Skin Game (43 page)

“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.”

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 instead 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.

Half a dozen squires stood stupefied and confused in dissipating clouds of memory mist, and of the others who were moving, only one had a clean shot at Butters. But the little guy’s hand pointed and an orange flicker danced out, a thin line wrapping around the barrel of the gunman’s weapon and holding fast. Butters heaved, shouting, and hauled the rifle out of the man’s hands. The cord released the gun in a glitter of orange light and slithered back up Butters’s sleeve.

And then, before any of the scrambling gunmen could get a clear shot at him, Butters hurdled the Carpenters’ little fence and smashed into Tessa in a tackle that, if not exactly physically impressive, was dynamic as hell.

The impact tore the pint-sized Tessa loose from Charity, and the emaciated Denarian let out a furious squall and went down under Butters’s weight.

Nicodemus drew his sword and thrust it at Butters’s back, but the flying folds of my leather duster slapped the blade aside. Butters wasn’t much of a fighter, but he was game. He screamed and slammed his head down into Tessa’s.

Then she lifted her hand and shouted something, and there was a crash of sound, a flash of light.

Butters flew off of her and landed six feet away, sprawled and dazed on the icy street. I could see blood running from one of his ears. He made a vague, spreading gesture with one hand, and Bob’s trail of campfire sparks emerged from the duster and soared away in the general direction of Butters’s apartment.

“What was
that
?” Tessa demanded, her tone furious as she came back to her feet.

“A detail,” Nicodemus said, his tone harsh. “Stupid, but brave, little man. Nice try.” He stepped over to Butters and raised his sword. Butters clenched his jaw and raised his hand in a hopeless defensive gesture. He knew what was coming—what had to come. But though his face was ghostly white, his eyes were steady, unflinching.

He’d made his choice, and he would accept the consequences of his actions.

And for that moment, everyone out there was looking at Nicodemus and Butters—and no one was looking at Michael Carpenter’s wife.

Hope gave me a last burst of strength.

“Charity!” I croaked.

Her head snapped around toward me, and she blinked in my direction.

I threw the broken hilt of
Fidelacchius
as hard as I could.

There are moments in your life that, when you look back at them, you realize were perfect. A hundred million things had to happen, to all come together at the same time, for such moments to come into existence—so many things that it beggars imagination to think that they could possibly have happened by random chance.

This was one of them.

The broken hilt of the Sword tumbled in a perfect arc. It flew up, soared down, and cleared the little fence in the front yard by maybe an inch. The rotation of its length was as precise as a juggler’s throw, setting the hilt to tumble directly into Charity’s palm.

But she bobbled it, and missed the grab.

The wooden hilt with its lonely, harmless little fragment of the
Sword’s blade bounced off the icy sidewalk and up into the air. It tumbled several more times, clipped Nicodemus’s shoulder . . .

. . . and landed directly in Waldo Butters’s upraised hand.

His fingers closed around the grip of the broken Sword of Faith, and if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would scarcely have believed what happened.

There was a flash of light.

There was a sound like a howl of holy trumpets backed up by the voices of an entire choir.

And suddenly a shaft of blinding silver-white light three feet long sprang from the broken hilt of
Fidelacchius
and shone in the first golden light of that day’s dawn, humming with the full power of the Sword, only louder now, more melodic, and
physically
audible.

Nicodemus’s sword was already falling, and when it met the blade of light, there was a shriek of protesting metal, a flash of sparks, and he reeled back three quick steps, staring at his own weapon in incomprehension.

Fidelacchius
had sheared it off as neatly as if it had been paper instead of steel. The severed end of Nicodemus’s sword glowed white-hot.

“Ah,” said a voice next to me, in a tone of intense satisfaction, and I jerked a quick glance up to see Uriel crouching next to me, his teeth showing, his eyes glittering.

Butters came to his feet, and his jaw hung open. He stared at the humming blade in his hands for a second and then suddenly his teeth showed in a joyous smile that was no less fierce for being so.

And his eyes locked on Nicodemus.

Suddenly, there was an incoherent scream from behind one of the vans, and the vehicle rocked, as if something enormous had smashed against it. A second later, Mouse stepped out from behind the van, where its bulk was shielding him from the immediate aim of the slowly recovering squires. The Foo dog’s head was low, his body crouched and tensed, hackles raised, gleaming, sharp, freshly bloodied teeth bared. He was no more than a few feet from Nicodemus’s back, and at his appearance, Anduriel’s shadow form went berserk, flickering and twisting in a dozen directions at once, like a panicked animal running to the ends of its tether.

“Nice try?” Butters said. “Mister, where I come from,
there is no try
.”

And he lifted the Sword to a guard position and charged, coat flaring dramatically, impossibly.

Mouse let out a great, coughing roar of a bark and flung himself forward, silver-blue light gathering in his fur and around his mane and jaws.

I saw the fury and the rage and bafflement in Nicodemus’s face as the newly minted Sir Butters came toward him, and I saw something else there, too.

Fear.

The furious light of the Sword of Faith renewed filled him with terror.

He let out a cry of frustration and leapt into the air, where Anduriel’s shadow gathered around him in a sudden blob of fluid darkness, and then streaked away, up into the dawn-lit fog, and was gone.

Butters whirled at once, toward Tessa, but the other Denarian had already fled into the fog, leaving behind a frustrated cry that turned into her demonform’s brassy shriek as it faded.

Butters, with Mouse at his side, turned to face the squires who still remained. The nearest one, I saw, was Jordan, who clutched his shotgun in white-knuckled hands, his expression bewildered.

In fact, as I looked around, I saw the same expression on the faces of every squire there. Utter confusion, as if they’d just beheld something that they knew damned well was impossible. They’d just seen their unbeatable lord and master humbled and forced to flee by a pipsqueak of a Knight who wore black-rimmed spectacles and might have weighed a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet.

“It’s over,” Butters said.
Fidelacchius
’s ominous hum gave his voice a certain terrifying punctuation. “We make an end of it, right here. It’s
over
, guys.”

Jordan, his eyes welling with tears, dropped his arms to his side, abruptly, limply, like an exhausted child. His weapon tumbled to the ground. And, over the next few seconds, the others did exactly the same.

The Sword of Faith, I thought, cuts both ways.

I realized my cheek was back against the floor a moment later, and dully noted that my eyes had stopped working at some point. They were
open, but they weren’t showing me any images. Maybe that’s what they meant by the phrase “lazy eye.” Hah. I’m hysterical when I’m dying.