a smile touched her mouth. “You went digging for information, didn’t you?”

  “Um,” I said. “Let’s just say that until I know more about what I’m up against, I’m playing things a lot closer to the chest than usual.”

  She frowned. “Tell me you aren’t doing it for my own protection.”

  “You’d kick my ass,” I said. “I’m doing it for mine.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I think.”

  “Don’t thank me,” I said. “I’m still keeping you in the dark. But I believe it’s absolutely necessary.”

  “So you need me to trust you.”

  “Yeah.”

  She spread her hands. “Yeah, okay. So what’s the play? I assume you want me to assemble the support team and await developments while you and Thomas go play with the bad guys?”

  I shook my head. “Hell, no. I want you to go in with me.”

  That shocked her silent for a moment. Her eyes widened slightly. “With you. To rob a Greek god.”

  “Burgle, technically,” I said. “I’m pretty sure if you pull a gun on Hades, you deserve whatever happens to you.”

  “Why me?” she asked. “Thomas is the one with the knives and the superstrength.”

  “I don’t need knives and superstrength,” I said. “What’s the first rule to protecting yourself on the street?”

  “Awareness,” she replied instantly. “It doesn’t matter how badass you are. If you don’t see it coming, you can’t do anything about it.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “I need you because you don’t have supernatural abilities. You never have. You’ve never relied on them. I need extra eyes. I need to see things happening, someone to watch my back, to notice details. You’re the detective who could see that the supernatural was real when everyone else was explaining it away. You’ve squared off against the worst and you’re still here to talk about it. You’ve got the best eyes of anyone I know.”

  Karrin took that in for a moment and then nodded slowly. “And . . . you think I’m crazy enough to actually do it?”

  “I need you,” I said simply.

  She considered that gravely.

  “I’ll get my gun,” she said.

  Six

  Karrin drove us to the address on the card in her new car, one of those little Japanese SUVs that Consumer Reports likes, and we got there about ten minutes before sundown.

  “An abandoned slaughterhouse,” she said. “Classy.”

  “I thought the stockyard district had all been knocked down and rebuilt,” I said.

  She put the car in park and checked the SIG she carried in a shoulder holster. “Almost all of it. A couple of the old wrecks hung on.”

  The wreck in question was a long, low building, a simple old box frame only a couple of stories high and running the length of the block. It was sagging and dirty and covered in stains and graffiti, an eyesore that had to have been around since before the Second World War. A painted sign on the side of the building was barely legible: SULLIVAN MEAT COMPANY. The buildings around it were updated brownstone business district standard—but I noticed that no one who worked in them, apparently, had elected to park his car on the slaughterhouse’s side of the block.

  I didn’t have to get out of the car to feel the energy around the place—dark, negative stuff, the kind of lingering aura that made people and animals avoid a place without giving much consideration as to why. City traffic seemed to ooze around it in a mindless, Brownian fashion, leaving the block all but deserted. Every city has places like that, where people tend not to go. It’s not like people run screaming or anything—they just never seem to find a reason to turn down certain streets, to stop on certain stretches of road. And there’s a reason that they don’t.

  Bad things happen in places like this.

  “Go in?” I asked Karrin.

  “Let’s watch for a bit,” she said. “See what happens.”

  “Aye-aye, Eye-guy,” I said.

  “I want you to imagine me kicking your an
kle right now,” Karrin said, “because it is beneath my dignity to actually do it.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since I don’t want to get your yucky boy germs on my shoes,” she said, watching the street. “So what’s Nicodemus after?”

  “No clue,” I said. “And whatever he says he’s after, I think it’s a safe bet that he’ll be lying.”

  “Ask the question from the other direction, then,” she said. “What’s Hades got?”

  “That’s the thing,” I said. “My sources say he’s the collector of the supernatural world. He’s famous for it. Art, treasure, gems, jewels, antiques, you name it.”

  “Nicodemus doesn’t seem like an antiquer to me.”

  I snorted. “Depends. There are a lot of kinds of antiques. Old coins. Old swords.”

  “For example,” she said, “you think he’s after some kind of magical artifact?”

  “Yeah. Something specific. It’s the only thing I can think of that he couldn’t get somewhere else,” I said.

  “Could he be trying to make something happen with the act of burglary itself?”

  I shrugged. “Like what? Other than pissing off something as big, powerful, and pathologically vengeful as a freaking Greek god. Those guys took things personally.”

  “Right. What if he’s setting it up to make it look like someone else did the crime?”

  I grunted. “Worth considering. But it seems like there’d be simpler ways to accomplish the same thing than to break into someone’s version of Hell.” I frowned. “Ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “You planning to bring one of the Swords with you?”

  Karrin had two swords that had been forged with nails from the Cross (yeah, that Cross) worked into the blades. They were powerful talismans, borne by the Knights of the Cross, the natural foes of Nicodemus and his crew of thirty silver-coined lunatics (yeah, those thirty pieces of silver).

  She frowned, her eyes scanning the street, and didn’t answer for a moment. When she did, I had the impression that she was choosing her words carefully. “You know I have to be careful with them.”

  “They’re weapons, Karrin,” I said. “They’re not glass figurines. What’s the point in having two genuine holy swords with which to fight evil if you don’t, you know, fight evil with them occasionally?”

  “Swords are funny,” she replied. “The most capable muscle-powered tool there is for killing a man. But they’re fragile, too. Use them the wrong way, and they’ll break like glass.”

  “The Denarians are on the field,” I said. “They’re the people the Swords were meant to challenge.”

  “The things inside the Coins are what the Swords were meant to fight. The ones holding the Coins are the people the Swords were meant to save,” she said, her tone gently emphatic. “And that’s why I’m not carrying one. I don’t want to save those animals, Harry. And it’s not enough to use the Swords against the right foe. You have to use them for the right reasons—or they could be lost forever. I won’t be the reason that happens.”

  “So you’ll just let them sit and do nothing?” I asked.

  “I’ll give them to anyone I think will use them wisely and well,” she said calmly. “But people like that don’t come along every day. Being a keeper of the Swords is a serious job, Harry. You know that.”

  I sighed. “Yeah. I do. But Nicodemus and his girl are right over there in that building—and we could use every advantage we can get.”

  Karrin suddenly smiled. It transformed her face, though her eyes never stopped sweeping the street. “You’re just going to have to have a little faith, Harry.”

  “Faith?”

  “That if a Knight with a Sword needs to be here, one will be here. For all we know, Sanya will come walking down the street and get in the car with us.”

  I scowled at that, even though she was probably right. When a Knight of the Sword was meant to show up and intervene, one would damned well make an entrance and intervene, regardless of who or what stood in the way. I’d seen it more than once. But . . . part of me hated to let go of the advantage the Swords would offer.

  Of course, that was what faith was all about, wasn’t it—letting go and trusting Someone Else.

  Maybe wizards just weren’t terribly predisposed to surrendering control. I mean, not when they have so much personal power available to them. Once you’ve had your hands on the primal forces that created the universe, it’s a little hard to relax and let them slip through your fingers. It would certainly explain why so few of the wizards I knew were even mildly religious.

  Also, it illustrated pretty clearly why I was never, ever going to be a Knight. Aside from the fact that I was working for the queen of the wicked faeries and getting into bed with jerks like Nicodemus, I mean.

  Karrin’s eyes flicked up to her rearview mirror and sharpened. “Car,” she said quietly.

  In a spy movie, I would have watched them coolly in the rearview mirror, or perhaps in my specially mirrored sunglasses. But as I am neither cool nor a spy, nor did I feel any particular need for stealth, I twisted my upper body around and peered out the back window of Karrin’s car.

  A white sedan with a rental agency’s bumper sticker on it pulled up to the curb halfway down the block. It was shuddering as it did, as if it could barely get its engine to turn over, even though it was a brand-new vehicle. Before it had entirely stopped moving, the passenger door swung open and a woman stepped out onto the street as though she just couldn’t stand to be stuck in one place.

  She was striking—rangy and nearly six feet tall, with long and intensely curled dark hair that fell almost to her waist. She wore sunglasses, jeans, and a thick, tight scarlet sweater that she filled out more noticeably than most. Her cowboy boots struck the street decisively in long strides as she crossed it, heading toward the old slaughterhouse. Her sharp chin was thrust forward, her mouth set in a firm line, and she walked as though she felt certain that the way was clear—or had better be.

  “Hot,” Karrin said, her tone neutral, observational. “Human?”

  I wasn’t getting any kind of supernatural vibe off of her, but there’s more than one way to identify a threat. “Can’t be sure,” I said. “But I think I know who she is.”

  “Who?”

  “A warlock,” I said.

  “That’s a rogue wizard, right?”

  “Yeah. When I was in the Wardens, they used to send out wanted posters for warlocks so the Wardens could recognize them. I didn’t hunt warlocks. But I was on the mailing list.”

  “Why didn’t you?” she asked. “Word is that they’re dangerous.”

  “Dangerous children, most of them,” I said. “Kids who no one ever taught or trained or told about the Laws of Magic.” I nodded toward the woman. “That one’s name is Hannah Ascher. She was on the run longer than any other warlock on recent record. She’s supposed to have died in a fire in . . . Australia, I think, about six years ago.”

  “You drowned once. How much pressure did the Council put on you after that?”

  “Good point,” I said.

  “What did she do?” Karrin asked.

  “Originally? Ascher burned three men to death from the inside out,” I said.

  “Jesus.”

  “Killed one Warden, back before my time. She’s put three more in the hospital over the years.”

  “Wizards trained to hunt rogue wizards, and she took them out?”

  “Pretty much. Probably why she doesn’t look worried about walking in there right now.”

  “Neither will we when we go in,” Karrin said.

  “No, we won’t,” I said.

  “Here comes the driver.”

  The driver’s-side door opened and a bald, blocky man of medium height in an expensive black suit got out. Even before he reached up to take off his sunglasses to reveal eyes like little green agates, I recognized him. Karrin did too, and let out a little growling sound. He put the sunglasses away in a pocket, checked what was
probably a gun in a shoulder holster, and hurried to catch up to Ascher, an annoyed expression on his blunt-featured face.

  “Binder,” she said.

  “Ernest Armand Tinwhistle,” I said. “Name that goofy, don’t blame him for wanting to use an alias.”

  Though, honestly, he hadn’t chosen it. The Wardens had given it to him when they’d realized how he’d somehow managed to bind an entire clan of entities out of the Nevernever into his service. He could whistle up a modest horde of humanoid creatures who apparently felt nothing remotely like pain or fear, and who were willing to sacrifice themselves without hesitation. Binder was a one-man army, and I’d told the little jerk that if I saw him in my town again, I’d end him. I’d told him to stay out, and yet here he was.

  For about three seconds, I couldn’t think about anything but ending him. I’d have to make it fast, take him out before he could call up any of his buddies, something quick, like breaking his neck. Open the car door. Call up a flash of light as I got out, something to dazzle his newly unshaded eyes. A dozen sprinting steps to get to him, then grab him by the jaw and the back of the head and twist sharply up and to one side, then bring up a shield around myself in case his brain stayed alive long enough to drop a death curse on me.

  “Harry,” Karrin said, quiet and sharp.

  I realized that I was breathing hard and that my breath was pluming into frost on the exhale as the mantle of power of the Winter Knight had begun informing my instincts in accord with the primal desire to defend my territory against an intruder. The temperature in the car had dropped as if she’d turned the AC up full blast. Water was condensing into droplets on the windows.

  I closed my eyes as the Winter rose up in me and I fought it down. I’d done it often enough over the past year on the island that it was almost routine. You can’t stave off the howling, primitive need for violence that came with the Winter mantle with the usual deep-breathing techniques. There was only one way that I’d found that worked. I had to assert my more rational mind. So I ran through my basic multiplication tables in my head, half a dozen mathematical theorems, which took several seconds, then hammered out ruthless logic against the need to murder Binder in the street.