Skin Game (6 page)

A certain degree of cutthroat pragmatism was what made any kind of alliance between various supernatural entities possible. I’d seen it between my grandfather and a professional assassin called the Hellhound. I’d seen it when squaring off against various bad guys, over the years, most of whom were willing to make a deal of some kind. Hell, I’d
done
it, with Mab, and she was doing it again with Nicodemus by sticking me here.

So it was entirely possible that he was on the up-and-up. Or at least that he was as sincere as I was about following through on the whole alliance thing. We had to get his McGuffin and get out again. Until then, I was betting, he might be good to his word.

And after that, everything would be up in the air.

On the other hand, Nicodemus had gone out of his way to remove as much memory of himself as possible from the human race, by destroying records of his deeds over the centuries. Guys who are on the up-and-up don’t go to those lengths to hide what they’ve done.

Not that it mattered. Mab had given her word. I had to play nice until we had grabbed the loot from Hades, or until Nicodemus tried to stick a knife in my back.

Fun, fun, fun.

I flipped to the second page of the folder and found a photo of a woman I knew, and hadn’t seen in . . . Hell’s bells, had it been almost ten years? She hadn’t changed much in that time, except for maybe looking leaner and harder. I wasn’t sure she’d be at all happy to see me, and I knew for damned sure what she would think of Nicodemus.

And since when had I become the guy that things happened to ten years ago?

Nicodemus continued in his lecture voice. “Entry to the target in the Nevernever requires us to find a matching site here in the mortal world.
That means breaking into a high-security facility in the real world before we can even get started in the Nevernever.”

I raised my hand.

“Pursuant to that,” Nicodemus said, and then paused. He sighed. “Yes, Mr. Dresden?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “She’s never going to work with you.”

“Probably not,” Nicodemus agreed. “She may, however, work with
you
. We need an expert in security systems with a working knowledge of the supernatural world. The pool of such individuals is rather small. I’ve arranged a meeting with her at a local event in approximately ninety minutes. You and Miss Ascher will make contact and convince her to join our cause.”

“Suppose she won’t?” I asked.

“Be more convincing,” he said. “We need her in order to proceed.”

I clenched my teeth, and then nodded once. Hell, if he needed her to make it happen, then by screwing this up, maybe I could make sure it didn’t. “Fine. But it’s me and Murphy.”

“No,” Ascher said. “It’s me and Binder.”

“I’m afraid the event is a formal one,” Nicodemus said. “I’ve taken the liberty of securing appropriate attire and identities for Dresden and Miss Ascher, neither of which would be compatible with Miss Murphy or Binder. Perhaps Miss Murphy could serve as your driver. She has the shoes for it.”

I couldn’t actually hear Karrin grind her teeth, but I knew she had.

“Binder,” Nicodemus said, “I have another errand for you. You’ll need to pick up the fourth—pardon, Miss Murphy, the fifth—member of the team at the train station. He’s stated that he’ll only meet someone he knows.”

Binder nodded once. “Who is it?”

“Goodman Grey.”

Binder’s face went pale. “Ah. Yes, I’ve worked with the gent.”

“Who is he?” Ascher asked.

“He’s . . . not a man to cross,” Binder said. “But a pro. I’ll pick him up. Smoother that way.”

Ascher pressed her lips together, as if she didn’t like it, but nodded. “Fine, then.” She looked down the table at me and smiled. “Well, Dresden, it looks like it’s time to put on our party dress.”

“Gee,” I said. “What fun.”

And I closed the folder on the picture of Anna Valmont.

D
eirdre brought me a garment bag and pointed me to a small employees’ kitchen and break room with another pair of work lights set up in it. I went in, closed the door, and opened the garment bag. There was a black tux inside with all the necessary accoutrements. I held it up enough to determine that it looked like a tolerable fit.

For a moment, I had a few paranoid misgivings. What if the entire point of the exercise had been to get me to take off the coat so that they could open fire with a machine gun and grease me through the wall? I already knew what it was like to be shot, and I was pretty well over the experience. Visions of Sonny Corleone danced in my head.

But I didn’t think that was going to happen. Karrin was on guard outside. There was no way they’d move a gun into position without her at least making noise to warn me. Then, too, Nicodemus had plans in motion. I didn’t think he’d want to jeopardize his “faithful associate” image until he could screw everyone over much more dramatically and permanently. And if he just murdered me outright, Mab would take it personally. I don’t care how long you’ve been in business. If you cross Mab, you can skip your next five-year plan.

So I doffed the coat, stripped down, and started getting dressed in the tux.

I was at pretty much the damnedest point of the process when the door opened again, and Hannah Ascher prowled into the room, carrying a garment bag of her own.

She gave me a slow and blatant once-over, that small smirk still on her mouth.

I’m pretty sure the temperature of the room didn’t literally go up, but I couldn’t have sworn to it. Some women have a quality about them, something completely intangible and indefinable, which gets called a lot of different things, depending on which society you’re in. I always think of it as heat, fire. It doesn’t have to be about sex, but it often is—and it definitely was with Hannah Ascher.

I was extremely aware of her body, and her eyes. Her expression told me that she knew exactly what effect she was having on me, and that she didn’t mind having it in the least. I’d say that my libido kicked into overdrive, except that didn’t seem sufficient to cover the rush of purely physical hunger that suddenly hit me.

Hannah Ascher was a damned attractive woman. And I’d been on that island for a long, long time.

I turned my face away from her and tried to ignore her while I laid out my cummerbund. Mighty wizards do not get rattled because someone sees them standing around in their boxer briefs.

“Damn, Dresden,” she said, taking a few steps to one side and looking me over again. A slow smile spread over her mouth. “Do you work out?”

“Uh,” I said. “Parkour.”

The answer seemed to amuse her. “Well. It’s definitely working for you.” She hung the garment bag up on a cabinet handle and unzipped it by feel, her eyes on me the whole time. “So many scars.” She had long arms. Her fingers brushed my shoulder. “What’s that one?”

The touch sent a zing of sensation down my spine and through my belly. There wasn’t anything magically coercive about it. I’d been on alert for that kind of nonsense from the moment my feet had hit the shore. It was worse than that—chemistry, pure and simple. My body had the idea that Ascher was exactly what I needed, and it wasn’t paying any attention to my brain.

I pulled my shoulder away from her, gave her a glare, and said, “Hey. Do you mind?”

She folded her arms, her smile widening. “Not at all. Where’d you get it?”

I glowered and turned back to my tux. “The FBI shot me, maybe twelve years ago.”

“Seriously?” Hannah asked. “It faded out really well.”

“It’s like that with wizards,” I said.

“Your left hand,” she said. “That’s from fire.”

“Vampire’s flunky,” I said. “Homemade flamethrower.”

“Which Court?” she asked.

“Black.”

“Interesting,” she said, and stripped out of her sweater in one smooth motion.

Her body was exactly as pleasant to look at as the contours of the sweater had promised, possibly more so. My libido approved vigorously.

I hurriedly turned my back. “Hey.”

“You’re kidding, right?” she asked, something like laughter in her voice. “Turning your back, really? On this? What kind of big-time badass are you, anyway, Dresden?”

“The kind who doesn’t know you, Miss Ascher,” I said.

“That’s a fixable problem, isn’t it?” she asked, her voice teasing. “And it’s Miss Ascher all of a sudden, huh? I wonder why that is.”

Her black satin bra hit the counter in my peripheral vision. It had little bits of frilly lace along the edges.

I hurriedly jumped into the pants before I embarrassed myself. “Look,” I said. “We’re working together. Can we just get the job done, please?”

“Not nearly so many scars on your back,” she noted. “You don’t run from much, do you?”

“I run all the time,” I said, stuffing my arms into the shirt. “But if you let yourself get attacked from behind a lot, you don’t get scars. You get a hole in the ground.”

Her boots made some clunking sounds on the floor. Socks and jeans joined the bra on the counter. “This thief we’re picking up,” she said. “You two have some history, huh?”

“Sort of,” I said. “She stole my car.”

She let out a brief laugh. “And you let her?”

“She gave it back,” I said. “I bailed her out of trouble once.”

“Think you can get her to go with us?”

“If it was just me, it would be more likely,” I said.

“Or maybe you’d try to throw a wrench into the works by making sure she didn’t get on board,” she said, her tone wry. “After all, you like Nicodemus so much.”

Oops. The woman was sharp. “What?” I asked.

“Based on your response, I’m going to assume that you don’t have much of a poker face, either,” she said. Cloth made soft rustling sounds. “Don’t feel bad. It’s one of the things I’m good at. I’ve got a feel for people.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that I can tell that right now, you’re wound up tighter than twenty clock springs,” she said. “You’re nervous and scared and angry, and you’re about to explode with the need to have sex with something. I’ve met guys fresh out of prison who aren’t bursting at the seams as hard as you.”

I paused in the midst of fastening cuff links.

“Seriously, I can promise you that you are impaired right now. You should blow off a little steam. Be good for you.”

“You’re an expert, eh?” I asked. My voice sounded a little rough.

“On this?” she asked, her voice teasing again. “I’m not bad. Zip me?”

I turned to find her facing away from me. She was wearing the hell out of a little black dress accented with shining black sequins. Her legs were excellent. There wasn’t much of a back to the dress, but there was a short zipper running a few inches up from the top of her hips. I was pretty sure she could have managed it alone. But I took a step over to her and did it up anyway.

She smelled like late-afternoon sunshine on wildflowers. Her long, curling hair touched the backs of my hands as they moved.

I felt the Winter in me stirring, taking notice of whatever had gotten to my sex drive, hungry for an outlet. That wasn’t a good thing. Winter thought sex was almost as much fun as violence, and that they went even better mixed together. Like chocolate and peanut butter.

I started multiplying numbers in my head and stepped away again,
focusing on getting dressed, and eight times eight, and putting on socks without sitting down or noticing the woman whose gaze remained on me.

“Man,” she said finally. “You’ve been burned more than once.”

I fastened the pretied tie onto the collar and straightened it by feel. “You have no idea.”

“Fine,” she said, her voice steady and calm. “You don’t want to have fun at work, that’s cool. I like you. I like your style. But this job is important to me, and to my partner. Get it right. You screw us over, and you and I are going to have a problem.”

“You really think you can take on a Wizard of the White Council, Miss Ascher?” I asked.

“I have so far,” she said, without a trace of threat or bravado.

I turned to face her and found her on something almost like eye level with me, thanks to a pair of heels that went with the dress. She was fastening a diamond tennis bracelet onto her left wrist.

I stepped up close to her and took the ends of the bracelet in my fingers. “You should hear my terms, too,” I said, and as I did, I could hear the Winter in my voice, making it quiet and cold and hard. “This town is my home. You hurt any mortals in my town, I take you out with the rest of the trash. And you should remember the state of my back, if you start thinking about putting a knife in it. Try it, and I’ll bury you.” The clasp closed, and I looked up to see her keeping a straight face—but I could see considerable uncertainty behind it. She drew her arm back from me a shade too quickly, and kept her eyes on my center of balance, as if she was expecting me to take a swing at her.

I’d had to talk tough to monsters and dangerous people before. I just couldn’t remember doing it while sharing a somewhat intimate domestic moment, like getting dressed together, or while helping them put on jewelry. There was something in that gesture that made Hannah Ascher a person first, a woman, and a dangerous warlock second. And I had effectively threatened her during that moment—which had probably just made me, to her, a dangerous Warden of the White Council slash paranormal criminal thug first, and a human being second.

Super. Harry Dresden, intimidator of women. Probably not the best
foot to get off on with someone with whom I was about to face considerable intrigue and danger.

Maybe next time, I’d just stick a gun in her face.

“You look great,” I said in a voice that sounded a lot gentler than it had a few seconds before. “Let’s get to work.”

T
he Peninsula is one of the ritzier of the ritzy hotels in Chicago, and it has a grand ballroom measurable in hectares. The serious events of Chicago’s nightlife rarely start before eight—you need time for people to get home from work and get all pretty before they show up looking fabulous—so when we arrived around seven thirty, Ascher and I were unfashionably early.

“I’m going to be right down here on the street,” Karrin said from the front seat of the black town car Nicodemus had provided. She had checked it for explosives. I’d gone over it for less physical dangers.

“Not sure how long it will take,” I said. “Cops going to let you loiter?”

“I still know a few guys on the force,” she said. “But I’ll circle the block if I have to. If you get in trouble, send up a flare.” She offered me a plastic box with a boutonniere made from a sunset-colored rose in it. “Don’t forget your advertising.”

“Not like I need it,” I said. “I’ll recognize her.”

“And she’ll recognize you,” Karrin said. “If she doesn’t know she’s supposed to talk to you, she might avoid you. It’s not exactly hard to see you coming.”

“Fine.” I took it, opened the box, and managed to stab myself in the finger with the pin while trying to put the damned thing on my lapel.

“Here,” Ascher said. She took the flower, wiped the pin off on a tissue, and passed it to Karrin, along with whatever tiny bit of my blood had been on it. Then she fixed the flower neatly to the tux. She wasn’t making
any particular effort to vamp, but her dress was cut low, giving me several eyefuls during the process. I tried not to notice and was partially successful.

“Here we go,” Karrin said, and got out of the car. She came around and opened the door for me. I got out, and helped Ascher out, and she flashed enough shapely leg to keep anyone on the hotel staff out front from noticing me except in passing. Karrin got back in the car and vanished with quiet efficiency, and I gave Ascher my arm and escorted her inside.

“Try not to look like that,” Ascher said under her breath, after we were in the elevator.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like you’re expecting ninjas to leap out of the trash cans. This is a party.”

“Everyone knows there’s no such things as ninjas,” I scoffed. “But it will be something. Count on it.”

“Not if we do it smooth,” Ascher said.

“You’re going to have to trust me on this one,” I replied. “There’s always something. It doesn’t matter how smooth you are, or how smart the plan is, or how plain the mission—something goes wrong. Nothing’s ever simple. That’s how it works.”

Ascher eyed me. “You have a very negative attitude. Just relax and we’ll get this done. Try not to look around so much. And for God’s sake, smile.”

I smiled.

“Maybe without clenching your jaw.”

The doors opened and we walked down a hallway to the grand ballroom. There were a couple of security guys outside the door dressed in the hotel’s colors, trying to look friendly and helpful. I breezed up and presented them with our engraved invitation and fake IDs. I’d say this for Nicodemus—he didn’t do things halfway, and his production values were outrageous. The fake driver’s license (in the name of Howard Delroy Oberheit, cute) looked more real than my actual Illinois driver’s license ever had. They eyed me, and then my license, closely, but they couldn’t spot it as a fake. Ascher (née Harmony Armitage) gave the
guards a big smile and some friendly chatter, and they didn’t look twice at her ID.

I couldn’t really blame them. Ascher looked like exactly the kind of woman who would be showing up to a blue-chip evening event. In me, the hotel’s thugs recognized another of their kind—and one who was taller and had better scars than they did. But with Hannah on my arm, they let me pass.

The interior of the ballroom had been decorated in a kind of Chinese motif. Lots of red fabric draped in swaths from the ceiling to create semi-curtained partitions, paper lanterns glowing cheerfully, stands of bamboo, a Zen garden with its sand groomed in impeccable curves. The hotel staff was mostly women in red silk tunics with mandarin collars. Caterers in white coats and black ties were just getting a buffet fully assembled. When we came in, I couldn’t see them, but I could hear a live band running through a number—seven pieces of brass, drums, and a piano, playing a classic ballroom piece.

I scanned the room slowly as we entered, but I didn’t see Anna Valmont standing around anywhere.

“So this thief we’re meeting,” Ascher asked. “What’s her story?”

“She used to belong to a gang called the Churchmice,” I said. “Specialized in robbing churches in Europe. Nicodemus hired them to swipe the Shroud of Turin for him a few years back.”

Ascher tilted her head. “What happened?”

“The three of them got it,” I said. “I suspect they tried to raise their price. Nicodemus and Deirdre killed two of them, and he would have killed Anna if I hadn’t intervened.”

Her eyes widened slightly. “And now Nicodemus wants her to help him?”

I snorted softly through my nose. “Yeah.”

Ascher studied me for a moment with her eyes narrowed. “Oh.”

“What?” I asked her.

“Just . . . admiring the manipulation,” she said. “I mean, I don’t like it, but it’s good.”

“How so?” I asked.

“Don’t you see?”

“I try not to think like that,” I said. The caterers uncovered the silver trays holding the meat, and a moment later the smell of roasted chicken and beef wafted up to my nose. My stomach made an audible sound. I’d been cooking for myself over a fireplace for a long, long while. It had been sustenance, but given my culinary skills, it hadn’t really been food, per se. The buffet smelled so good that for a minute I half expected to hear the pitter-patter of drool sliding out of my mouth.

“If you don’t, someone else will,” Ascher said. “If nothing else, you’ve got to defend yourself . . . Hey, are you as hungry as I am?”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And we’ve apparently got some time to kill.”

“So it wouldn’t be unprofessional to raid the buffet?”

“Even Pitt and Clooney had to eat,” I said. “Come on.”

We raided the buffet. I piled my little plate with what I hoped would be a restrained amount of food. Ascher didn’t bother. She took a bit of almost everything, stacking food up hungrily. We made our way to one of many tables set up around the outskirts of the ballroom while the band went through another number. I picked one that gave us a view of the door, and watched for Anna Valmont to arrive.

She didn’t appear over the next few moments, though a few of Chicago’s luminaries did, and the numbers in the room began to slowly grow. The hotel staff began taking coats and drifting through the room with trays of food and drink, while the caterers began to briskly move back and forth through the service entrances, like a small army of worker ants, repairing the damage to the buffet almost the moment it was done. It seemed to mean so much to them that I was considering doing a little more damage myself, purely to give them a chance to repair it, you understand. I try to be nice to people.

I was just gathering my empty plate to show my compassionate, humanitarian side when one of the hotel staff touched my arm and said, “Pardon me, Mr. Oberheit? You have a telephone call, sir. There’s a courtesy phone right over here.”

I looked up at the woman, wiped my mouth with a napkin, and said, “All right. Show me.” I nodded to Ascher. “Be right back.”

I got up and followed the staffer over to a curtained alcove by one
wall, where there was a phone. We were more or less out of the way of everyone else in the room there.

“Miss Valmont,” I said to the staffer, once we were there. “Nice to see you again.”

Anna Valmont turned to face me with a small and not terribly pleasant smile. The last time I’d seen her, she’d been a peroxide blonde. Now her hair was black, cut in a neat pageboy. She was leaner than I remembered, almost too much so, like a young, feral cat. She was still pretty, though her features had lost that sense of youthful exuberance, and her eyes were harder, warier.

“Dresden,” she said. “‘Mr. Oberheit,’ seriously?”

“Did you hear me criticizing your alias?” I asked.

That got a flash of a smile. “Who’s the stripper?”

“No one you know, and no one to mess with,” I said. “And there’s nothing wrong with strippers. How’ve you been?”

She reached into her tunic and carefully produced a thickly packed business envelope. “Do you have my money or not?”

I arched an eyebrow at that. “Money?”

That got me another smile, though there was something serrated about it. “We have history, Dresden, but I don’t do freebies and I’m not hanging around for chitchat. The people I had to cross for this aren’t the forgiving type and have been on my heels all week. This envelope is made of flash paper. Cough up the dough or the data and I turn to smoke.”

My mind was racing. Nicodemus had set up a job for Anna Valmont—it was the only way he could know that she would be here, and that she would be meeting the guy with the sunset-colored rose. So it stood to reason that whatever information he’d had her take, it might be valuable, too.

I checked around me quickly. I couldn’t see the table from where I stood, but Ascher wasn’t in sight. “Do it,” I said, turning back to Valmont. “Destroy it, now, quick.”

“You think I won’t?” she asked. Then she paused, frowning. “Wait a minute . . . What’s the con here?”

“No con,” I said low. “Look, Anna, there’s a lot going on and there’s no time to explain it all. Blow the data and vanish. We’ll both be better off.”

She tilted her head, her expression suddenly skeptical, and she drew the envelope up close against her in an unconscious protective gesture. “You give me a hundred grand up front for this with another hundred on delivery, and then tell me to wreck the data? It’s not like this is the only copy.”

“I wasn’t the one who hired you,” I said intently. “Hell’s bells, you stole my car once. You think I’ve got that kind of cash? I’m just the pickup guy, and you don’t want to be involved with this crew. Get out while you can.”

“I did the job, I get my money,” she said. “You want to trash the data, fine. You pay for it. One hundred thousand.”

“How about two million?” Ascher said. She eased into the alcove, holding a champagne flute with no lipstick marks on the rim.

Anna looked at her sharply. “What?”

“Two million guaranteed,” Ascher said. “As much as twenty if we pull off the job.”

I ground my teeth.

Valmont looked back and forth between us for a second, her expression closed. “This job was an audition.”

“Bingo,” Ascher said. “You’ve got the skills and the guts. This is a big job. Dresden here is doing what he always does, trying to protect you from the big bad world. But this is a chance at a score that will let you retire to your own island.”

“A job?” Anna said. “For who?”

“Nicodemus Archleone,” I said.

Anna Valmont’s eyes went flat, hard. “You’re working with him?”

“Long story,” I said. “And not by choice.” But I realized what Ascher had been talking about before. Nicodemus had picked Anna Valmont and sent me to get her because he’d been calculating her motivations. Anna owed me something, and she owed Nicodemus something more. Even if she didn’t pitch in to help me, she might do it for revenge, for the chance to pull the rug out from under Nicodemus’s feet at the worst possible
moment. He’d given her double the reasons to get involved. The money was just the icing on the cake.

Valmont wasn’t exactly a slow thinker herself. “Twenty million,” she said.

“Best-case scenario,” Ascher said. “Two guaranteed.”

“Nicodemus Archleone,” I said. “You remember what happened the last time you did a contract with him?”

“We tried to screw him and he screwed us back harder,” Anna said. She eyed Ascher, as a couple more hotel staff flitted by the alcove. “What happens if I say no?”

“You miss the score of a lifetime,” Ascher said. “Nicodemus has to abandon the job.” She looked at me. “And Dresden is screwed.”

Which was true, now that Ascher was here and had seen me trying to derail the job. Unless I killed her to shut her up, something I wasn’t ready to do, she’d tell Nicodemus and he’d put the word out that Mab’s word was no good anymore. Mab would crucify me for that, no metaphor involved. Worse, I was pretty sure that such a thing would be a severe blow to Mab’s power in more than a political sense—and Mab had an important job to do.

All of which, I was certain, Nicodemus knew.

Jerk.

“Is that true?” Valmont asked.

I ground my teeth and didn’t answer. A crew of four caterers carrying a large tray went by.

“It’s true,” Valmont said. “The job. Is it real?”

“It’s dangerous as hell,” I said.

“Binder is in,” Ascher said. “Do you know who that is?”

“Mercenary,” Valmont said, nodding. “Reputation for being a survivor.”

“Damn skippy,” Ascher replied. “He’s my partner. I’m along to keep Dresden here from getting all noble on you.”

“That true?” Valmont asked me.

“Son of a bitch,” I said.

Valmont nodded several times. Then she said, to Ascher, “Excuse us for a moment, would you?”

Ascher smiled and nodded her head. She lifted her glass to me in a little toast, sipped, and drifted back out of the alcove.

Valmont leaned a little closer to me, lowering her voice. “You don’t care about money, Dresden. And you aren’t working for him by choice. You want to burn him.”

“Yeah,” I said.

Something hot flared in Valmont’s eyes. “Can you?”

“The job is too big for him to do alone,” I said.

“A lot of things could happen,” she said.

“Or you walk,” I said, “and it doesn’t happen at all. He’s out millions of bucks he’s already paid, and there’s no job.”

“And he just crawls back into the woodwork,” Valmont said. “And maybe he doesn’t come out for another fifty years and I never have another chance to pay him back.”

“Or maybe you get yourself killed trying,” I said. “Revenge isn’t smart, Anna.”

“It is if you make a profit doing it,” she said. She clacked her teeth together a couple of times, a nervous gesture. “How bad is it for you if I walk?”