Skin Game: A Novel of the Dresden Files

by Jim Butcher

“There are crazymaking moments too,” Molly said quietly, in the tone of someone delivering a caveat. “But . . . mostly, yeah. Mom and Dad have some pretty strong opinions but . . . they know how to do family.”

  I blinked my eyes quickly several times. “When I was a kid . . .” I stopped talking before I started crying, and smiled after them. When I was a kid in the foster system, I would have given a hand and an eye to be a part of something like this. I took a steadying breath and said, “Your family has given my daughter a home.”

  “She’s a pretty cool kid,” Molly said. “I mean, as Jawas go, she’s more or less awesome. She makes it easy to love her. Go on. They’re waiting for you.”

  We went into the kitchen, where Charity was sitting at the kitchen table. Her eyes were a little glazed over with prescription painkillers, but she looked alert, with her wounded leg propped up and pillowed on another chair. Michael sat in the chair next to her, his own freshly wounded leg mirroring hers on a chair of its own, and the pair of them were holding hands, a matched set.

  Michael’s cane, I noted, was back. It rested within arm’s reach.

  Binder and Valmont sat at the table across from them, and everyone was drinking from steaming mugs. There were five brand-new locking metal cash boxes from an office supply store sitting side by side on the table.

  Binder was in the middle of a story of some kind, gesticulating with both thick-fingered hands. “So I looked at her and said, ‘That’s not my pen, love.’”

  Michael blinked and then turned bright pink, while Charity threw back her head and let out a rolling belly laugh. Anna Valmont smiled, and sipped at her tea. She was the first to notice that I had come in, and her face brightened, for a moment, into a genuine smile. “Dresden.”

  Binder glanced over his shoulder and said, “About bloody time, mate. You look a right mess.”

  “Yeah, but I feel like an utter disaster,” I said, and limped to the table. “Where’s Grey?”

  “He won’t come in the yard,” Michael said.

  I arched an eyebrow and looked at him. “Hngh.”

  Michael spread his hands. “He said he’d be around and that you would take him his pay.”

  “Said he didn’t want a share of the stones,” Binder said in a tone of utter disbelief. “That he had his pay coming from you.”

  I lifted my eyebrows. “Huh.”

  “There’s professional,” Binder said, “and then there’s just bloody odd.”

  “Not everyone is motivated solely by money,” Valmont said, smiling into her tea.

  “And how much more sensible a world it would be if they were,” Binder said.

  “I’ve divided the stones by weight,” Valmont said. “Each box is the same. Everyone else should pick theirs and I’ll take whichever one is left.”

  “Sensible, professional,” Binder said in a tone of approval. “Dresden?”

  “Sure,” I said. I tapped a box and picked it up. It was heavy. Diamonds are, after all, rocks.

  Binder claimed one. Michael frowned thoughtfully.

  “Michael?” I asked him.

  “I’m . . . not sure I can accept—”

  Charity, very firmly, picked up one of the boxes and put it on her lap. “We have at least twenty-three more child-years of college education to finance,” she said. “And what if there are grandchildren one day, after that? And have you considered the good we might do with the money?”

  Michael opened his mouth, frowned, and then closed it again. “But what do we know about selling diamonds?”

  “Anna assures me it’s perfectly simple.”

  “Fairly,” Valmont said. “Especially if you do so quietly, over time. I’ll walk you through it.”

  “Oh,” Michael said.

  “And we have an extra,” Valmont said, “since Grey didn’t want a share.”

  “Here’s a brainstorm,” Binder said. “Give it to me.”

  “Why on earth would I do that?” Valmont said.

  “Because I’ll take it to Marcone and bribe him with it to not kill us all, after we wrecked his perfectly nice bank,” Binder said. “Walking away rich is all very well, but I want to live to spend it.”

  “Give it to me,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Harry?” Michael asked.

  “I know Marcone,” I said. “He knows me. I’ll use it to keep him off of all of us. You have my word.”

  Michael exhaled through his nose. Then he nodded and said, “Good enough for me. Miss Valmont?”

  Anna considered me and then nodded once. “Agreed.”

  “Better you than me, mate,” Binder chimed in. “Just you try to get some kind of warning to us if he kills you when you go to talk to him.”

  “I’ll bear it in mind,” I said, and took a second box. Valmont claimed the last one.

  We were all quiet for a moment.

  Then Binder rose and said, “Ladies, gents, what a treat it’s been scraping out of a mess by the skin of our teeth with you. Godspeed.” And he headed for the door.

  Valmont rose, too, smiling quietly. She came over to me and gave me a hug.

  I eyed her. Then I made a bit of a show of checking my pockets for missing items.

  That made her laugh, and she hugged me again, a little longer. Then she stood up on tiptoe to kiss my cheek and said, “I left your things in the closet of the room you were sleeping in.”

  I nodded, very slightly.

  She withdrew then, smiled at Charity, and said, “Give me three days.Then call me at the number I gave you.”

  “I will,” Charity said. “Thank you.”

  Anna smiled at her, nodded to Michael, and left.

  Michael idly unlocked his box and opened it. Light spilled off of the diamonds heaped inside.

  “My, my, my,” Michael said.

  Charity picked up a stone carefully and shook her head, bemused. “My, my, my.”

  “Watch my loot for me?” I asked. “I need to go speak to Grey.”

  * * *

  I found Grey standing on the sidewalk outside the house, leaning against the streetlight with his arms folded over his chest and his head bowed. He looked up as I came out of the house and shuffled down the front walk to the gate.

  “Dresden,” he said.

  “Grey. You really came through for me.”

  “What you hired me to do,” Grey said, as if I might be a bit thick.

  “I guess I did, didn’t I?” I said. “You could have bailed. You could have taken Nick’s money.”

  He looked at me as if I had begun speaking in tongues.

  “Guess Vadderung was right about you.”

  Something not quite a smile touched Grey’s mouth. “Heh,” he said. “He’s one who would know, isn’t he?”

  “So how come you won’t come in the yard?” I asked, stepping through the broken gate to join him.

  Grey stared at me, his eyes opaque. He turned his head to the Carpenters’ home, and looked up and around the yard, as if noting the position of invisible sentries. Then he looked back at me.

  And his body language shifted, relaxing slightly. His eyes flickered and changed, from brown orbs with that odd golden sheen to them to something brighter gold, almost yellow, the color spreading too wide for human eyes, the pupils slit vertically like a cat’s. I had seen eyes exactly like them once before.

  My heart leapt up into my throat and I slammed the gate shut. “Hell’s bells,” I stammered. “A naagloshii? You’re a freaking naagloshii?”

  Grey’s eyes narrowed and changed back to mostly human brown again. He was silent for a moment, and then said, “You didn’t choose to be the son of Margaret LeFay. You didn’t choose the legacy she left you with her blood. And she was a piece of work, kid. I knew her.”

  I frowned at him, and said nothing.

  “I didn’t choose my father, either,” Grey said. “And he was a piece of work, too. But I do choose how I live my life. So pay up.”

  I nodded, slowly, and said, “What’s it g
oing to cost me?”

  He told me.

  “What?” I said. “That much?”

  “Cash only,” he said. “Now.”

  “I don’t have that much on me,” I said.

  He snorted and said, “I believe you. We going to have a problem?”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll go get it.”

  “Sure,” he said, and bowed his head again, as if prepared to wait from now until Judgment Day.

  And I shambled back into the house, went in to Michael and asked, “Can you loan me a dollar?”

  * * *

  I watched Grey depart, walking down the sidewalk, turning the corner, and continuing on his way. The day had warmed up enough to melt the ice, and the evening was misty, cool, and humid. The streets gleamed. It was very quiet. For a moment, I stood there alone.

  “If you have a minute,” I said to the air.

  Uriel suddenly stood next to me.

  “Look at you,” I said. “Got your jet plane back.”

  “Undamaged,” he said. “Michael is a good man.”

  “Best I know,” I said. “Would you really have nuked Grey if he’d come in the yard?”

  Uriel considered the statement for a moment. Then he said, “Let’s just say that I’m relieved that he didn’t make the attempt. It would have been awkward.”

  “I think I’m starting to see the picture now,” I said. “Who was really moving this whole mess.”

  “I thought you might,” he said.

  “But I don’t get your role in it,” I said. “What was your angle?”

  “Redemption,” he said.

  “For Nicodemus?” I asked him. “You risked that much—your grace, the Sword, Michael, me—for that clown?”

  “Not only for him,” Uriel said.

  I thought about that for a second and then said, “Jordan.”

  “And the other squires, yes,” Uriel said.

  “Why?” I asked. “They made their choices, too, didn’t they?”

  Uriel seemed to consider the question for a moment. “Some men fall from grace,” he said slowly. “Some are pushed.”

  I grunted. Then I said, “Butters.”

  Uriel smiled.

  “When Cassius Snakeboy was about to gut me, I remember thinking that no Knight of the Cross was going to show up and save me.”

  “Cassius was a former Knight of the Blackened Denarius,” Uriel said. “It seems appropriate that he should be countered by an incipient Knight of the Cross. Don’t you think?”

  “And the Sword breaking?” I asked. “Did you plan that, too?”

  “I don’t plan anything,” Uriel said. “I don’t really do anything. Not unless one of the Fallen crosses the line.”

  “No? What is your job, then?”

  “I make it possible for mortals to make a choice,” he said. “Ms. Murphy chose to act in a way that would shatter the Sword. Mr. Butters chose to act with a selflessness and courage that proved him worthy to be a true Knight. And you chose to believe that a ruined, broken sword could make a difference. The sum of those acts created a Sword that is, in some ways, greater than what was broken.”

  “I didn’t choose for it to do that,” I said. “Seriously. There might be some kind of copyright infringement going on here.”

  Uriel smiled again. “I must admit,” he said, “I never foresaw that particular form of faith being expressed under my purview.”

  “Belief in a freaking movie?” I asked him.

  “Belief in a story,” Uriel said, “of good confronting evil, of light overcoming darkness, of love transcending hate.” He tilted his head. “Isn’t that where all faith begins?”

  I grunted and thought about it. “Huh.”

  Uriel smiled.

  “Lot of Star Wars fans out there,” I noted. “Maybe more Star Wars fans than Catholics.”

  “I liked the music,” he said.

  * * *

  I took the extra box of diamonds and went to see Marcone.

  Molly came with me, but I didn’t need her intuition to know who I would find there. When we got there, she looked at the building and said, “That bitch.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I knocked at the door of the Brighter Future Society. It was a small but genuine castle that Marcone had paid to move to Chicago. It was not lost on me that he had erected the damned thing on the lot formerly occupied by the boardinghouse whose basement I’d rented for years. Jerk.

  The door opened and a man the height and width of a drawbridge glowered down at me. He had long hair, a mad bomber’s beard, and enough muscle to feed a thousand hungry vultures.

  “Your name is Skaldi Skheldson,” I said. “You know who I am. I’m here to see Marcone and his guest.”

  Skaldi frowned. Skaldi’s frown would have been intimidating if I hadn’t spent the past few days hanging out with the Genoskwa.

  I bobbed an eyebrow at him and said, “Well?”

  The frown became a scowl. But he stepped aside and let me in. I said, “Thanks,” and headed for the conference room. I knew right where it was. I’d visited when I was a mostly dead ghost. Skaldi hurried to keep up with me. The fact that I already knew where I was going appeared to leave him a little unsettled.

  Wizard.

  We passed several other Einherjaren as I walked through the building, and opened the door to the conference room without knocking.

  Mab was inside, seated at one end of the table, her expression distant and implacable, her back ramrod-straight. Her dress and her hair were both pitch-black, as were her eyes, all the way across her sclera. She was here, then, in her aspect of Judgment.

  People die when Mab shows up in black. The last time I’d seen her in that outfit, two Faerie Queens had bled out onto the soil of Demonreach.

  Seated at her right hand, wearing a charcoal-grey suit, was Gentleman Johnnie Marcone, Baron of Chicago under the Unseelie Accords—and made so, at least in part, by my own signature. There might have been slightly more silver at his temples than the last time I’d seen him, but it only made him look more distinguished. Otherwise, he looked exactly as he always did: calm, alert, impeccably groomed, and as merciful as a lawn mower’s blade.

  “You could have told me from the beginning,” I said to Mab.

  She regarded me with flat black eyes and tilted her head, a curiously birdlike gesture.

  “You were balancing the scales with Nicodemus,” I said. “But it was never about paying back a favor. And it wasn’t about foiling his scheme. This was full-scale political vengeance.”

  Very, very slowly, Mab lifted her hands and placed them flat on the table in front of her. Her nails were black and looked sharp enough to slice silk.

  “You set Nicodemus up from the very beginning,” I said. “You, Hades, and Marcone.”

  Marcone tilted his head from one side to the other and said nothing.

  “It’s the only thing that makes sense,” I said. “Why you sent Molly away—because she’d have known you were up to something. Why the plans to Marcone’s vault were available. Why the bodies got cleaned up, and why the cops didn’t crawl all over this thing when it was done. Hell, they’re probably spinning the shoot-out and the explosions as some kind of terrorist attack. And I’ll bet you anything that the squires found themselves offered a new job, now that their demigod has fallen from grace. Right?”

  A ghost of a smile haunted Marcone’s lips.

  “Nicodemus violated your Accords,” I said to Mab. “He kidnapped Marcone. He abducted the emissary appointed under the Accords. This was your payback. You arranged for him to get the details about Hades’ vault.” I turned to Marcone. “You built your vault specifically to create the link so that a Way could be opened there. All so you could set Nicodemus up, years after he wronged you both.” I met Mab’s unwavering gaze and said, “And you dealt him the worst pain you could imagine. You took away his daughter. No, you did even worse—you made him do it himself.”

  Neither of them said anything.

>   But Mab’s raven black nails sank a fraction of an inch into the wood of the table, and her void black eyes glittered.

  “Now he’s lost his lieutenant,” I continued. “He’s lost his squires. When word gets out of his treachery, he’ll lose his name. No one will want to work with him. No one will deal with him. From where you’re standing, you’ve done worse than kill him. You’ve wounded him, strangled his power, and left him to suffer.”

  A long moment of silence passed.

  I turned to Marcone. “And what did you get out of it? You got to build the vault, and to secure the clientele who use it. My money says that Hades was your first depositor. That when he made that gesture of trust in you, others followed his example—and that now you’re holding in trust a treasure trove like none in the supernatural world. And if you got a little payback on Nicodemus as a side effect of that, you didn’t mind it at all. And you’ll have plenty of money to pay to have him hounded down, now that he’s been weakened.”

  Marcone’s eyes, the exact green shade of old dollar bills, focused pleasantly on me. Still, he said nothing.

  Then Mab finally spoke, her voice sepulchral. “Do you have a point, my Knight?”

  “I wanted you to know that I knew,” I said. Then I turned to Marcone. “There were people involved in the robbery. People who aren’t otherwise involved in this affair.”

  “People who violated my territory, nonetheless,” Marcone said quietly.

  “While helping you get your vengeance,” I said. “Go after Nicodemus as hard as you want. Leave the rest of them out of it. They took nothing from you.”

  “They took the life of one of my employees,” Marcone said.

  “The woman who did that is dead already,” I said. And I tossed the cash box onto the conference table. It landed with an impressive thump.

  Mab frowned.

  Marcone raised his eyebrows briefly. “And what is this?”

  “It’s weregild,” I said. “You know the word?”

  “Salic Code,” he replied, instantly. “Blood money.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “That’s for your dead employee’s family. Take care of them with it. And leave my people out of it. It ends here.”

  Marcone considered the box and then me. “And if I should disagree with your terms?”