Skin Game (2 page)

M
y brother and I had built the Whatsup Dock down at the shore at one of Demonreach’s three little beaches, the one nearest the opening in the stone reefs surrounding the island. There had been a town on the hillside up above the beach maybe a century before, but it had been abandoned after its residents had apparently been driven slowly bonkers by all the dark energy around the hideous things imprisoned below the island.

The ruins of the town were still there, half swallowed by the forest, a corpse being slowly devoured by fungus and moss. I sometimes wondered how long I could stay on the damned island before I was bonkers, too.

There was an expensive motored yacht tied to the dock, as out of place as a Ferrari in a cattle yard, white with a lot of frosty blue chrome. There were a couple of hands in sight, and they weren’t dressed in sailing clothes so much as they were in sailing costumes. The creases were too straight, the clothes too clean, the fit too perfect. Watching them move, I had no doubt they were carrying weapons, and practiced in killing. They were Sidhe, the lords of Faerie, tall and beautiful and dangerous. They didn’t impress me.

Mostly because they weren’t nearly as pretty or dangerous as the woman standing at the very end of my dock, the tips of her expensive shoes half an inch from Demonreach’s shore. When there’s a Great White Shark in the water with you, it’s tough to be worried about a couple of barracuda swimming along behind her.

Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness, was wearing a tailored business suit somewhere between the color of smeared charcoal on newsprint and frozen periwinkles. The blouse beneath was snow-white, like her hair, which was bound up in an elaborate do that belonged in the forties. Opals flashed on her ears and at her throat, deep colors of green and blue, matching the shifting hues of her cold, flat eyes. She was pale, beautiful on a scale that beggared simple description, and I harbored a healthy and rational terror of her.

I came down the old stone steps in the hillside to the dock, and stopped an arm’s length away from Mab. I didn’t bow to her, but I inclined my head formally. There were other Sidhe there, on the boat, witnessing the meeting, and I had worked out a while ago that though I was no danger to Mab’s pride, she would not tolerate disrespect to her office. I was pretty sure that if the Winter Knight openly defied her in front of her Court, it would basically be a declaration of war, and despite what I now knew about the island, I wanted nothing of the sort with Mab.

“My Queen,” I said pleasantly. “How’s tricks?”

“Functioning flawlessly, my Knight,” she replied. “As ever. Get on the boat.”

“Why?” I asked.

Her mouth turned down into a slight frown, but it was belied by the sudden pleased light in her eyes.

“I’m predictable, aren’t I?” I asked her.

“In many ways,” she replied. “Shall I answer you literally?”

“I’d like that.”

Mab nodded. Then she leaned forward, very slightly, her eyes growing deep, and said in a voice colder and harder than frozen stone, “Because I told you to do so.”

I swallowed, and my stomach did this little roller-coaster number on me. “What happens if I won’t?” I asked.

“You have already made clear to me that you will resist me if I attempt to compel you directly to obey my commands,” Mab said. “Such a thing would render you useless to me, and for the moment, I would find it inconvenient to train a replacement. I would therefore do nothing.”

I blinked at that. “Nothing? I could deny you, and you’d just . . . go?”

“Indeed,” Mab said, turning. “You will be dead in three days, by which time I should have made arrangements to replace you.”

“Uh,” I said. “What?”

Mab paused and looked over her shoulder. “The parasite within you will emerge in that time. Surely you have noticed the pains growing worse.”

Boy, had I. And it added up.

“Dammit,” I snarled, keeping my voice too low to be heard by the goons on the boat. “You set me up.”

Mab turned to face me and gave me a very small smile.

“I’ve been sending out Toot and Lacuna with messages for you and Molly every damned day. None of them got through, did they?”

“They are faeries,” Mab said. “I am a Queen of Faerie.”

“And my sendings to Molly?”

“I wove nets to catch any spells leaving this island the moment I bade you farewell, my Knight,” she said. “And the messages you sent to her through your friends were altered to suit my needs. I find it useful how the tiniest amount of distrust creates so much opportunity for miscommunication. Your friends have been trying to visit you for several weeks, but the lake ice has held unusually long this year. Alas.”

I ground my teeth. “You knew I needed her help.”

“And,” she said, biting the words off crisply, “you still do.”

Three days.

Hell’s bells.

“Have you ever considered just asking me for my help?” I asked her. “Maybe even saying ‘please’?”

She arched a pale eyebrow at me. “I am not your client.”

“So you just go straight to extortion?”

“I cannot compel you,” she said in a reasonable tone. “I must therefore see to it that circumstance does. You cannot leave the island without being incapacitated by pain. You cannot send for help unless I allow it. Your time has all but run out, my Knight.”

I found myself speaking through clenched teeth. “Why? Why would you put me in a corner like this?”

“Perhaps because it is necessary. Perhaps it is to protect you from yourself.” Her eyes flashed with the distant fury of a thunderstorm on the horizon. “Or perhaps it is simply because I
can
. In the end, it does not matter why. All that matters is what is.”

I inhaled and exhaled a few times, to keep the anger from boiling out into my voice. Given what she had to manage, it was entirely possible that manipulating me and threatening me with death this way
was
asking politely—by the standards of Mab, anyway. But that didn’t mean I had to like it.

Besides. She was right. If Mab said I had three days to live, she meant it. She had neither the capability nor the need to speak any direct lies. And if that was true, which I felt depressingly confident it was, then she had me over a barrel.

“What do you want?” I asked. I almost sounded polite.

The question brought a pleased smile to her lips and a nod that looked suspiciously like one of approval. “I wish you to perform a task for me.”

“This task,” I said. “Would it happen to be off the island?”

“Obviously.”

I pointed a finger at my temple. “Then we have an issue with the incapacitated-by-pain thing. You’ll have to fix me first.”

“If I did, you’d never agree to it,” Mab said calmly. “And I would then be obliged to replace you. For your own health and safety, therefore, you will wear this instead.” She lifted her hand and held it out to me, palm up.

There was a small stone in her palm, a deep blue opal. I leaned a little closer, eyeing it. It was set on a silver stud—an earring.

“It should suffice to contain the parasite for what time remains,” Mab said. “Put it on.”

“My ears aren’t pierced,” I objected.

Mab arched an eyebrow. “Are you the Winter Knight or some sort of puling child?”

I scowled at her. “Come over here and say that.”

At that, Mab calmly stepped onto the shore of Demonreach, until her toes were almost touching mine. She was several inches over six feet tall, and barely had to reach up to take my earlobe in her fingers.

“Wait,” I said. “Wait.”

She paused.

“The left one.”

Mab tilted her head. “Why?”

“It’s . . . Look, it’s a mortal thing. Just do the left one, okay?”

She exhaled briefly through her nose. Then she shook her head and changed ears. There was a pinpoint of red-hot pain in my left earlobe, and then a slow pulse of lazy, almost seductive cold, like the air on an autumn night when you open the bedroom windows and sleep like a rock.

“There,” Mab said, fixing the post in place. “Was that such a trial?”

I glowered and reached up to the stone with my left hand. My fingertips confirmed what my ears had reported—it felt physically cold to the touch.

“Now that I’ve got this to keep me safe off the island,” I said very quietly, “what’s to stop me from having Alfred drop you into a cell right this second, and solving my problems myself?”

“I am,” Mab said. She gave me a very small, very chill smile, and held up her finger. There was a tiny droplet of my blood upon it, scarlet against her pale skin. “The consequences to your mortal world should there be no Mab would be dire. The consequences to yourself, should you try it, even more so. Try me, wizard. I am willing.”

For a second, I thought about it. She was stacking up enough leverage on me that whatever it was she wanted me to do, I was sure I was going to hate it. I’d never wanted to be in Mab’s ongoing service anyway. The boss couldn’t be the boss if I imprisoned her in crystal hundreds of feet beneath the waters of Lake Michigan. And it wasn’t like she hadn’t earned some time in the cooler. Mab was a serious bad guy.

Except . . . she was
our
serious bad guy. As cruel and as horrible as she could be, she was a guardian who protected the world from things that were even worse. Suddenly removing her from that balance of power could be worse than catastrophic.

And admit it to yourself, at least, Dresden. You’re scared. What if you tried to take her down—and missed? Remember what happened to the last guy who betrayed Mab? You’ve never beaten her. You’ve never come close.

I didn’t let myself shudder. She would have seen it as weakness, and that isn’t a wise thing to show any faerie. I just exhaled and looked away from those cold, endless eyes.

Mab inclined her head to me, barely, a victor’s acknowledgment. Then she turned and walked back onto the dock. “Bring anything you may need. We leave at once.”

M
ab’s yacht took us to Belmont Harbor, where the late-February ice had evidently been broken up by an unseasonably warm morning. My ear throbbed with occasional cold, but my head seemed fine, and when we docked I hopped over the rail and onto the pier with a large duffel bag in one hand and my new wizard’s staff in the other.

Mab descended the gangplank with dignity and eyed me.

“Parkour,” I explained.

“Appointment,” she said, gliding by me.

A limo was waiting for us, complete with two more Sidhe in bodyguard costumes. They swept us into the city proper, down Lake Shore Drive until we hit the Loop, turned, and pulled up in front of the Carbide and Carbon Building, a vast charcoal-colored creation that had always reminded me of the monolith in
2001
, except for all the brassy filigree. I’d always thought it looked particularly baroque and cool, and then it had become the Hard Rock Hotel.

Two additional Sidhe bodyguards were waiting when we pulled up, tall and inhumanly beautiful. Between one step and the next, they all changed from a crowd of cover models into lantern-jawed thugs with buzz cuts and earpieces—glamour, the legendary power of faerie illusion. Mab did not bother altering her own appearance, save for donning a pair of designer sunglasses. The four goons fell into a square formation around us as we went in, and we all marched up to an awaiting elevator.
The numbers rolled swiftly up to the top floor—and then went one floor up above
that
one.

The doors opened onto an extravagant penthouse loft. Mozart floated in from speakers of such quality that for a moment I assumed that live musicians must be present. Floor-to-fourteen-foot-ceiling windows gave us a sweeping view of the lake and the shoreline south of the hotel. The floors were made of polished hardwood. Tropical trees had been planted throughout the room, along with bright flowering plants that were busy committing the olfactory floral equivalent of aggravated assault. Furniture sets were scattered around the place, some on the floor, and some on platforms sitting at various levels. There was a bar, and a small stage with a sound system, and at the far end of the loft, stairs led up to an elevated platform, which, judging from the bed, must have served as a bedroom.

There were also five goons wearing black suits with matching shotguns waiting for us outside of the elevator doors. As the doors opened, the goons worked the actions on their weapons, but did not precisely raise them to aim at us.

“Ma’am,” said one of them, much younger than the others, “please identify yourself.”

Mab stared at them impassively through her sunglasses. Then, in a motion so slight that I doubt any of them noticed, she twitched one eyebrow.

I grunted, flicked a hand, and muttered,
“Infriga.”

I didn’t put much power into the spell, but it was enough to make the point: A sudden thick layer of rime crackled into being over the lower two-thirds of the goons’ bodies, covering their boots and guns and the hands holding them. The men twitched in surprise and let out little hisses of discomfort, but did not relinquish the weapons.

“The lady doesn’t do lackeys,” I told them, “and you damned well know who she is. Whichever one of you chuckleheads is holding the brain should probably go tell your boss she’s here before she starts feeling offended.”

The young goon who had spoken staggered away, deeper into the loft, around a screen of trees and flowers, while the others faced us, dispassionate and clearly uncomfortable.

Mab eyed me and said in an intimate whisper, “What was that?”

I answered in kind. “I’m not killing a mortal just to make a point.”

“You were willing enough to kill one of my Sidhe for that reason.”

“I play on your team,” I told her. “I’m not from your town.”

She looked up at me over the rims of her sunglasses and then said, “Squeamishness does not become the Winter Knight.”

“It’s not about squeam, Mab,” I said.

“No,” she said. “It is about weakness.”

“Yeah, well,” I said, facing front again, “I’m only human.”

Mab’s gaze remained on me, cold and heavy as a blanket of snow. “For now.”

I didn’t shiver. I get muscle twitches sometimes. That’s all.

The goon capable of human speech returned, and was careful not to make eye contact with anyone as he bowed at the waist in Mab’s general direction. “Your Majesty. Please proceed. Your four guards may wait here, with these four, and I will show you to him.”

Mab did not so much as twitch to acknowledge that the goon had spoken. She just stepped out of the elevator smartly, her heels clicking with metronomic inevitability on the hard floor, and both the goon and I hurried to keep pace with her.

We walked around the screen of shrubbery where the goon had gone a moment before and found an elaborate raised platform with three wide steps leading up to it. The whole thing was thickly surrounded by more plant life, giving it the cozy feel of an alcove. Expensive living room furniture was spaced around it ideally for conversation, and that’s where Mab’s appointment was waiting for us.

“Sir,” the goon said. “Her Majesty, Queen Mab, and the Winter Knight.”

“Who needs no introduction,” said a man with a deep, resonant voice. I recognized it. That voice had once been smooth and flowing, but now there was a hint of rasp to it, a roughness that wasn’t there before, like silk gliding over old gravel.

A man of medium height and build rose from his chair. He was dressed in a black silk suit, a black shirt, and a worn grey tie. He had dark hair threaded with silver and dark eyes, and he moved with the coiled
grace of a snake. There was a smile on his mouth, but not in his eyes as he faced me. “Well, well, well. Harry Dresden.”

“Nicodemus Archleone.” I slurred into a Connery accent. “My cut hash improved your voish.”

Something ugly flickered far back in his eyes, and his voice might have grown a little rougher, but his smile never wavered. “You came closer than anyone has in a long, long time.”

“Maybe you’re starting to slip in your old age,” I said. “It’s the little things that go first. For instance, you missed taking the tongue out of one of your goons. You’re going to make him feel left out if he’s the only one who can talk.”

That made Nicodemus smile more deeply. I’d met his gang of hangers-on before. They’d all had their tongues cut out.

He turned to Mab and bowed at the waist, the gesture more elegant than anything I could manage, the manners of another time. “Your Majesty.”

“Nicodemus,” Mab said in a frosty tone. Then, in a more neutral one, “Anduriel.”

Nicodemus didn’t move, but his freaking shadow inclined its head anyway. No matter how many times I saw that kind of action, it still creeped me out.

Nicodemus was a Knight of the Blackened Denarius, or maybe it was more accurate to say that he was
the
Knight of the Blackened Denarius. He had one of thirty silver coins on him somewhere, one that contained the essence of the Fallen angel, Anduriel. The Denarians were bad news, in a major way—even though angels were sharply curtailed in how they were allowed to use their power, hobbled and bound to a mortal partner, they were as dangerous as anything running around in the shadows, and when they teamed up with world-class lunatics like Nicodemus, they were several shades worse. Nicodemus, as far as I had been able to find out, had been perpetrating outrages for a couple of millennia. He was smart, ruthless and tough, and killing people was almost as significant to him as throwing away an empty beer can.

I’d survived him once. He’d survived me once. Neither of us had been able to put the other away.

Yet.

“I beg your indulgence for a moment,” Nicodemus said to Mab. “A minor matter of internal protocol to which I must attend before we continue.”

There was a frozen microinstant of displeasure before Mab answered. “Of course.”

Nicodemus bowed again, and then walked a few steps away and turned to the goon who had led us over. He beckoned to the man and said, “Brother Jordan, approach.”

Jordan came to rigid military attention, swallowed, and then walked formally forward, stopping precisely in front of Nicodemus before bracing to attention again.

“You have completed the trials of the Brotherhood,” Nicodemus said, his voice warm. “You have the highest recommendation of your fellows. And you have faced a dangerous foe with steadfast courage. It is my judgment that you have demonstrated your loyalty and commitment to our cause beyond the meager bonds of any oath.” He reached up and put a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “Have you any final words?”

The kid’s eyes gleamed with sudden emotion, and his breathing sped. “I thank you, my lord.”

“Well said,” Nicodemus murmured, smiling. Then he said, “Deirdre.”

The second person in the alcove rose from where she had been sitting quietly in the background. She was a young woman in a simple black dress. Her features were lean and severe, her body graced with the same slight, elegant curves as a straight razor. She had long, dark hair to go with black eyes that were a double of Nicodemus’s own, and when she approached Jordan, she gave him an almost sisterly smile.

And then she changed.

First her eyes shifted, changing from dark orbs to pits filled with a burning crimson glow. A second set of eyes, these glowing green, blinked open above the first. And then her face contorted, the bones shifting. Her skin seemed to ripple and then hardened, darkening to the ugly deep purple of a fresh bruise, taking on the consistency of thick hide. The dress just seemed to shimmer out of existence, revealing legs that had contorted, her feet lengthening dramatically, until they looked
backward-hinged. And her hair changed—it grew, slithering out of her scalp like dozens of writhing serpents, flattening into hard, metallic ribbons of midnight black that rustled and stirred and rippled of their own volition.

As that happened, Nicodemus’s shadow simply grew, with no change in the light to prompt it. It stretched out behind him, and then up the wall, growing and growing until it spread over the whole of that side of the huge loft.

“Bear witness,” Nicodemus said quietly, “as Brother Jordan becomes Squire Jordan.”

The green eyes atop Deirdre’s flickered brightly, as Deirdre lifted claw-tipped hands to cup Jordan’s face, quite gently. Then she leaned forward and kissed him, lips parted.

My stomach twisted and flipped over. I didn’t let it show.

Deirdre’s head suddenly snapped forward a little more, and Jordan’s body stiffened. A muffled scream escaped the seal of Deirdre’s lips, but was quickly choked off. I saw Deirdre’s jaws lock, and then she jerked her head away in the sudden, sharp motion of a shark ripping flesh from its prey. Her head fell back in something that looked horribly like ecstasy, and I could see the bloody flesh of Jordan’s tongue gripped between her teeth.

Blood fountained from the young man’s mouth. He let out a wordless sound and staggered, falling to one knee.

Deirdre’s head jerked in swallowing motions, like a seabird downing a fish, and she made a quiet gulping sound. Then she shuddered, and opened her burning eyes slowly. She turned to move deliberately to Nicodemus’s side, her purplish lips black with blood, and murmured, “It is done, Father.”

Nicodemus kissed her on the mouth. And, my God, him doing it with tongue
now
was even more unsettling than it had been the
first
time I’d seen it.

He lifted his mouth from Deirdre’s a moment later and said, “Rise, Squire Jordan.”

The young man staggered to his feet, the lower half of his face a mass of blood, dripping down over his chin and throat.

“Get some ice on that and see the medic, Squire,” Nicodemus said. “Congratulations.”

Jordan’s eyes gleamed again, and his mouth twisted into a macabre smile. Then he turned and hurried away, leaving a dripping trail of blood behind him.

My stomach twisted. One of these days, I’m going to have to learn to keep my mouth shut. Nicodemus had just casually had a young man maimed solely to make a point to me for teasing him about it. I clenched my jaw and resolved to use the incident to remind me exactly the kind of monster I was dealing with here.

“There,” Nicodemus said, turning back to Mab. “I apologize for any inconvenience.”

“Shall we conclude our business?” Mab said. “My time is valuable.”

“Of course,” Nicodemus said. “You know why I have approached you.”

“Indeed,” Mab said. “Anduriel once loaned me the services of his . . . associate. I now repay that debt by loaning you the services of mine.”

“Wait. What?” I said.

“Excellent,” Nicodemus said. He produced a business card and held it out. “Our little group will meet here at sundown.”

Mab reached for the card and nodded. “Done.”

I intercepted her hand, taking the card before she could. “
Not
done,” I said. “I’m not working with this psychopath.”

“Sociopath, actually,” Nicodemus said. “Though for practical purposes, the terms are nearly interchangeable.”

“You’re an ugly piece of work, and I don’t trust you any farther than I can kick you, which I’m tempted to see how far I can do,” I snapped back. I turned to Mab. “Tell me you aren’t serious.”

“I,” she said in a hard voice, “am perfectly serious. You will go with Archleone. You will render him all aid and assistance until such time as he has completed his objective.”

“
What
objective?” I demanded.

Mab looked at him.

Nicodemus smiled at me. “Nothing terribly complex. Difficult, to be sure, but not complicated. We’re going to rob a vault.”

“You don’t need anyone to help you with that,” I said. “You could handle any vault in the world.”

“True,” Nicodemus said. “But this vault is not of this world. It is in fact, of the Underworld.”

“Underworld?” I asked.

I was getting a bad feeling about this.

Nicodemus gave me a bland smile.

“Who?” I asked him. “Whose vault are you knocking over?”

“An ancient being of tremendous power,” he replied in his roughened voice, his smile widening. “You may know him as Hades, the Lord of the Underworld.”