Skin Game: A Novel of the Dresden Files

by Jim Butcher

  I checked the corners of the house, in case the squires had deployed people on foot, to move through the backyards the way I had. And when I looked back to the storm door, the heavy security door beyond it had been opened and, the twin barrels of a coach gun gaped in front of my eyes.

  I dropped my veil in a hurry and held up my hands. I think I said something clever, like “Glurk!”

  Charity lowered the shotgun, her blue eyes wide. She was wearing pajamas and one of her handmade tactical coats over them—a layer of titanium mail between two multilayered coats of antiballistic fabric. She had what looked like a Colt Model 1911 in a holster on her hip. “Harry!” she said, and hurriedly opened the storm door.

  I hurried in and said, “They’re coming.”

  “Michael just called,” she said, nodding, and shut the security door behind me, throwing multiple bolts closed as she did.

  “Where are the kids?”

  “Upstairs, in the panic room.”

  “We’ve got to get them out,” I said.

  “Too late,” said a voice from the front room. “They’re here.”

  I padded forward intently, and found Waldo Butters crouching by the front windows, staring out. He was wearing his Batman vest with all its magical gadgets, and holding a pump-action shotgun carefully, as if he knew how to use it, but only just.

  In the doorway to the kitchen stood Uriel. He was wearing an apron. There was what appeared to be pancake flour staining his shirt. Instead of looking dangerous and absolute, the way an archangel should, he looked slender and a little tired and vulnerable. He didn’t have a gun, but he stood holding a long kitchen knife in competent hands, and there was a quiet balance to his body that would have warned me that he might be dangerous if I hadn’t known him.

  Mouse sat next to Uriel, looking extremely serious. His tail thumped twice against the vulnerable archangel’s legs as he saw me.

  “Da . . . ,” Charity began, when she saw Uriel. “Darn it,” she continued, her voice annoyed. “You’re supposed to be upstairs with the children.”

  “I was fighting wars when this planet was nothing but expanding gasses,” Uriel said.

  “You also didn’t leak and die if someone poked a hole in you,” I said.

  The angel frowned. “I can help.”

  “Help what?” I asked him, drawing the monster revolver from my duster pocket. “Slice up bananas for pancakes? This is a gunfight.”

  “Harry,” Butters said urgently.

  “Ennghk,” I said in frustration, and went to Butters. “Mouse, stay with him, boy.”

  “Woof,” Mouse said seriously. That was obviously the mutt’s plan, but I read somewhere that a good commander never gives an order he knows won’t be obeyed. It therefore stood to reason that he might as well give orders that he knows will be obeyed whenever possible.

  “Kill the lights,” I said to Charity.

  She nodded. Most of the lights were already out, but a few night-lights that could double as detachable flashlights glowed in power outlets here and there. She went around detaching them, and the interior of the home became darker than the predawn winter light outside.

  I moved to Butters’s side and peered out through the translucent drapes while I reloaded my big revolver. I could dimly see squires unloading from the two vans, now parked in front of the house. They carried shotguns and rifles, as they had before.

  “Nine,” Butters said quietly, counting gunmen. “Ten. Eleven. Jesus.”

  “Keep counting,” I said. “It might matter.”

  Butters nodded. “Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen? Sixteen.”

  “Stay down,” I told everyone. “Stay away from the windows. Don’t let them know anything.”

  Someone moved through the dark and crouched quietly next to me. “I called the police already,” Charity said.

  “They’re responding to a big emergency,” I replied. “Be a while before they get here.” I noted two pairs of gunmen splitting off from the others, heading around either side of the house. “They’re going around.”

  “I’ll take the back,” Charity said.

  “You know how to use guns, too, huh?” I asked her.

  I saw her teeth gleam in the dimness. “I like hammers and axes better. We’ll know in a minute.”

  “Luck,” I said, and she vanished back into the rear of the house.

  Michael’s house had been fortified the same way mine had been, with heavy-duty security doors that would resist anything short of breaching charges or the determined use of a ram. With anything like a little luck, they might try the doors, find them tough, and waste some time figuring it out.

  But Nicodemus didn’t leave room for luck in his plans. Eight men started carefully toward the front door over the lawn. Two of them were carrying small charges of plastic explosives. Of course, he’d already scoped the place out. Or maybe he just planned to blow the door off its hinges even if it was made of painted paper.

  Dammit, I wasn’t a soldier. I didn’t have training in the whole tactical thing. But if it was me, and I wanted to get inside a house where I expected at least a little bit of fight, it might be smart to go in from two directions at once. Maybe I’d have most of my guys coming from the front, and just a few from the back, to reduce the chances of them massacring one another by mistake. For that matter, maybe I’d just put a few guys on the back door to plug anyone who tried to run away.

  Of course, the whole point of breaching a room is to do it when you aren’t expected. And they were. That gave us at least a little advantage, right?

  Sure it did.

  “They’re going to blow the door,” I said to Butters. “And maybe toss in a few flashbangs, and then they’ll roll in here and start shooting. Get over there behind the couch and wait for them. Soon as that door opens, start shooting through it.”

  Butters swallowed, and nodded in a jerky motion. His face was pale and beaded with cold sweat. “Right.” He crawled over to the couch.

  Meanwhile, I went to the wall beside the staircase that went upstairs. When the door blew, it would slam open, or if it got taken off the hinges, fly back onto the staircase. I would crouch beside the staircase, where most of my body would be hidden except for my gun arm and my head. I got into position and put the gun down on the floor where I could find it easily.

  Then I waited.

  Ten seconds later, there was a sound like a huge hammer hitting a flat rock, and a sensation like standing in surf and being hit in the chest with a wave, only less substantial. The door flew open. I could barely get the air out of my chest, but I flicked my hand at the door and muttered, “Ventas servitas.”

  A gust of powerful wind hit the doorway from my side just as several small objects tumbled in from the other side, and they fell back to the porch with dull thumps before there was a wash of light and sound that would have obliterated my vision if I hadn’t already shielded my eyes with my hand. A couple of wordless cries of confusion went up from the squires outside, and exhaustion from the effort made my vision narrow to a tunnel. I saw someone move in the doorway, and then Butters opened up with the shotgun.

  I grabbed my pistol, aimed it at the doorway, and fired two rounds as quickly as I could aim them. A man was knocked down, and while I’d like to claim credit for being an awesome gunslinger, odds were better that it was Butters and his shotgun who were responsible.

  There wasn’t time for anything more than that. Fanatics they might be, but they weren’t stupid. It took them less than a couple of seconds to clear away from the porch and our lines of fire. Even the guy who went down scrabbled away, leaving a smear of blood behind him as he did.

  I stopped shooting, frustrated at the lack of targets, but Butters kept pumping shell after shell into the empty doorway. He didn’t stop until the shotgun clicked on an empty chamber three or four times.

  I darted a look at him, to find him staring at the doorway, trembling visibly, his face pale as a sheet.

  “Dude,” I said. “Reload.” />
  He stared at me with goggle-eyes for a second, then jerked his head in a nod and started fumbling at one of his pockets. I waited until he had the shotgun reloaded and said, “Cover the door. I’m going to check on Charity.”

  “Right,” he said.

  I turned and paced toward the back of the house, trying to remember where the walls were so that I didn’t walk into them—and as I rounded the corner nearly walked into a squire with a shotgun.

  No time to think. I swept my staff from left to right, knocking it against the shotgun. The weakened grip of my left hand didn’t give me a lot of leverage, but when fire and thunder bloomed from the barrel, instead of dying I reeled in sudden agony at the pain of the sound so near my eardrum, so it was enough. The squire knocked the staff from my weak grip with a slash of the shotgun’s barrel.

  I shot him twice in the stomach with my big revolver.

  He let out a gasp and went down, and I kicked the shotgun out of his hands as he fell.

  Behind him, his partner drew a bead on me with an assault carbine and had me dead to rights. Terror spiked through me. I tried to fling myself away, knowing as I did that it wouldn’t do me any good.

  Uriel melted out of the shadows behind the second squire with his kitchen knife, and opened both of the squire’s big arteries and his windpipe with a single slice. The man collapsed, and Uriel rode him to the floor, pinning the assault rifle down with one hand for a few seconds, until the squire stopped struggling.

  He looked up at me, his expression sickened.

  I stared at the two squires. They’d come in the back.

  Charity.

  By the time I got to the back door, it was standing open, one side of it twisted and blackened with the force of the breaching charge that had opened it. Charity’s shotgun lay on the floor, a couple of expended flashbangs next to it. There was a smear of blood in a trail leading to the door and out into the ice.

  Charity was gone.

  It wasn’t hard to figure. The bad guys had blown the back door, only she hadn’t had a wizard there to stop the flashbangs. They’d sailed in, stunned her, and she’d been taken before she could fire a shot.

  I saw a flash of movement outside the door, and leapt back as another shotgun roared. The squire missed me, but not by much, and a section of drywall the size of my fist vanished from the wall behind where I’d been.

  “Harry!” Butters howled.

  I hurried back to the front of the house to find Butters staring out through the curtains, his expression twisted up in horror.

  Nicodemus was standing on the sidewalk outside the Carpenter house, his shadow writhing.

  Tessa stood beside him in human form, wearing black trousers and a black shirt. Her expression was distant, haunted. She looked awful, thin and wasted away, like those movies of people rescued from concentration camps, but her eyes burned with some dark emotion that the word hate didn’t begin to cover.

  As I watched, two squires half dragged, half carried Charity over to him. They dumped her on the sidewalk in front of Nicodemus. She seemed stunned. Her leg was covered in blood. The armored coat was chewed and torn over her wounded thigh, where most of the shotgun pellets had been caught and stopped.

  Nicodemus seized a handful of Charity’s hair and dragged her faceup, to where she could see her house.

  My heart twisted and rage filled me. I knew what he was doing. Nicodemus planned to leave a message for Michael. It wasn’t enough for Nicodemus simply to kill the Knight’s children—not when he could kill them and leave Charity’s corpse behind in such a fashion as to make clear that she had been forced to watch them die, first.

  “Watch, Mrs. Carpenter,” Tessa hissed. “Watch.”

  Nicodemus turned his head toward three squires, who were standing by with bottles of vodka fitted into Molotov cocktails with bits of cloth. The bottles were already lit.

  His gravelly voice came out low and hard. “Burn it down.”

  Fifty

  I stepped up to the door with my staff in hand just as the three men hurled the bottles of vodka, pointed the staff, and snarled, “Infriga!”

  Icy air screamed. The bottles soared up toward the house and hit the roof with a number of dull thunks, then came rattling back down to fall to the lawn, glass cracking, their contents frozen solid.

  A number of things happened, all at once.

  Tessa let out a hellish screech. She lifted a hand toward me, gathering power in her palm, but as she released it, Nicodemus seized her arm and directed the blast straight up into the air.

  Squires started shooting at me. A bullet smacked into my duster over my left lung and hit me like a fist, spinning me to one side.

  Mouse hurtled toward the rear of the house.

  And, as I fell, Mab’s earring burst, the two pieces flying out of my ear in different directions and bouncing off the walls of the entry hall, and all the pain in the universe came crashing down on me at the same time.

  Dimly, I heard Butters calling my name. Bullets hit the entry hall and the doorway and darted past me in spiteful, hissing whispers to thwack into the stairs behind me. I lay there in a stupor of pain, and another round hit my duster again, and then Butters was hauling me out of the doorway by main force.

  I tried to care about other things that were happening, but mostly I was trying to work up enough energy to curl up into a defensive fetal position—and failing.

  “Harry!” Butters screamed, propping me up. “Harry, get up! They’re coming back!”

  “Burn it!” Tessa shrieked. “Burn them! Burn them all!”

  “Harry!” Butters howled. “Do something!”

  I didn’t have enough left in me to contort my face.

  “Oh, God,” Butters said. “OhGodohGodohGod . . .”

  And that was when I saw Waldo Butters choose to be a hero.

  He looked up the stairs, toward where the children were hidden. Then he looked out toward the men outside. Then he hardened his jaw.

  And with businesslike motions, he stripped me out of my leather duster. He put it on. The sleeves were too long and it was grotesquely oversized, but I had to admit that he got a lot more coverage out of the thing than I ever did.

  “Bob,” he said.

  Glowing lights surged up out of one of the pouches on his Batman vest, dancing nervously in the slowly growing light of dawn. “Yeah, boss?”

  “We’re going in.”

  “Uh . . .”

  “If anything happens to me,” he said, “I want you to head back to the skull. Tell Andi everything you saw. Tell her I said to get you to someone responsible. And tell her that I said that I loved her. Okay?”

  “Boss,” Bob said, his voice subdued. “You sure about this?”

  “There’s nobody else here,” Butters said quietly. “Harry’s down. Charity’s been captured. We can’t risk Uriel’s demise. And if we wait for help, they’ll burn the kids to death while we wring our hands.”

  “But . . . you aren’t up for this. You can’t possibly beat them.”

  “Gotta try,” Butters said.

  “You’ll die trying,” Bob said. “And it won’t make any difference.”

  “I’ve got to believe that it will,” he said. “Maybe I can slow them down until some real help gets here.”

  “Oh,” Bob said, his voice very small.

  “You ready?” Butters asked. “Can you access the duster?”

  “Sure. I tutored Harry on these spells.”

  “Keep the bullets off me for as long as you can,” Butters said.

  “Got it,” Bob said. “Let’s give ’em hell, boss.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Butters said. He took a deep breath, and then put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, Harry. You’ve done enough. I got this.”

  I wanted to scream at Butters not to go, not to throw his life away—to go get the kids and try to run. It would have been just as hopeless, but he might not realize that. And at least they’d die with bullets in them inst
ead of being burned to death. But I couldn’t move, or think or do anything else. The pain was simply too great. It wasn’t a headache now. It was a worldache. I didn’t have a broken arm anymore—I didn’t have a body at all. I just had pain.

  But I started crying as Waldo Butters stood up, rolled the sleeves of my duster up until his hands could reach out of them, grabbed a couple of things from his vest, flung something on the floor of the porch and went out the door.

  The first globe he’d hurled down released a sudden, brief cloud of opaque smoke that went roiling out in all directions, and guns began firing outside.

  No, dammit.

  No.

  I couldn’t let things end like this. Butters was a friend, and too good a man to let die while I lay on the floor unable to go to his aid.

  I fought to rise, but my arms and legs couldn’t hear me through the pain. Again, I struggled, throwing up every mental shield I could against the agony, and this time I managed to shift my weight, and fall heavily onto my side. My cheek lay on the floor and I found myself staring along it, down the hall toward the back of the house, past the dining room where I’d struggled with the squires who invaded . . . and where the remnants of Fidelacchius had been carefully set on the dining room table.

  The table had been jarred in the fight. The broken hilt of the Sword of Faith had fallen and rolled toward the front of the house. It was only a few feet away from me.

  Could it be?

  When the Knights of the Blackened Denarius set out to wreak harm, the Swords were there to oppose them. The Sword of Faith was no more. But that did not mean that the power that guided the Swords could not find another means of expressing itself. I’d seen Charity Carpenter rely upon her faith when Molly was in danger before. How much deeper would it be now, with her home and family in peril?

  Maybe Michael was right about the Sword. If he was, there was still a chance.

  And I had to believe that. People I loved were going to die. I had to believe that there was hope.

  Hope lets you do things you would otherwise never be able to do, gives strength when everything is darkest. In that moment, maybe it helped me—because I forced my nerve endings to respond and dragged myself toward the hilt of the Sword, clenching my teeth in sheer defiance of the agony supplanting my existence. It felt like it took forever before my fingers settled on the wooden grip of the Sword, but by the time I finally reached it, and turned back to the door, Butters had only at that moment reached the front gate. My duster whirled and swirled around him like a living thing, orange light playing along the normally invisible black runes I’d tattooed into the leather, the mantle flaring up wildly like a cobra’s hood.