Skin Game (36 page)

His eyes widened in surprise, but he caught it adroitly, his whole body shuddering as its power washed over him.

I watched him, his face, his posture, and put every ounce of scorn I had into my voice. “I don’t know how you said it back in the day, but I’ll bet you anything her first word was ‘dada.’”

Something snapped.

His chest stopped heaving.

A single tear appeared.

And he said, in an utterly flat, utterly dead voice, “Kill them.”

And that ended the game, right there.

I win?

W
ith those words, Nicodemus broke his pact with Mab and freed me of any obligation to keep helping him secure the Grail. I had fulfilled every ounce of her promise to him, or at least to well within the obligation as Mab would see it. Hell, I had actually
given
him the Grail. And if he couldn’t take a little harsh truth, as Mab would see it, then that was Nicodemus’s problem, not hers.

Well. Nicodemus’s problem—and mine. The big downside of the plan to infuriate an emotionally traumatized psychopath into trying to kill me was part two, where the lunatic actually did it.

As spots for a fight went, this was better than most. It was limited to as few people and as few environmental factors as possible. If I’d waited until we were back in Chicago, Nick would have had a virtually unlimited number of civilians to harm and possible hostages to seize. Not only that, but
I
would have had a virtually unlimited number of collaterals to damage, and I didn’t imagine that any fight with the head of the Denarians was going to be something I wanted to finesse. Additionally, if we’d duked it out in Chicago, I would have had to worry about whose side Binder would throw in on, not to mention a possible strike team of Denarian squires standing by in the wings, and on top of all of that I was pretty sure that Marcone’s troubleshooters would be trying to murder us all.

Here, in the Underworld, I could take the gloves off. The fight would be clean, or as clean as such things got, and I wouldn’t have to worry about innocents being harmed.

Just, you know, Michael and me.

I could think abstract thoughts about the decisions leading up to the fight in the back of my head all I wanted, because the real fight happened almost too fast for any thinking to get involved.

The Genoskwa lunged toward me, making a foolish mistake—he should have gone after Michael.

The Knight of the Cross pivoted on the balls of his feet, and
Amoracchius
blazed into furious light. He didn’t move with blinding speed. Michael’s attack was all about timing, and his timing was pretty much perfect. As the Genoskwa thundered past him, Michael whirled, cloak flying out, and struck a spinning blow that started at the level of his ankles and swept up until he was holding
Amoracchius
over his head in both hands. On the way, the Sword cut a line of light into the back of one of the Genoskwa’s thick, hairy knees.

I heard the suddenly parted tendons, thicker than heavy ropes, snap like bowstrings, and the Genoskwa’s leg melted out from underneath it in the middle of its stride.

At the same moment, Nicodemus flung both his arms forward, and a terrible, smothering darkness came slamming down upon me.

I’d had two possible responses to his first attack in mind—and they had to be responses, not assaults of my own. When all this was over, I wanted there to be absolutely no question in Mab’s mind that he had turned on me, not the other way around. He might have come at me with his sword—it was how he normally preferred to do business, in every case that I had seen. A shield would have held him off, at least for a time.

Or, in his rage, he might unleash the full malice of Anduriel upon me. Which he had done.

This was not a normal circumstance for Nicodemus.

I’d prepared the proper defense.

“Lumios!”
I shouted, as the darkness closed in, and I poured my will into the same light spell I’d used earlier—only I added a measure of soulfire into the mix.

The light leapt forth in a sphere and exploded into sparks as it collided with something that simply
devoured
it, swallowing it into nothingness as it streamed forth. The effect was damned odd-looking, from the
inside. Light poured forth to be enveloped by a slithering blackness all around me, something that recoiled from the sparks and then came surging back in their wake with frenzied agitation—but the darkness could reach no closer than just beyond the reach of my arm.

I heard Nicodemus shout something in a language I didn’t understand, and the Genoskwa let out a howl of furious pain. Something heavy made the ground quiver beneath my feet, and there was an enormous crashing sound.

Michael’s voice rang out like a silver trumpet, calling,
“In nomine Dei!
Lux et veritas!”

Steel rang on steel, and I realized that I hadn’t figured the numbers right after all. It wasn’t Nick and the Genoskwa versus me and Michael. It was Nick, the Genoskwa, and
Anduriel
versus me and Michael. And I had the last two as my dance partners.

The Genoskwa let out a roar, and I knew it was coming right at me. I couldn’t move without stepping into that smothering blackness and that seemed like a horrible idea, so instead I folded my arms across my chest, and muttered, “Let’s see you ground
this
, ugly.” Then I called upon Winter, and cried out,
“Arctispinae!”

I expanded my arms out explosively, and as I did, slivers of Winter cold froze the water in the air into hundreds of spines of needle-pointed ice that exploded out from me, into the darkness and beyond. No magic attached itself to the spines of ice once they had been formed—they simply became sharp, hurtling pieces of solid matter. I was betting that whatever power the Genoskwa had to negate the effects of directly applied magic, it still had to follow the laws of magic as I understood them.

The bet paid off. The Genoskwa let out another ear-shattering roar of pain from no more than seven or eight feet away.

I used the sound as a point of reference and whirled my staff in a swooping arc, its green-silver soulfire-infused light driving back the substance of the Fallen angel still trying to compress in upon me. My will gathered more Winter ice around the end of the staff in an irregular globe the size of my head and harder than stone, and I aimed at the source of the sound and cried,
“Forzare!”

A lance of pure kinetic energy flung the hailstone from the end of my
staff and out through the darkness like a cannonball, and it hit something with an enormous and meaty-sounding
thunk
of obdurate ice against muscle-dense flesh. I must have gotten him in the breadbasket, because instead of roaring, the Genoskwa let out a windy, seething sound.

Steel rang on steel again, and I heard workboots pound the marble, coming near me. Michael shouted,
“Omnia vincit amor!”
and the blinding white fire of
Amoracchius
shattered the darkness around me as if it had been a dry and dusty eggshell.

My vision returned. Nicodemus was coming along in Michael’s wake, blade in hand, but as Anduriel was shattered, he screamed and staggered, falling to one knee and only managed that because he threw out his left arm to support himself.

Not far away, the Genoskwa was rising from where he had fallen. The hailstone I’d conjured had apparently knocked him backward over the marble block in the center of the stage, and one side of his rib cage looked distorted. The creature crouched on three limbs, his leg dragging, and bared his teeth at me in a silent snarl, yellowed tusks showing.

“Enough, Nicodemus!” Michael thundered, and his voice rang from the marble and the riches of the vault. “Enough!”

The sheer volume and force in his voice staggered me. I found myself standing back to back with him so that I could keep the Genoskwa in sight.

“Has today not been enough for you?” Michael said, his voice dropping to something almost like a plea. “In the name of God, man, have your eyes not yet been opened?”

“Michael,” I growled, low, between clenched teeth. “What are you doing?”

“My job,” he answered me, just as quietly. “Nicodemus Archleone,” he said, his tone gentle, directed back toward the fallen Denarian. “Look at yourself. Look at your fury. Look at your pain. Look where they have
led
you, man. Your own
child
.”

From where he had fallen, Nicodemus looked up at Michael, and I saw something I had never seen on his face before.

Weariness. Strain. Uncertainty.

“This is what it has taken, Nicodemus,” Michael said quietly. “This
journey into the darkness of greed and ambition. You stand amongst untold, unimaginable wealth, and you have lost the only thing that really matters because of them. Because of the lies and the schemes of the Fallen.”

Nicodemus did not move.

Neither did the Genoskwa. But I gathered another hailstone-cannonball onto the end of my staff, just to be sure I was ready if he did.

Michael lowered his sword, the wrathful fire of
Amoracchius
becoming something less fierce, less hot. “It is not too late. Don’t you see what has happened here? What has been arranged, all the pieces that have been moved to bring you to the only place where your eyes might be opened. Where you might have a chance—perhaps your very last chance—to turn aside from the path you have walked for so long. A path that has caused you and those close to you and the world around you nothing but heartache and misery.”

“Is that what you believe this is?” Nicodemus said in a wooden, uninflected tone. “My chance at redemption?”

“It isn’t a matter of belief,” Michael said. “I need look no further than the evidence of my eyes and mind. It’s why I took up the Sword in the first place. To save you, and those like you, who have been used by the Fallen. It’s why I have been given the grace to take up arms again, this very night—in time to offer you a chance.”

“For forgiveness?” Nicodemus spat.

“For hope,” Michael said. “For a new beginning. For peace.” He swallowed and said, “I can’t imagine anything happening to my daughter. No father should have to see his child die.” Michael’s voice stayed steady, quiet, and sincere. “As different as we are, as much separated in time and faith, you are still a human being. You are still my brother. And I am very sorry for your pain. Please. Let me help you.”

Nicodemus shuddered and dropped his eyes.

I blinked several times.

And for a second, I thought Michael was going to pull it off.

Then Nicodemus shook his head and let out a low and quiet laugh. He stood up again, and as he did, his shadow seemed to accrete beneath
him, gathering darkness from all around the room and drawing it into a nebulous pool at his feet.

“Choirboy,” he said, contempt in his tone. “You think you know about commitment. About faith. But yours is as a child’s daydream beside mine.”

“Don’t do this,” Michael said, his tone almost pleading. “Please don’t let them win.”

“Let
them
win?” Nicodemus said. “I do not dance to the Fallen’s tune, Knight. We may move together, but I play the music. I set the beat. For nearly two thousand years have I followed my path, through every treacherous bend and twist, through every temptation to turn aside, and after centuries of effort and study and planning and victory, they follow
my
leadership. Not the other way around. Turn aside from my path? I have
blazed
it through ages of humanity, through centuries of war and plague and madness and havoc and devotion. I
am
my path, and it is me. There is no turning aside.”

The shadow at his feet seemed to darken as he spoke, to throb in time with his voice, and I shuddered at the sight, at the pride in his bearing, the clarity in his eyes, and the absolute, serene certainty in his voice.

Lucifer must have looked
exactly
like that, right before things went to Hell.

I was still standing back to back with Michael, and I felt his shoulders slump in disappointment. But there was nothing of remorse or weakness in his voice as his sword swept back up to guard position. “Despite all you have given in their service, you stand alone before
Amoracchius
now. I am truly sorry for your soul, brother—but this time, you will answer for what you have done.”

“Alone,” Nicodemus all but purred. “Do you think I am alone?”

He gave us his hungry shark-smile, and my stomach went into free fall.

Behind the stone block the Genoskwa smiled as well, and that would have been a hideous thing to see if a second set of glowing green eyes hadn’t opened above the cavernous gleam of the Genoskwa’s beady orbs, along with a faintly glowing, swirling sigil in the center of his forehead—
and made the sight truly nightmarish. Even as I watched, curling ram’s horns erupted from the Genoskwa’s skull, and the already enormous creature began to swell, growing in mass, his patchy fur thickening, an extra set of limbs swelling out from his sides. Within a heartbeat or three, the shape of a creature like some enormous bear of a forgotten epoch, except for the extra legs, eyes, and the horns, stood where the Genoskwa had been. Tons of it.

“Ursiel,” I breathed. A Fallen angel so powerful that it had taken all three Knights of the Cross together to take him out the last time he’d appeared. And this time he wasn’t powered by the skinny husk of an insane gold miner, either. “Oh, crap.”

“It gets better,” said another voice.

I looked past where Ursiel and the Genoskwa stood, to find Hannah Ascher mounting the steps to the top of the stage. She’d shed her packs, and walking with a lazy, deliberate sensuality, she stretched her arms overhead as she reached the stage, and her clothing just . . . dissolved, like so much smoke, into a clinging, purplish mist that drifted around her in spiraling tendrils—not so much for modesty as for accent, yet for the most part, covering her most delicate parts with the same coyness as a fan dancer’s feathers. She smiled, slowly, and a second set of glowing purple eyes opened above her own, as a glowing sigil, vaguely suggestive of an hourglass appeared on her forehead.

I knew the symbol.

It had been etched in my flesh for years.

“Lasciel,” I whispered.

“Hello, lover,” said a throaty, playful voice that was not quite Hannah Ascher’s own. “You have no idea how much I’ve missed you.”

I leaned my head back to Michael a little and said, “You and I definitely need to have a talk with the Church about what the word ‘safekeeping’ means.”

Michael glanced at me with a faint frown, to let me know that this was not the time.