Skin Game (7 page)

“Pretty bad,” I said, as a second crew of caterers went by with another huge tray. “But I think you should walk.”

A hint of disgust entered her voice. “You
would
. Christ.” She shook her head. “I’m not some little girl you need to protect, Dresden.”

“You’re not in the same weight class as these people either, Anna,” I said. “That’s not an insult. It’s just true. Hell, I don’t want to be there.”

“It isn’t about how big you are, Dresden,” she said. “It’s about how smart you are.” She shook her head. “Maybe you need my help more than you know.”

I wanted to tear out my hair. “Don’t you get it?” I asked. “That’s exactly what he
wants
you to think. He’s a player who’s been operating since before your family tree got started, and he’s setting you up.”

Naked hatred filled her voice. “He killed my
friends
.”

“Dammit,” I said. “You try to screw him over, he’ll kill you just as fast.”

“And yet you’re doing it.” She put the envelope carefully away in her
tunic. “Last time around, I thought I had it all together. I didn’t think I needed your help. But I did. This time, it’s your turn. Get the stripper and tell her we’d better get moving.”

“Why?”

She touched the envelope through the tunic. “Like I said. The former owners have been kind of persistent since I took this from their files.”

“Who?”

“The Fomor.”

“Balls—those guys?” I sighed, just as the horns blared and the band revved up into a swing number. “Okay, let’s g—”

The caterers came by again, all eight of them this time, in their identical uniforms, moving industriously. They were carrying two big trays, and abruptly dumped them onto their sides. The shiny metal covers clanged and clattered onto the floor, the sound lost in the rumble of drums, and from beneath them came two squirming, slithering
things
.

For a second, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. It was just two mounds of writhing purple-grey flesh mottled with blotches of other colors. And then they just sort of
unspooled
into writhing, grasping appendages and a weird bulbous body, and suddenly two creatures that looked like the torso of a hairless, gorilla-like humanoid grafted to the limbs of an enormous octopus came scuttle-humping over the floor toward us, preceded by a wave of reeking, rotten-fish stench and followed by twin trails of yellowish mucus.

“Hell’s bells,” I swore. “I
told
her so. Nothing’s ever simple.”

S
o, what do you call abominations like that? I wondered in an oddly calm corner of my brain as adrenaline kicked it into high gear. Octogorillataurs? Gorilloctopi? How are you going to whale properly on a thing if you don’t even have a name for it?

More to the point, nameless hideous monsters are freaking terrifying. You always fear what you don’t know, what you don’t understand, and the first step to having understanding of something is to know what to call it. It’s a habit of mine to give names to anything I wind up interacting with if it doesn’t have one readily available. Names have power—magically, sure, but far more important, they have psychological power. Something horrible with a name holds less power over you, less terror, than something horrible without one.

“Octokongs,” I pronounced grimly. “Why did it have to be octokongs?”

“Are you
kidding
me?” breathed Anna Valmont. Her body tensed like a quivering power line, but she didn’t panic. “Dresden?”

At the other end of the hall, the band hit the first chorus of the swing number, drums rumbling. The octokongs came a-glumping toward us, ten limbs threshing, octopus and gorilla both, nearly human eyes burning with furious hate, but they weren’t what had me the most worried. The Fomor were a melting pot of a supernatural nation, the survivors of a dozen dark mythologies and pantheons that had apparently been biding their time for the past couple of thousand years, emerging from
beneath the world’s oceans in the wake of the destruction of the Red Court of Vampires. They’d spent the last couple of years giving everyone a hard time and making thousands of people vanish. Nobody knew why, yet, but the Fomor’s covert servitors on land looked human, had gills, and acted like exemplary monsters—and they were what I was more worried about.

Behind the octokongs, the servitors in the caterer uniforms crouched down into ready positions, drawing out what looked chillingly like weighted saps, and every one of them was focused on Valmont. The beasties were just the attack dogs. The servitors were here to make Anna Valmont vanish—alive. One could only have nightmares about what people who get their kicks stitching gorillas to octopi might do to a captive thief.

I didn’t have any of my magical gear on me. That limited my options in the increasingly crowded public venue. Worse, they’d gotten close to us before coming at us. There was nowhere to run and no time for anything subtle.

Lucky for me.

I’m not really a subtle guy.

I summoned forth my will, gathering it into a coherent mass, and crouched, reaching down and across my body with my right hand. Then I shouted,
“Forzare!”
as I rose, sweeping my arm out in a wide arc and unleashing a slew of invisible force as I did.

A wave of raw kinetic force lashed out from me in a crescent-shaped arc, catching both octokongs and all eight of the servitors, sending them tumbling backward.

The sudden, widely spread burst of magic also sent the heavy covered platters flying, and one of them hit edge-on and slashed right through one of the floor-to-ceiling windows of the ballroom. A genuine hotel staffer caught the edge of the spell and went sprawling as though clipped by an NFL linebacker. Hanging sheets of red fabric blew in a miniature hurricane, some of them tearing free of their fastenings and flying through the room. A couple of small tables and their chairs went spinning away—and almost every lightbulb in the place abruptly shattered in a shower of sparks.

People started screaming as flickering gloom descended, though as
luck would have it, the band still had light enough to play by and, after a stutter, kept going. The octokongs, knocked back several yards before they could spread out their tentacles and grab onto the floor, let out enormous, feral roars of defiance, and at that terrifying sound, genuine panic began to spread through the ballroom. A few seconds later, someone must have pulled a fire alarm, because an ear-piercing mechanical whoop began to cycle through the air.

So, basically: Harry Dresden, one; peaceful gathering, zero.

I grabbed Valmont by the hand and darted to one side, shoving scarlet cloth aside with my other hand and running blindly forward through it. The Fomor would be on our heels any second. Anything I could have unleashed that would have killed or disabled the Fomor crew would have caused even more collateral damage and might have gotten someone killed in the relatively limited confines of the ballroom. All I’d done was knock them back on their heels—but I wasn’t trying to win a fight. I just wanted to get us out in one piece.

I didn’t know where Ascher had gotten off to, but the Fomor were after Valmont. Ascher had survived being hunted by the White Council for years. I imagined she could get herself out of a hotel without my help.

“What are we doing?” Anna shouted.

“Leaving!”

“Obviously. Where?”

“Fire stairs!” I called back. “I’m not getting stuck in an elevator with one of those things!”

We plunged out of the obscuring curtains, and I tripped on a chair, stumbled, and banged my hip hard into the buffet table. I might have fallen if Valmont hadn’t hauled on my arm.

I pointed toward the door the caterers had been using and got my feet moving again. “There! Fire stairs down the hall, to the right.”

“I saw the signs too,” she snapped.

We rushed through the doors, rounded the corner, and I found myself facing two more of the flat-eyed Fomor servitors, both of them bigger and heavier than average and wearing their more common uniform—black slacks with a tight black turtleneck.

And machine guns.

I don’t mean assault rifles. I mean full-on automatic weapons, the kind that come with their ammunition in a freaking box. The two turtlenecks had obviously been placed to cover the stairs, and they weren’t standing around being stupid. The second I came around the corner, one of them lifted his weapon and began letting loose chattering three- and four-round bursts of fire.

In movies, when someone shoots at the hero with a machine gun, they hit everything around him but they don’t actually hit
him
. The thing is, actual machine guns don’t really work like that. A skilled handler can fire them very accurately, and can lay down so many rounds that whatever he’s shooting at gets hit. A lot. That’s why they
make
machine guns in the first place. Someone opens up on you with one of those, and you have two choices—get to cover or get shot multiple times. I was less than fifty feet away, down a straight, empty hallway. He could barely have missed me if he’d been
trying
.

I threw back my right arm, hauling Anna Valmont behind me, and lifted my left arm, along with my will, snapping out,
“Defendarius!”

Something tugged hard at my lower leg, and then my will congealed into a barrier of solid force between us and the shooter. Bullets struck it, sending up flashes of light as they did, revealing it as a half-dome shape with very ragged edges. The impact of each hit was visceral, felt all the way through my body, like the beat of a big drum in a too-loud nightclub. Heavy rounds like that were specifically designed to hit hard and penetrate cover. They could kill a soldier on the other side of a thick tree, chew apart a man in body armor, and reduce concrete walls to powder and rubble.

Without a magical focus to help concentrate my shield’s energy, it took an enormous amount of juice to keep it dense enough to actually stop the rounds, while slowing them down enough to keep them from simply ricocheting everywhere. Rounds like that would penetrate the walls and ceiling of the Peninsula as if going through soft cheese. Innocent people five floors away could be killed if I didn’t slow the bullets as they rebounded, and the metal-clad slugs bounced and clattered to the floor around me.

That didn’t deter the turtleneck. He started walking slowly forward
in the goofy-looking, rolling, heel-to-toe gait of a trained close-quarters gunman, the kind of step that kept his eyes and head and shoulders level the whole time he was moving. He kept firing steady, controlled bursts as he approached, filling the hallway with light and deafening thunder, and it was everything I could do just to keep the bullets off of us.

Holding the shield in place was a job of work, and within seconds I had to drop to one knee, reducing the size of the shield needed as I did. I had to hold on for a little longer. Once the turtleneck ran dry, he’d have to change weapons or reload his magazine, and then I’d have a chance to hit back.

Except that his buddy was advancing right next to him,
not
firing. Ready to take over the second the first turtleneck’s weapon ran out. Gulp. I wasn’t sure I had the juice to hang on
that
long.

I was missing my shield bracelet pretty hard at that point—but it hadn’t been with me when I woke up under the island of Demonreach, and I hadn’t had the time or the resources to make another one since. My new staff would have done just fine, but it was just a little bit harder to sneak that thing into a formal gathering.

I needed a new plan.

Valmont shouted something at me. I was concentrating so hard, I barely heard her the first time. “Close your eyes!” she screamed. Then she tensed and moved and something flew over the faintly glowing top edge of my shield and clattered to the ground at the turtlenecks’ feet.

The two shooters reacted instantly, diving away, and a second later there was a flash of utterly blinding white light and something slapped the air of the hallway like a giant’s palm.

I hadn’t gotten my eyes closed in time, and my vision was covered in red and purple spots, my ears ringing in a steady, high-pitched tone, but the shield had protected me from the force of the small explosion, and my head was clear enough that I could stagger to my feet and get out of the deadly hallway, Valmont pulling me along in her wake.

“Jesus Christ,” she swore in a vicious tone as we ran. “It was just some goddamned
files
. Other stairway!”

Going back into the darkened ballroom after the stroboscopic hallway had left my eyes helplessly trying to adjust. “I can’t see yet,” I said, and felt her take my hand. “Okay, go!”

Valmont started running, and I lurched blindly along with her, holding her hand like an NBA-sized toddler and trying not to fall down. We crossed what had to have been most of the ballroom before Valmont suddenly stopped. My rented shoes were not exactly hell on wheels for traction, and I all but fell over her before I could stop, too.

“What?” I asked.

“Quiet,” she hissed. “One of those things at the door.”

“You have any more flash-bangs?” I said, lower.

“Most girls don’t even carry the one, you know,” she said rather primly. “I can’t tell you how many jobs I’ve done without a hitch since the last time I saw you, Dresden. You walk through the door and everything goes to hell.”

“That’s embroidered on my towels, actually,” I said. I blinked my eyes hard, several times, and could barely make out the shape of one of the octokongs waiting at the door. Well, technically, it was waiting
over
the door, its tentacles spread out along the ceiling, sticking to it like some enormous spider, apelike arms hanging down. Valmont had stopped us behind a column, deep in the shadows created by the emergency lights in the hallway beyond the octokong. “Wow, those things are ugly.” I blinked some more. “Okay, stay close.”

“Can you see?”

“Yeah, almost. We’ll make a run for it. If it comes at us, I’ll knock it away and we meep-meep right the hell out of here.”

“Meep-meep.” Valmont’s voice was dry. “It’s so nice to work with a mature professional.”

“Fine. We extract, exfiltrate, whatever,” I said. I changed hands, shifting hers to my left, making sure my right was free. “Here we go.”

And we ran for the door.

The octokong started slorping down the wall, all tentacles and slime and harsh, ugly grunting sounds, but it didn’t just drop, and though I was ready to unleash another blast of force at it, we scooted by a couple of inches ahead of the nearest tentacle tip, and into the hallway, free and clear, even more easily than I’d planned.

So naturally, alarm bells started going off in my head.

There was a doorway across the hall, and I didn’t slow down. I
lowered my shoulder and hit it with the weight of my entire body, and with the full power of the Winter Knight.

I don’t wanna say I’m strong when I’ve got my Winter Knight on—but I’ve lifted cars. Maybe it isn’t really comic-book-style superstrength, but I’m a big guy, I’m no lightweight, and that door splintered, its lock tearing free of its wooden frame as if it had already half rotted out. I went through it, my shoulder sending up a hot pulse of discomfort, dragging Valmont with me.

The
second
octokong had been waiting on the inside of the hallway, already plunging down at us, and if we’d paused for even a fraction of a second, it would have nabbed us both. Instead, I crashed into a rack of brooms and mops at the back of a large cleaning closet, snapping several handles and putting a huge dent in the drywall. I sort of bounced off of it, my eyes still blurry with spots, stunned.

“Dresden!” Valmont cried.

I spun to see her lurch and grab onto a heavy metal shelf of cleaning products. I’d lost hold of her at some point. No sooner had she grabbed on than one of her legs was jerked out from beneath her, and her hands were wrenched free of the shelf.

I snapped my arms out and caught her before she could be hauled out of the closet, becoming cognizant of a purple-grey tentacle wrapped around her ankle as I did. I went to the floor, lashing out with all the power of my legs, and sent the door swinging closed with vicious force, neatly severing the tip of the octokong’s tentacle.

There was a furious bellow from outside the door.

“Get behind me, get behind me!” I shouted at Valmont, keeping the door pressed shut with my legs. She scrambled over me in the darkness inside the closet, her limbs lean and solid beneath her disguise. A second later, there was a click, and light from a tiny flashlight flooded the room as she used it to start scanning the shelves.