Skin Game (9 page)

K
arrin’s house is a modest place in Bucktown that looks like it should belong to a little old lady—mainly because it did, and Karrin never seemed to have the time or heart to change the exterior much from the way her grandmother had it painted, decorated, and landscaped. When we pulled up, there were already cars on the street outside. She slid the town car into the drive and around to the back of the house.

Before she had settled the car into park, I turned to Valmont and asked, “What’s in the file?”

“A profile of a local businessman,” Valmont replied at once.

“Anyone I know?”

She shrugged, reached into her purse, and passed me the file, which she had rolled up into a tube. I took it, unrolled it, and squinted at it until Karrin flicked on a reading light. It was on for about five seconds before it stuttered and went out.

“Nothing’s ever easy around you, is it?” she said.

I stuck my tongue out at her, tugged my mother’s silver pentacle amulet out of my shirt, and sent a gentle current of my will down into it. The silver began to glow with blue-white wizard light, enough to let me scan over the file.

“Harvey Morrison,” I read aloud. “Fifty-seven, he’s an investment banker, financial adviser, and economic securities consultant.” I blinked at Karrin. “What’s that?”

“He handles rich people’s money,” she said.

I grunted and went back to reading. “He goes sailing in the summer, golfing when the weather is nice, and takes a long weekend in Vegas twice a year. No wife, no kids.” There was a picture. I held it up. “Good-looking guy. Sort of like Clooney, but with a receding hairline. Lists his favorite movies, books, music. Got a biography of him—grew up in the area, went to some nice schools, parents died when he was in college.”

“Why him?” Karrin asked me.

I looked back at Valmont.

She shrugged her shoulders. “He looked pretty unremarkable to me. No obvious graft or embezzling, which is a given for someone operating at his level.”

“Honest men?” I asked, with minimal cynicism.

“Smart crooks, when they steal,” she said. “He’s a trusted functionary like hundreds of others in this town.”

“Gambling problem?”

She shrugged. “Not an obvious one, from his records. The Fomor don’t rate him as a particularly vulnerable target for manipulation.”

“They have files on money guys?” I asked.

“They’ve been buying information left and right for the past couple of years,” Valmont said. “Throwing a lot of money around. It’s been a real seller’s market.”

“What do you mean?”

“Everyone’s buying,” Valmont said. “Fomor, White Court, Venatori, Svartalves, every paranormal crew who isn’t trying to keep a low profile. That’s why I ran this job—it’s the third one this month. You want to make some fast money, Dresden, and know some juicy secrets, I can put you in touch with some serious buyers.”

I blinked at that information. “Since when have you been all savvy on the supernatural scene?”

“Since monsters killed my two best friends.” She shrugged a shoulder. “I made it my business to learn. I was sort of startled how easy it was. No one really seems to spend all that much effort truly hiding from humanity.”

“There’s no need to,” I said. “Most people don’t want to know, wouldn’t believe it if you showed them.”

“So I’ve realized,” Valmont said.

“Why him?” Karrin asked. “What’s Nicodemus’s interest?”

I pursed my lips and sucked in my breath through my teeth thoughtfully. “Access,” I said. “Gotta be.”

“What do you mean?”

I held up Harvey’s picture. “This guy can get us something that no one else can. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

“Whose money does he handle?” Karrin asked.

I scanned the file. “Um . . . there’s a client list here. Individuals, businesses, estates, trusts. Most of it is just numbers, or has question marks. Several of them are listed as unknown.”

“Pretty standard,” Valmont said. “Guys like that operate at high levels of discretion. What has Nicodemus told you about this job?”

“The final objective, and you,” I said. “None of the steps in between.”

“Keeping you in the dark,” she said. “Keeps the carrot in your mind, but makes it harder for you to betray him if you aren’t sure what comes next.”

“Jerk,” I muttered. “So we don’t know what Nicodemus has in mind yet, but I bet you anything that Harvey here is step two.”

“Makes sense,” Karrin said.

“All right,” I said. “No details to any of the Chicago crew, okay? We’re playing pretty serious hardball. If word of this leaks, it could reflect on Mab badly, and that could get a little crucifixiony for me.”

Karrin grimaced. “So you also want to keep them in the dark and give them information on an as-needed, step-by-step basis?”

“Don’t want to,” I said. “Need to. The irony is not lost on me, but like I said, I’m playing this one kind of close to the chest.”

I closed my eyes again and checked on my body. The same feelings of vague discomfort and weariness seemed to permeate my limbs, and a faint twinge of what might have been the beginnings of a muscle cramp tugged at my back. The silver stud in my ear continued to weigh a little too much, and to pulse with cold at the very edge of comfort.

A gut instinct told me that Mab’s little painkiller wasn’t actually helping me,
except
to hide the pain I would otherwise be feeling. I’d poured out a lot of energy into just a couple of spells back at the hotel, and doing
it without my tools had been hard work. I’d been forced to draw upon the Winter mantle just to keep the pace I needed to stay alive. There wasn’t any hard information on how the mantle would interact with my abilities, since to the best of my knowledge there had never been a Winter Knight with a wizard’s skills before—but I was pretty sure that the more I leaned on that cold, dark power, the more comfortable I would get in doing so, and the more potential it would have to change who and what I was.

Whatever was in my head was close to killing me. I suddenly felt all but sure that Mab’s gift had two edges. Yes, it made me feel well enough to run around getting in danger—but it also left me weak enough to need the Winter mantle now more than ever. It was probably her way of telling me I needed to employ it more.

But sooner or later, doing that would change me, the way it had changed everyone who had come before me.

If it hadn’t changed me already.

I felt scared.

After a long moment of silence, Karrin said, “We’ll do it your way for now. Let’s go on in.”

I forced myself to shake off the dark thoughts and the fear that went with them. “You got my stuff?” I asked.

“Trunk.”

I got out and slogged over to the town car’s trunk. I got my duffel bag and staff out of it, and slung the reassuring weight of my duster over my shoulder to don once I got patched up and into some comfortable clothing. Maybe I would sleep in it.

It had been that kind of day.

* * *

I stopped inside Karrin’s kitchen, on the tile floor, so that I wouldn’t get blood on the carpet, and found Waldo Butters waiting for me.

Butters was a scrawny little guy in his midforties, though from his build you could mistake him for someone a lot younger. He had a shock of black hair that never combed into anything like order, a slender beak of a nose, glasses, and long, elegant fingers.

“Harry,” he said when I came in, offering me his hand. “We have got to stop meeting like this.”

I traded grips with him and grinned tiredly. “Yeah, or I’ll never be able to pay your bill.”

He looked me up and down critically. “What the hell happened? You get in a fight with a street sweeper?”

“Octokongs,” I said. “And a turtleneck with a machine gun.”

“Right calf,” Karrin said, bringing Valmont in out of the cold and locking the door behind her. “He’s been shot.”

“And you’re letting him walk around on it?” Butters demanded.

Karrin gave him a look that would have curdled milk. “Next time I’ll stick him in my purse.”

He sighed and said, “Look, Harry, I know you don’t feel the pain, but you are
not
invincible. Pain’s there for a damned reason.” He waved a hand at one of the kitchen chairs and said, “Sit, sit.”

The kitchen was a tiny one. I sat. Butters was a medical doctor, though he spent most of his time cutting up corpses as an Illinois medical examiner, and since the hospitals tended to get a little twitchy when you walked in with gunshot wounds, he’d taken care of such injuries on the down low for me before.

Butters unwrapped my leg, muttered under his breath, and said, “Let’s get him on the table. Help me extend it.”

“Yeah,” Karrin said.

They fussed about extending her kitchen table for a minute, and then she nudged me and said, “Come on, Harry, I’m not lifting you up there.”

That said, she still got her shoulder beneath my arm and helped me up, and then helped me lift my legs onto the table. It seemed a lot harder than it should have been to get myself into place.

“Butters,” I said, “you going to slash up my tux?”

“Just hold still,” he said, picking up a pair of safety scissors out of his bag of medical tools.

“Awesome,” I said, smiling. “I’m just going to close my eyes for a minute.”

“Karrin, would you hang out with Andi, please. It’s bad enough that
I’m working on him like this. I don’t need my elbows being crowded, too.”

“Right,” she said. “We’ll be in the living room.”

“Okay, Harry,” Butters said. “Let me get to work.”

“How you and Andi doing?” I asked him. “Still good?”

He didn’t react to my mention of his girlfriend. “Try not to move.”

I did that. The earring pulsed, waves of sleepy cold coming out a little faster than they had that morning. Butters prodded at the bullet wound with something, and I noted that it probably would have hurt like hell without the presence of Winter in my weary body. I opened my eyes long enough to see him swabbing out the injury with a plastic tool coated with what must have been some kind of antibiotic.

He was running it all the way through the hole in my leg.

I shuddered and closed my eyes again.

Day one of working with the Knights of the Blackened Denarius and I’d already been shot and ripped up by a pair of hideous abominations—and that had been doing something relatively simple and safe, by the standards of the rest of the operation.

I had this sinking feeling that day two was going to be worse.

O
pen your eyes, you fool. She’s right in front of . . .

I jerked my head up off the table, blinking. There had been a voice in my ear, as clear as day, speaking in a fearful, angry tone. “What?”

Time had gone by. Butters stood at the sink, cleaning his gear. He paused and looked over his shoulder at me, scowling, and said with perfect authority, “Lay. Down.”

I did. The earring felt like a chip of ice, so cold that I was about to start shivering. “Did you say something?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, frowning. “You were pretty out of it, man. I was letting you rest.”

“Someone else in here?”

“No, Harry,” he said.

“I could have sworn . . .”

He looked at me expectantly, raising one eyebrow. “Sworn what?”

I shook my head. “Beginning of a dream, maybe.”

“Sure,” Butters said.

“Am I going to make it, doc?”

He snorted. “Barring infection, you should be fine. No, wait—you
should
be in a hospital on an IV and then in a bed for a week. But knowing you, you’re probably going to keep doing whatever stupidly dangerous thing you’re doing. You probably won’t bleed to death while you’re doing it, now.”

I lifted my head enough to examine myself. My clothes were gone,
except for my pants, and they’d lost most of the right leg. Take that, Nicodemus’s heist budget. I had several cuts bandaged. I had fresh stitches in two of the cuts, plus at both ends of the hole in my leg, maybe a dozen altogether, and . . .

“Is that
Super Glue
holding these cuts closed?”

“Super Glue and sutures, and if I could figure out a way to duct-tape them all shut, I’d do that, too.”

“I’ll take the roll with me, just in case,” I said. “Can I get dressed, then?”

He sighed. “Try not to move too fast, okay? And be careful standing up. I don’t think the blood loss was too serious, but you might be a little dizzy for a while.”

I got up, slowly, and found my duffel bag. I pulled a set of fresh clothes out, ditched the rest of the tux, and tugged them on.

“So what
are
you doing?” Butters asked as I did. “Karrin’s been more tight-lipped than usual.”

“It’s better if I don’t say, for now,” I said. “But before I do anything else, I need to pay off a debt.”

He frowned at me. “What?”

I finished dressing, reached into the duffel bag, and withdrew a block of oak wood. It had taken me most of a month and several botched attempts to get the proportions correct, but in the end I had finally managed to carve a modestly accurate replica of a human skull. Once I’d gotten it carved, I’d boned it with tools I’d made from several curved and pointed sections of a deer’s antler Alfred had found for me, and then I’d gone to work. Now, the wooden skull was covered in neat, if crowded, inscriptions of runes and sigils much like those on my staff.

“Four months it took me to make this,” I said, and held it out to Butters. I didn’t know exactly who else was in the house, or how much they might hear, so I didn’t want to mention Bob the Skull out loud. The adviser-spirit was far too valuable and vulnerable a resource to advertise. “Give this to our mutual friend and tell him we’re even. He’ll be able to tell you what to do with it.”

Butters blinked several times. “Is this . . . what I think it is?”

I stepped closer to him and lowered my voice to a near whisper. “A
backup vessel for him,” I confirmed. “Not as nice as the one he has, but it should protect him from sunrise and daylight if he needs it. I made a deal with him. I’m paying up.”

“Harry,” Butters said. He shook his head slowly. “I’m sure he’ll be very pleased.”

“No, he won’t,” I snorted. “He’ll bitch and moan about how primitive it is. But he’ll
have
it, and that’s the important thing.”

“Thank you,” Butters said in a carefully polite tone, and slipped the wooden skull into his bag. “I’ll get it to him.”

I blinked a couple of times. “Uh, man? Are you okay?”

He looked at me for a moment before turning back to the sink and continuing to wash things. “It’s been a long year,” he said. “And I haven’t slept in a while. That’s all.”

That wasn’t all. I mean, I’m not exactly a social genius, but I could see that he was clearly anxious about something.

“Butters?” I asked.

He shook his head and his voice came out harder and cooler than I would have expected. “You should probably stop asking, Harry.”

“Yeah, I should probably eat more vegetables, too,” I said, “but let’s face it. That isn’t going to happen. So what’s up?”

He sighed. Then he said, “Harry . . . did you ever read
Pet Sematary
?”

I frowned. “Yeah, like, a long time ago . . .” My stomach twisted a little. “What are you saying exactly? You think I came back wrong?”

“You were
dead
, man,” Butters said. “People were . . . Look, when you were here, you were the sheriff in town, in a lot of ways. You died and
things
started moving on Chicago. Not just the Fomor. Ghouls have been lurking around. Stuff came out of Undertown. The vampires started putting people in their pockets. Even the straights started to notice. Molly did what she could, but the price she was obviously paying to do it . . .”

I watched his face as he spoke. His eyes were focused out at a thousand yards, his hands moving more and more slowly. “And your ghost showed up, and that was . . . you know. Weird. But we all figured that, hey, you hadn’t lived like the rest of us. It figured you wouldn’t die the same way, either.”

“Technically, it was more of a code-blue situation . . . ,” I began.

“You didn’t say that at the time,” Butters said.

I opened my mouth and then closed it again. He was right. I hadn’t. I mean, I hadn’t known back then, but he’d had a considerable amount of time to get used to the idea of me being an ex-wizard.

“Then you show up again, when things are getting worse and worse,” he said, smiling faintly. “I mean, badass big brother Harry, back from the dead, man. I don’t think you can know what that was like for us. You’ve had the kind of power you have for so long, I think maybe you’ve got very little clue what it feels like to walk around without it. You don’t know what it was like to sit there helplessly as bad things happened to people while you couldn’t do more than fumble around and maybe help someone once in a blue moon.” He let out a bitter little laugh. “Oh, the skull could tell me all kinds of things. I’m not sure that made it any better, knowing all about what was happening, without having the strength to do anything but slink around and do little things when you could—just hardly ever when you wanted to.”

“Butters,” I said.

He didn’t hear me. “And then to suddenly see that protector back, when you thought he was gone for good, when things were getting even worse.” He shook his head, his eyes welling. “It was like an IV of pure hope, man. Superman had his cape again. The sheriff was back in town.”

I bowed my head. I was pretty sure I knew what was next, and I didn’t like it at all.

“Except . . . you weren’t back in town, were you,” he said. “You stayed out on Creepy Island. You didn’t do anything. And then Molly was gone, too, so we didn’t even have
that
going for us. Will and Georgia both got put in the hospital last year, you know. For a while we weren’t sure they were going to make it. They have a little girl now. She almost wound up an orphan. Everyone’s lost someone over the past couple of years, or knows someone who has. And you stayed on Creepy Island.”

“I had to,” I said.

Butter’s jawline hardened. “Try to see this from my perspective, Harry,” he said. “Ever since Chichén Itzá, you haven’t been you. Do you even get that?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You made a deal. With
Mab
,” he said simply. “You apparently died. Your ghost showed up claiming you had died, and got us all to do things. Then you show up alive again, only you’ve got freaky Winter faerie powers. You were here for a
day
before Molly was gone, with freaky Winter faerie powers of her own. And you’ve been back for a year, living out on that island where hardly anyone can get to you, not talking, not helping, not
here
.” He looked at me for the first time. “Not
you
. Not the you we all know. The guy who came to gaming every week. Who we went to drive-in movies with.”

I stuffed my hands in my pockets.

“I know that things happen to people,” he said. “And maybe you’ve got excellent and real reasons for doing what you’ve done. But . . . at the end of the day, there’s just no replacement for being
here
. We’re losing people. Kids. Old folks. Hell, there was this thing killing people’s
pets
for a while.” He turned back to his washing. “It’s enough to make a guy a little bit cynical. And now you show up again, only you’re not talking about what you’re doing. People are worried that you’re going to go bad like the other Winter Knights have.” He spun back to me, his dark eyes hard and pained. “And when you sit up from being sewn up, what’s the first thing you do? Hey, Butters? How you doing, Butters? Sorry about beating up your girlfriend? Didn’t mean to wreck your computer room, man? No. The first thing you start talking about is
paying off a debt
.
Just like one of the Fae
.”

Which made a cold chill go through my stomach. Butters might not have all the facts, he might not have the full story, but . . .

He wasn’t wrong.

He started slapping his stuff back into his bag, though his voice stayed gentle. “I’m afraid, man. I know what’s going on out there now, and it’s scary as hell. So you tell me, Harry. Should I be anxious about Superman hanging out with Luthor? When I find out more about what you’re dragging Karrin into, is it going to make me less worried? Because I’m not sure I know you anymore.”

It was maybe fifteen seconds before I could answer.

“It isn’t going to make you any less worried,” I said quietly. “And I still can’t talk to you about it.”

“Honesty,” he said. He nodded a couple of times. “Well. At least we’ve got that much. There’s orange juice in the fridge. Drink some. Get a lot of fluids in the next few days.”

Then Butters took his bag and walked out of the kitchen.

He looked at least as tired as I felt. And I could see how afraid he was, and how the fear had worn him down. He had doubts. Which, in this world, was only smart. He had doubts about me. That hurt. But they were understandable. Maybe even smart. And he’d been up-front with me about it all. That had taken courage. If I truly had been turning into the monster he feared, by being honest with me about it, he would’ve just painted a huge target on his face. He’d done it anyway—which meant that he wasn’t sure, and he was willing to risk it.

And most important, when I’d needed his help, he’d shown up and given it.

Butters was good people.

And he wasn’t wrong.

I heard quiet talking going on in the living room, between Butters and Karrin and another female voice—Andi, presumably. A moment later, the door opened and closed again. The quiet of an emptier house settled over the place.

Karrin appeared in the doorway.

“You heard that, huh?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I did.” She crossed to the refrigerator, opened it, and took out a jug of orange juice. She got a plastic drinking glass out of the cupboard and poured it full. Then she passed the juice to me.

I grimaced and drank some, then stared down at the rest. “You agree with him?”

“I understand him,” she said.

“But do you agree?”

“I trust you,” she said.

Three words. Big ones. Especially coming from her. For a moment, they filled the room, and I felt something tight in my chest ease out of me.

I looked up at her and smiled with one side of my mouth. She answered it.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” I said.

The smile deepened around her eyes. “Maybe I’m a big girl who can make up her own mind.”

“Maybe you are,” I allowed.

“It’s been a hard year,” she said. “They’re tired, and scared. People lose faith sometimes. They’ll come around. You’ll see.”

“Thanks,” I said quietly.

She put her hand on my arm and squeezed, then let go of me. “I set Valmont up in the guest bedroom,” she said. “You’re in my room. I’m on the couch.”

“I’ll take the couch,” I said.

“You don’t fit on it, bonehead. You’re the one who got shot, remember? And I need you in the best shape possible if we’re going to do this.”

I swirled the orange juice in the glass. She had a point.

Mister appeared in the doorway, then flung himself at my shins. I pulled the injured one back so that his shoulder hit my left shin alone. I leaned down to rub his notched ear. “Where have you been, fuzzball?”

“It’s funny,” Karrin said. “He vanishes whenever Andi shows up for some reason.”

I remembered a scene of perfect havoc in the living room of my old apartment, and it made me smile. “Maybe she’s not a cat person,” I said.

“Drink your juice,” she said. I did. She filled up the glass and watched me drink it down again before she was satisfied.

“Okay,” she said. “Valmont’s already gone to bed. Go sleep. We’re getting an early start tomorrow, and you need to be sharp.”

This wasn’t my first rodeo, and Karrin had a point. You don’t survive situations like this by shorting yourself on vital rest for no reason. Besides, I’d already dealt with enough for one evening. Let the day’s trouble be enough for the day.

I headed back toward Karrin’s bedroom and paused as I entered the living room.

There were guns on the coffee table. Like, a lot of them, broken out on cloths, being cleaned, leaned against a nearby chair, where a large equipment bag waited to receive them. Karrin’s favorite little Belgian carbine was there, along with what looked like a couple of space guns. “New toys?” I asked.

“I’m a girl, Harry,” she said, rather smugly. “I accessorize.”

“Is that a bazooka?”

“No,” she said. “That is an AT4 rocket launcher. Way better than a bazooka.”

“In case we have to hunt dinosaurs?” I asked.