Skin Game: A Novel of the Dresden Files

by Jim Butcher

  Valmont gave me a grim nod, and jerked her head toward the hole in the wall where we’d entered. “We’re lucky Ascher didn’t set them off on the way in.”

  I padded over to the wall and examined it. At the edges of the scorched hole, I could see the melted plastic edges of shapes I recognized from previous horrible experiences—claymore antipersonnel mines. They’d been set into the wall, between the concrete and the drywall, facing into the room.

  I swallowed. One claymore, when detonated, would spew hundreds of ball bearings out in a broad arc in front of it, a giant’s shotgun. I counted eight of the devices, stacked vertically, one per linear foot. I think the things were about a foot across.

  So. Assume Marcone wanted anyone who tried to force their way into his vault reduced to salsa. Assume he was perfectly well aware how hard a lot of supernatural beings were to hurt. How would he handle it?

  Overkill, that’s how.

  I was guessing he’d installed one claymore mine per square foot of wall. Multiply that by, for simplicity’s sake, three hundred ball bearings each, and you had a whole freaking lot of round pieces of metal waiting to tear us all to shreds. They would bounce around the steel walls of this room like BBs rattling around the inside of a tin can and render any physical body in it to churned meat sauce.

  “Fun,” I said. I turned to Nicodemus and said, “Looks like this party is over. You weren’t sufficiently prepared.”

  “We aren’t stopping now,” Nicodemus said, staring at Valmont. “Open the vault, Miss Valmont.”

  “It would be stupid,” Valmont said. “I think I could have done the first one. This is a door I know nothing about. Even if I do everything right, I could run into something that trips the circuit just because I don’t know it’s there.”

  “I’m going to give you three minutes to open the vault, Miss Valmont. After that, I’ll kill you.”

  “Are you insane?” Valmont demanded.

  “Hell’s bells, man,” I said. “Calm down. The target isn’t going anywhere. You aren’t getting any older. What’s the rush?”

  He bared his teeth. “Time is relative, Dresden. And, at the moment, it is running out. We open the vault, today. Either Miss Valmont does so or she dies.”

  “Or she sets off the mines and we all die?” I blurted. “Have you lost it?”

  “Feel free to wait outside if you are frightened,” he said calmly.

  And I realized that I could. I could back out of the room and pull Michael with me. Valmont would have nowhere else to go, no other options, and I knew exactly what she would do, facing certain death—she’d blow the system in an attempt to take Nicodemus and Deirdre with her. Or maybe she would pull off a minor miracle and open the door, in which case we could proceed just as we had before. If she died, the raid was blown and Mab’s obligation to Nicodemus was met or at least delayed—and if I got lucky, maybe it would put paid to a roomful of bad people at the same time. If Valmont survived, I was no worse off than before.

  And all I had to do was throw a woman to the wolves. The math said it was the smart move.

  “Math was never my best subject,” I muttered. “Michael, get clear.”

  He ground his teeth, but Michael had worked with me long enough to trust me when things were tight—and we both knew that not even Amoracchius and the purest intentions in the world would save him from a blast like the one Marcone had rigged. He left.

  “I’m not frightened,” Grey said. “I want to make that perfectly clear.” Then he also left the room.

  “What are you doing, Dresden?” Nicodemus asked.

  “Helping. Stop the shot clock and let us work,” I said, and made sure the manacles were locked tight against my wrist as I strode over to Anna Valmont. “Okay,” I told her. “Let’s do this.”

  She widened her eyes at me. “What are you doing? Get back!”

  “I’m helping you,” I said. “I’m helping you open this door without blowing anyone to hell. Especially yourself. Also me.”

  She whirled the little flashlight up and shone it on the ground at my feet. “Stop!”

  It was an ultraviolet light. I barely managed to stop my foot before it came down on a circle of vaguely Norse runes painted on the stone floor, invisible to normal light but picked out by Valmont’s flashlight.

  “Stars and stones,” I breathed. “It’s a ward.”

  She shone the light around the floor in front of the vault door. There were at least a dozen wards the size of dinner plates in the immediate area around it.

  “That’s why the door is different,” I said. “They’ve got passive spells running all over the damned room.”

  “I didn’t see the first one until I’d already trampled all over them,” she said. “That suggests, to me, that I’m not the right sort of person to set them off.”

  “Give me the light again,” I said, and she shone it at my feet. I bent over and peered down at the ward, examining it carefully. “Good call. These are built to react to a practitioner’s aura. Not real strong—there’s no threshold to base them on. But enough to put out a surge of magical energy.”

  “Enough to break a circuit, you think?”

  “Definitely.”

  “So a practitioner walks on one of them and . . .” Valmont opened the fingers of her left hand all at once, an elegant gesture. “Boom.”

  The chatter of automatic gunfire came from upstairs—one of the suits had opened up with an Uzi. Valmont and I both flinched at the sudden sound.

  “Christ,” she breathed.

  “We have no time,” Nicodemus said. “Open the door, Miss Valmont.”

  She swallowed and looked at me.

  “Shine the light at my feet, so I can see the way,” I said.

  She did, and I picked my way over the wards until I reached her side. “Okay,” I said. “Three things. One, I’m not going to run off and leave you here alone. Two, I’m not going to let him shoot you. And three—you can do this.”

  “I don’t know if I can,” she said in a low whisper. “What if this door is more complex than the first one?”

  “It can’t be,” I said.

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said. “Because of the way magic interacts with technology. Marcone’s got all these low-grade wards spread out around the door. Whatever electronics or mechanics are inside it, the more complex they are, the faster the magic in this room would break them down and trip the circuit.” I pointed a finger. “That door has got to be assembled out of simpler parts and far simpler electronics than the original. That’s why it got installed secretly—not to stick an even meaner door on, but to hide the fact that the door has to be less complicated than the original.”

  Valmont looked at me for a moment, frowning. “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, you know. In theory.”

  “God, Dresden,” she said. “What if you’re wrong?”

  “Well,” I said, “if I am, neither one of us will ever know it. Because I’m not going anywhere.”

  She stared up at me uncertainly.

  I put a hand on her shoulder and said, “This is what happened to the audacity of the woman who stole my coat and my car after I rescued her from certain doom? I remembered you with a little more attitude than that.”

  A spark of some kind of defiance, or amusement, or maybe both, flickered in her eyes. “I don’t remember it happening that way.”

  “Probable doom,” I allowed, and felt myself grinning like a loon. “Highly possible doom. Look, Anna, you robbed the Vatican when you swiped the Shroud. How tough can it be to handle the pad of a schmuck gangster from Illinois?”

  She took a slow, deep breath. “You make an excellent point,” she said seriously, and bent to her tools.

  She moved with swift, precise professionalism. She had the cover off the control panel in half a minute, and was getting into the wires behind it seconds later.

  “You were right,” she reported. “There are no chi
ps or microcircuits at all.”

  “Can you open it?” I asked.

  “If I don’t make any mistakes. Yes. I think. Now hush.”

  More gunfire erupted from upstairs as she worked. It wasn’t answered by anything I could hear, but I was pretty sure Binder’s goons wouldn’t be firing off their weapons for fun.

  Grey slid back into the room and reported, conversationally, “They’re using suppressed weapons. There are enough of them to make a great big mess of this entire operation, but so far they’re just probing us.”

  “Heh,” I said. “Probe.”

  “Wizard,” Grey said, a trifle impatiently, “are you sure you want to keep pushing it like this?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Think so.”

  “Grey, stand by,” Nicodemus said. “Should Valmont open the vault, we’ll need you to handle the scanner.”

  Grey grunted and said, “Guess I’d better put my game face on.”

  And once again, he seemed to quiver in place, a motion that I couldn’t quite track with my eyes, and suddenly Grey was gone and poor Harvey was standing there, looking nervously through the scorched entry of the vault. More gunfire rang out and Grey-Harvey flinched, darting quick glances behind him.

  Huh.

  “Bloody hell,” Valmont muttered, reaching for another tool. She started operating the combination lock, watching a bobbing needle on some kind of sensor as she did. “Impossible to work with all this jabber.”

  “I could make some white noise for you,” I said helpfully, and followed by saying something like, “Kssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

  “Thank you, Dresden, for that additional distract—” Her eyes widened in sudden terror and she stopped breathing.

  I felt my spine go rigid with anticipation. If those claymores went off, there was no way my duster was going to save me from that much flying metal. I clenched my teeth.

  Valmont looked up at me, abruptly showed me a tigress’s smile, and said, “Gotcha.” Then she pushed a final button with a decisive stab, and the vault door made an ominous clickety-clack sound. She turned the handle, and the enormous door swung ponderously open. “Schmuck gangster from Illinois, indeed.”

  “Get that UV light on the wards again,” I said.

  “On it,” Valmont said.

  “Grey,” Nicodemus said.

  Grey-Harvey hopped rather nimbly through the wards as Valmont illuminated them, and went through the vault door.

  I went with him, my senses alert to any other bits of magical mayhem that might be waiting for us inside Gentleman Johnnie Marcone’s vault.

  It was huge. Fifty feet wide. A hundred feet long. Barred doors that looked sufficient to keep out King Kong stood at intervals along the walls. Each of the barred doors had a steel plaque on it bearing a number and a name. The first one on the right read: LORD RAITH—00010001. The room behind it was piled with boxes of about the right size to hold large paintings, strong-box-style crates, and several pallets bearing bricks made of bundles of hundred-dollar bills, stacked up in four-foot cubes and wrapped in clear plastic.

  The strong room on the other side of us had a plate that read: FERROVAX—00010002, and it was filled with row upon row of closed, fireproof safes.

  And there were eleven more rooms on each side of the vault.

  In between the barred doors were storage lockers, shelves loaded with precious artwork, and more of those giant cubes of money than I really wanted to start counting.

  It was the fortune of a small nation. Maybe even a not-so-small nation.

  And the only door in the place with a little computerized eye-scanning thing next to it was at the very, very far end of the vault, in the center of the rear wall—the Storage Cubby of the Underworld.

  “Looks like that’s it,” I said.

  For a second, Grey-Harvey said nothing. I looked at him. He was scanning the room, slowly.

  “It’s just money,” I said. “Get your head in the game.”

  “I’m looking for guards and booby traps,” he said.

  I grunted. “Oh. Carry on.”

  “I shouldn’t be here,” Grey muttered, almost too quietly to be heard. “This is stupid. I’m going to get caught. I’m going to get caught. Someone will come for me. Those things will get me.”

  I gave him a somewhat fish-eyed look. “Uh,” I said. “What?”

  Grey blinked once and then looked at me. “Huh?”

  “What were you talking about?” I said.

  He frowned slightly. The frown turned into a grimace and he rubbed at his forehead. “Nothing.”

  “The hell it was,” I said.

  “I’m too Harvey right now,” he said. “He doesn’t like this situation very much.”

  “Uh,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘too Harvey’?”

  “Shifting this deep isn’t for chumps,” he said. “It’s nothing you need to worry about. Trust me.”

  “Why should I do that?”

  His voice turned annoyed. “Because I’m a freaking shapeshifter and I’m the one who knows, that’s why.” He eyed me. “You’d better wait here. Manacles or not, those retina scanners are damned finicky.”

  “I’ll stop short,” I said, and started walking to the end of the vault. I didn’t doubt that Grey was right about the scanners, but I’d have to be a lot more gullible than I was to let someone like him out of my sight if I could help it. I stopped thirty or forty feet short of the back wall, and Grey-Harvey sidled up to the panel. He lifted his fingers and tapped out a sequence of maybe a dozen or fifteen numbers into the keypad, swiftly, as if his fingers knew it by pure reflex. A panel rotated when he was done, and a little tube appeared. He leaned down and peered into it, and red light flashed out. He straightened, blinking, and a second later there was a quiet clack.

  “Here goes nothing,” he said, and turned the handle on the door to the strong room.

  The door to the mortal vault of the God of the Underworld (labeled HADES—00000013) opened smoothly, soundlessly. It would have taken more muscle to get into Michael’s fridge.

  Grey turned to me, resuming his own shape, and his mouth twisted into a perfectly invincible smirk. “Damn, I’m good.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Go get everybody else. I’ll get the Way ready.”

  Grey turned to go and then paused, eyeing me.

  “If I wanted to shut this thing down,” I said, “I could have done it pretty much anytime in the past twenty minutes.” I shifted to a maniacally indeterminate European accent and said, “We’re going through.”

  “The Black Hole?” Grey asked, incredulously. “Nobody quotes The Black Hole, Dresden. Nobody even remembers that one.”

  “Hogwash. Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Perkins, and Roddy McDowall all in the same movie? Immortality.”

  “Roddy McDowall was just the voice of the robot.”

  “Yeah. And the robots were awesome.”

  “Cheap Star Wars knockoffs,” Grey sneered.

  “Not necessarily mutually exclusive,” I said.

  “I wasn’t worried about you scrubbing the mission,” he said. “I was thinking you might indulge yourself in a little Robin Hood action against this Marcone character.”

  “Doubt it would make him any angrier than he’s already going to be,” I said. “But ripping off this vault isn’t the job.”

  Grey considered me for a moment and then nodded. “Right. I’ll get the crew.” He turned and jogged to the entrance to the vault—

  —and was suddenly pulled out of the vault and into the security room beyond by an abrupt and severe force.

  “Yeah, that can’t be goo—,” I started to say.

  Before I could finish, Tessa in her mantis form blurred through the vault door, fantastic in her speed, terrifying in her strength, and slammed the door closed behind her. Her rear legs rotated the inside works of the door—meant to allow the door to be locked or unlocked from the inside—and the lock of the heavy vault door shut with a very final-sounding clack.

  Suddenly,
the only light came from some tiny floor lamps along either wall, and they gleamed madly from the mantis’s thousands of eye facets.

  “You,” came her buzzing, two-layered voice, poisonous with hate. “This is your fault.”

  “What?” I said.

  My hand went to the thorn manacles still on my wrist—and then froze. Michael and the others were outside, in the booby-trapped security room. If I started throwing magic around, even at this distance, I would almost certainly trip the antiwizard fail-safe Marcone had built into it.

  “No matter,” Tessa spat. “Your death will end the chain even more readily than the accountant’s.”

  And then a furious Knight of the Blackened Denarius came hurtling toward me with insectile speed—and if I used a lick of magic to fight her, I’d blow my friends to Kingdom Come.

  Thirty-six

  Tessa’s wings blurred and she came at me, scythe-hook arms raised to strike.

  The voice inside my head was screaming a high-pitched, girly scream of terror, and for a second I thought I was going to wet my pants. There wasn’t any time to get cute, there wasn’t any space to run, and without the superstrength of the Winter mantle, I was as good as dead.

  Unless . . .

  If Butters was right, then the strength I’d gained as the Winter Knight was something I’d had all along—latent and ready for an emergency. The only thing that had been holding me back was the natural inhibitors built into my body. Not only that, but I had another advantage—during the past year and a half or so, since I’d been dead and got better, I’d been training furiously. First, to get myself back on my feet and into shape to fight if I had to, and then because it had provided a necessary physical outlet for the pressures I was under.

  The thing about training of any kind is that you get held back by an absolute limit—it freaking hurts. Little injuries mount up, robbing you of your drive, degrading the efficiency of whatever training you’re into, creating imbalances and points of relative weakness.

  But not me.

  For the duration of my training, I’d been shielded from pain by the aegis of the Winter mantle. It wasn’t just that it made me physically stronger—it also allowed me to train longer and harder and more thoroughly than I could possibly have done without it. I wasn’t faster and stronger than I’d been before solely because I wore the Winter Knight’s mantle—I’d also worked my ass off to do it.