Skin Game Page 9

  “You dare to threaten him?” the servitor whispered.

  “Just stating facts,” I said. “You and your crew better go. Before I start ripping off your collars and asking the police and reporters what’s wrong with your necks.”

  The servitor stared at me with empty eyes for a long moment. Then he turned abruptly and started walking. The other guys in caterer uniforms went with him.

  “Subtle,” came Karrin’s voice.

  I turned to find her standing maybe ten feet behind me, her arms crossed, where her hand would be close to her gun. Had the servitor or his buddies drawn a weapon, she’d have been in a good position to draw and start evening the odds.

  “Murph,” I said. “Did they get out?”

  “They’re waiting.” Her eyes flickered with distress as they swept over me. “Jesus, Harry. Are you all right?”

  “Aches a bit. Stings a bit. ’m fine.”

  “You’re bleeding,” she said, hurrying closer. “Your leg. Hold still.” She knelt down and I suddenly realized that she was right—my leg was bleeding, the leg of my pants soaked, blood dripping from the hem of my pants leg and onto my rented shoes. She rolled the bloodied cloth up briskly.

  “You’ve been shot,” she said.

  I blinked. “Uh, what? I don’t feel shot. Are you sure?”

  “There’s a hole right through the outside of your calf,” she said. “Little on both sides. Christ, they must have been close.”

  “M240,” I said. “From maybe thirty feet.”

  “You got lucky—it missed the bone and didn’t tumble.” She pulled a handkerchief from her jacket pocket and said, “This is what Butters warned you about. Not being able to sense your own injuries. I’ve got to tie this off until we can get it taken care of. Brace.”

  Her shoulders twisted as she knotted the cloth around my calf and jerked it tight. That tingled and stung a little, but it didn’t hurt any more than that. I suddenly realized that Winter was sighing through me like an icy wind, dulling the pain.

  I also suddenly realized that Karrin was kneeling at my feet. The Winter in me thought that was all kinds of interesting. Something very like panic fluttered through my chest, something far more energetic and destabilizing than the fear I’d felt in the conflict a few minutes before.

  “Uh, right,” I said, forcing my eyes away. “What are we doing standing around here? Let’s go.”

  Karrin rose and looked up at me, her expression torn between concern and something darker. Then she nodded and said, “Car’s over here. Follow me.”

  * * *

  Once in the car, I looked back over my shoulder at Ascher and Valmont while Karrin got us moving. We cruised out just as the majority of the emergency vehicles arrived. Valmont was staring out the window, her face unreadable behind her sunglasses. Ascher was looking over her shoulder, watching the scene behind.

  When she finally turned around to see me looking at her, her face split into a wide smile, and her dark eyes glittered brightly. “Damn,” she said, “that was intense.”

  “More for some than others,” Karrin said. “Miss Ascher, I’m going to take you back to the slaughterhouse to meet up with your partner.”

  Ascher frowned. “What about you?”

  “Dresden’s shot.”

  Ascher blinked. “When?”

  “Getting me out,” Valmont said, still staring out the window. “He got shot pushing me behind him.”

  “I’m taking him to someone who can help,” Karrin said. “Tell Nicodemus that Valmont is with us.”

  Ascher frowned at that, and eyed Valmont. “That what you want?”

  “I’m not going to see that guy without Dresden around,” Valmont said. “You were smart, you wouldn’t, either.”

  “Let her be,” I said quietly. “Ascher’s a big girl. She can make her own choices.”

  “Sure,” Valmont said.

  Ascher frowned at me for a long minute before saying, “I hear a lot of stories about you.”

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “The warlock who became a Warden,” she said. “And then refused to hunt warlocks for the Council.”

  I shrugged. “True.”

  “And they didn’t kill you for it?” Ascher asked.

  “Middle of a war,” I said. “Needed every fighter.”

  “I hear other things. Wild things. That you help people. That you’ll fight anyone.”

  I shrugged a shoulder. It hurt a little. “Sometimes.”

  “Is he always like this?” Ascher asked Karrin.

  “Only when he’s bleeding out,” Karrin said. “Usually you can’t get him to shut up.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  Karrin eyed me, a faint glimmer of humor somewhere in the look.

  I shrugged a shoulder tiredly. “Yeah. Okay.”

  “So if you’re such a tough guy,” Ascher said, “how come I didn’t see you kicking ass and taking names in there?”

  I closed my eyes for a moment. I didn’t feel like explaining to Ascher about how the Winter Knight was built to be a killing machine, one that moved and struck and never paused to think. I didn’t feel like explaining what could have happened if I’d let that particular genie out of the bottle in the middle of one of Chicago’s premier hotels. Karrin was right. I’d burned down buildings like they were going out of style in the past. A fire in the Peninsula could have killed hundreds. If I’d lost control of the instincts forced upon me by the Winter mantle, I might have killed even more.

  What I did want to do, in the wake of the life-and-death struggle, was rip her party dress off and see what happened next. But that was the Winter in me talking. Mostly. And I wasn’t going to let that out, either.

  “We weren’t there to kill Fomor,” I said. “We went to get Valmont. We got her. That’s all.”

  “If I hadn’t been there,” Ascher said, “that thing would have torn you apart.”

  “Good thing you were there then,” I said. “You’ve got some game. I’ll give you that. Fire magic is tricky to use that well. You’ve got a talent.”

  “Okay,” Ascher said, seemingly mollified. “You’ve got no idea how many guys I’ve worked with that don’t want to admit they got saved by a girl.”

  “Gosh,” I said, glancing at Karrin. “It’s such a new experience for me.”

  Karrin snorted, and pulled the car over. We’d made it back to the slaughterhouse.

  “Tell Nicodemus we’ll be back at sunrise,” I said.

  Valmont said nothing. But she took off the slightly too large shoes and passed them back to Ascher.

  “Sure,” Ascher said. “Don’t bleed to death or anything. This is too interesting.”

  “Meh,” I said.

  She flashed me another smile, took her shoes, and slid out of the limo. Karrin didn’t pause to watch her reenter the building, but pulled out again at once.

  I looked back over my shoulder at Valmont. “You okay?”

  She took off the sunglasses and gave me a very small smile. “Nicodemus. He’s really back there?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And you’re going to burn him?”

  “If I can,” I said.

  “Then I’m good,” she said. She turned her eyes back to the night outside. “I’m good.”

  Karrin stared at Valmont in the mirror for a moment, frowning. Then she set her jaw and turned her eyes back to the road.

  “Where?” I asked her quietly.

  “My place,” she said. “I called Butters the minute the alarms started going off at the hotel. He’ll be waiting for us.”

  “I don’t want anyone else tangled up in this,” I said.

  “You want to take on the Knights of the Blackened Denarius,” Karrin said. “Do you really think you can do it alone?”

  I grunted, tiredly, and clos
ed my eyes.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said.

  The limo’s tires whispered on the city streets, and I stopped paying attention to anything else.

  Twelve

  Karrin’s house is a modest place in Bucktown that looks like it should belong to a little old lady—mainly because it did, and Karrin never seemed to have the time or heart to change the exterior much from the way her grandmother had it painted, decorated, and landscaped. When we pulled up, there were already cars on the street outside. She slid the town car into the drive and around to the back of the house.

  Before she had settled the car into park, I turned to Valmont and asked, “What’s in the file?”

  “A profile of a local businessman,” Valmont replied at once.

  “Anyone I know?”

  She shrugged, reached into her purse, and passed me the file, which she had rolled up into a tube. I took it, unrolled it, and squinted at it until Karrin flicked on a reading light. It was on for about five seconds before it stuttered and went out.

  “Nothing’s ever easy around you, is it?” she said.

  I stuck my tongue out at her, tugged my mother’s silver pentacle amulet out of my shirt, and sent a gentle current of my will down into it. The silver began to glow with blue-white wizard light, enough to let me scan over the file.

  “Harvey Morrison,” I read aloud. “Fifty-seven, he’s an investment banker, financial adviser, and economic securities consultant.” I blinked at Karrin. “What’s that?”

  “He handles rich people’s money,” she said.

  I grunted and went back to reading. “He goes sailing in the summer, golfing when the weather is nice, and takes a long weekend in Vegas twice a year. No wife, no kids.” There was a picture. I held it up. “Good-looking guy. Sort of like Clooney, but with a receding hairline. Lists his favorite movies, books, music. Got a biography of him—grew up in the area, went to some nice schools, parents died when he was in college.”

  “Why him?” Karrin asked me.

  I looked back at Valmont.

  She shrugged her shoulders. “He looked pretty unremarkable to me. No obvious graft or embezzling, which is a given for someone operating at his level.”

  “Honest men?” I asked, with minimal cynicism.

  “Smart crooks, when they steal,” she said. “He’s a trusted functionary like hundreds of others in this town.”

  “Gambling problem?”

  She shrugged. “Not an obvious one, from his records. The Fomor don’t rate him as a particularly vulnerable target for manipulation.”

  “They have files on money guys?” I asked.

  “They’ve been buying information left and right for the past couple of years,” Valmont said. “Throwing a lot of money around. It’s been a real seller’s market.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone’s buying,” Valmont said. “Fomor, White Court, Venatori, Svartalves, every paranormal crew who isn’t trying to keep a low profile. That’s why I ran this job—it’s the third one this month. You want to make some fast money, Dresden, and know some juicy secrets, I can put you in touch with some serious buyers.”

  I blinked at that information. “Since when have you been all savvy on the supernatural scene?”

  “Since monsters killed my two best friends.” She shrugged a shoulder. “I made it my business to learn. I was sort of startled how easy it was. No one really seems to spend all that much effort truly hiding from humanity.”

  “There’s no need to,” I said. “Most people don’t want to know, wouldn’t believe it if you showed them.”

  “So I’ve realized,” Valmont said.

  “Why him?” Karrin asked. “What’s Nicodemus’s interest?”

  I pursed my lips and sucked in my breath through my teeth thoughtfully. “Access,” I said. “Gotta be.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I held up Harvey’s picture. “This guy can get us something that no one else can. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “Whose money does he handle?” Karrin asked.

  I scanned the file. “Um . . . there’s a client list here. Individuals, businesses, estates, trusts. Most of it is just numbers, or has question marks. Several of them are listed as unknown.”

  “Pretty standard,” Valmont said. “Guys like that operate at high levels of discretion. What has Nicodemus told you about this job?”

  “The final objective, and you,” I said. “None of the steps in between.”

  “Keeping you in the dark,” she said. “Keeps the carrot in your mind, but makes it harder for you to betray him if you aren’t sure what comes next.”

  “Jerk,” I muttered. “So we don’t know what Nicodemus has in mind yet, but I bet you anything that Harvey here is step two.”

  “Makes sense,” Karrin said.

  “All right,” I said. “No details to any of the Chicago crew, okay? We’re playing pretty serious hardball. If word of this leaks, it could reflect on Mab badly, and that could get a little crucifixiony for me.”

  Karrin grimaced. “So you also want to keep them in the dark and give them information on an as-needed, step-by-step basis?”

  “Don’t want to,” I said. “Need to. The irony is not lost on me, but like I said, I’m playing this one kind of close to the chest.”

  I closed my eyes again and checked on my body. The same feelings of vague discomfort and weariness seemed to permeate my limbs, and a faint twinge of what might have been the beginnings of a muscle cramp tugged at my back. The silver stud in my ear continued to weigh a little too much, and to pulse with cold at the very edge of comfort.

  A gut instinct told me that Mab’s little painkiller wasn’t actually helping me, except to hide the pain I would otherwise be feeling. I’d poured out a lot of energy into just a couple of spells back at the hotel, and doing it without my tools had been hard work. I’d been forced to draw upon the Winter mantle just to keep the pace I needed to stay alive. There wasn’t any hard information on how the mantle would interact with my abilities, since to the best of my knowledge there had never been a Winter Knight with a wizard’s skills before—but I was pretty sure that the more I leaned on that cold, dark power, the more comfortable I would get in doing so, and the more potential it would have to change who and what I was.

  Whatever was in my head was close to killing me. I suddenly felt all but sure that Mab’s gift had two edges. Yes, it made me feel well enough to run around getting in danger—but it also left me weak enough to need the Winter mantle now more than ever. It was probably her way of telling me I needed to employ it more.

  But sooner or later, doing that would change me, the way it had changed everyone who had come before me.

  If it hadn’t changed me already.

  I felt scared.

  After a long moment of silence, Karrin said, “We’ll do it your way for now. Let’s go on in.”

  I forced myself to shake off the dark thoughts and the fear that went with them. “You got my stuff?” I asked.

  “Trunk.”

  I got out and slogged over to the town car’s trunk. I got my duffel bag and staff out of it, and slung the reassuring weight of my duster over my shoulder to don once I got patched up and into some comfortable clothing. Maybe I would sleep in it.

  It had been that kind of day.

  * * *

  I stopped inside Karrin’s kitchen, on the tile floor, so that I wouldn’t get blood on the carpet, and found Waldo Butters waiting for me.

  Butters was a scrawny little guy in his midforties, though from his build you could mistake him for someone a lot younger. He had a shock of black hair that never combed into anything like order, a slender beak of a nose, glasses, and long, elegant fingers.

  “Harry,” he said when I came in, offering me his hand. “We have got to
stop meeting like this.”

  I traded grips with him and grinned tiredly. “Yeah, or I’ll never be able to pay your bill.”

  He looked me up and down critically. “What the hell happened? You get in a fight with a street sweeper?”

  “Octokongs,” I said. “And a turtleneck with a machine gun.”

  “Right calf,” Karrin said, bringing Valmont in out of the cold and locking the door behind her. “He’s been shot.”

  “And you’re letting him walk around on it?” Butters demanded.

  Karrin gave him a look that would have curdled milk. “Next time I’ll stick him in my purse.”

  He sighed and said, “Look, Harry, I know you don’t feel the pain, but you are not invincible. Pain’s there for a damned reason.” He waved a hand at one of the kitchen chairs and said, “Sit, sit.”

  The kitchen was a tiny one. I sat. Butters was a medical doctor, though he spent most of his time cutting up corpses as an Illinois medical examiner, and since the hospitals tended to get a little twitchy when you walked in with gunshot wounds, he’d taken care of such injuries on the down low for me before.

  Butters unwrapped my leg, muttered under his breath, and said, “Let’s get him on the table. Help me extend it.”

  “Yeah,” Karrin said.

  They fussed about extending her kitchen table for a minute, and then she nudged me and said, “Come on, Harry, I’m not lifting you up there.”

  That said, she still got her shoulder beneath my arm and helped me up, and then helped me lift my legs onto the table. It seemed a lot harder than it should have been to get myself into place.

  “Butters,” I said, “you going to slash up my tux?”

  “Just hold still,” he said, picking up a pair of safety scissors out of his bag of medical tools.

  “Awesome,” I said, smiling. “I’m just going to close my eyes for a minute.”

  “Karrin, would you hang out with Andi, please. It’s bad enough that I’m working on him like this. I don’t need my elbows being crowded, too.”

  “Right,” she said. “We’ll be in the living room.”

  “Okay, Harry,” Butters said. “Let me get to work.”