Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

“You will perform precisely as instructed.”

“I will not,” I said. “I know how he works. Whatever he’s doing, it’s nothing but bad news. People are going to get hurt—and I’m not going to be a part of that. I’m not going to help him.”

“It is obvious to me that you did not listen to me very carefully,” Mab said.

“It is obvious to me that you just don’t get it,” I replied. “There are things you just don’t do, Mab. Helping a monster like that get what he wants is one of them.”

“Even if refusing costs you your life?” she asked.

I sighed. “Have you even been paying attention, the past couple of years? Do you have any doubt that I would rather die than become part of something like that?”

Her teeth made a white gleam in the dark. “And yet, here you are.”

“Do you really want to push this?” I asked. “Do you want to lose your shiny new Knight already?”

“Hardly a loss if he will not fulfill a simple command,” Mab said.

“I’ll fulfill commands. I’ve done it before.”

“In your own inept way, yes,” Mab said.

“Just not this one.”

“You will do precisely as instructed,” Mab said. She took a very small step closer to me. “Or there will be consequences.”

I swallowed.

The last Knight to anger Mab had wound up begging me to end his life. The poor bastard had been grateful.

“What consequences?” I asked.

“The parasite,” Mab said. “When it kills you and emerges, it will seek out everyone you know. Everyone you love. And it will utterly destroy them—starting with one child in particular.”

Gooseflesh erupted along my arms. She was talking about Maggie. My daughter.

“She’s out of this,” I said in a whisper. “She’s protected.”

“Not from this,” Mab said, her tone remote. “Not from a being created of your own essence, just as she is. Your death will bring a deadly creature into the world, my Knight—one who knows all that you know of your allies. Lovers. Family.”

“No, it won’t,” I said. “I’ll go back to the island. I’ll instruct Alfred to imprison it the moment it breaks free.”

Mab’s smile turned genuine. It was considerably scarier than her glare. “Oh, sweet child.” She shook her head. “What makes you think I shall allow you to return?”

I clenched my fists along with my teeth. “You . . . you bitch.”

Mab slapped me.

Okay, that doesn’t convey what happened very well. Her arm moved. Her palm hit my left cheekbone, and an instant later the right side of my skull smashed into the elevator door. My head bounced off it like a Ping-Pong ball, my legs went rubbery, and I got a really, really good look at the marble tile floor of the elevator. The metal rang like a gong, and was still reverberating a couple of minutes later, when I slowly sat up. Or maybe that was just me.

“I welcome your suggestions, questions, thoughts, and arguments, my Knight,” Mab said in a calm voice. She moved one foot, gracefully, and rested the tip of her high heel against my throat. She put a very little bit of her weight behind it, and it hurt like hell. “But I am Mab, mortal. It is not your place to judge me. Do you understand?”

I couldn’t talk, with her heel nudging my voice box. I jerked my head in a short nod.

“Defy me if you will,” she said. “I cannot prevent you from doing so—if you are willing to pay the price for it.”

And with that, she removed her foot from my throat.

I sat up and rubbed at it. “This is not a smart way to maintain a good professional relationship with me,” I croaked.

“Do I seem stupid to you, my Knight?” she asked. “Think.”

I eyed her. Mab’s voice was perfectly calm. After what I’d said to her, the defiance I’d offered her, I hadn’t expected that. She had never been shy about showing her outrage when she felt it had been earned. This perfect poise was . . . not out of character, precisely, but I had expected a good deal more intensity than she was displaying. My defiance endangered her plans, and that never left her in a good mood.

Unless . . .

I closed my eyes and ran back through her words in my head.

“Your precise instructions,” I said slowly, “were to go with Nicodemus and help him until such time as he completed his objective.”

“Indeed,” Mab said. “Which he stated was to remove the contents of a vault.” She leaned down, took a fistful of my shirt in her hand, and hauled me back to my feet as easily as she might heft a Chihuahua. “I never said what you would do after.”

I blinked at that. Several times. “You . . .” I dropped my voice. “You want me to double-cross him?”

“I expect you to repay my debt by fulfilling my instructions,” Mab replied. “After that . . .” Her smile returned, smug in the shadows. “I expect you to be yourself.”

“Whatever Nicodemus has going this time . . . you want to stop him, too,” I breathed.

She tilted her head, very slightly.

“You know he’s not going to honor the truce,” I said quietly. “He’s going to try to take me out somewhere along the line. He’s going to betray me.”

“Of course,” she said. “I expect superior, more creative treachery on your part.”

“While still keeping your word and helping him?” I demanded.

Her smile sharpened. “Is it not quite the game?” she asked. “In my younger days, I would have relished such a novel challenge.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Gee. Thanks.”

“Petulance does not become the Winter Knight,” Mab said. She turned to the elevator doors, which had an enormous dent in them the same shape as a wizard’s noggin. They swept open with a groan of protesting metal. “Do this for me, and I shall ensure the safe removal of the parasite when the task is completed.”

“Nicodemus, his daughter, and God knows what else is in his crew,” I said. “I’m working with my hands tied, and you expect me to survive this game?”

“If you want to live, if you want your friends and family to live, I expect you to do more than survive it,” Mab said, sweeping out. “I expect you to skin them alive.”

Five

“To Mab’s credit,” Karrin Murphy said, “she is sort of asking you to do what you’re good at.”

I blinked. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“You have a tendency to weasel out of these bargains you get yourself into, Harry,” she said. “You have a history.”

“Like I shouldn’t fight them?” I demanded.

“You probably should focus more on not getting into them in the first place,” she said, “but that’s just one humble ex-cop’s opinion.”

We were sitting in Karrin’s living room, in the little house with the rose garden she’d inherited from her grandmother. She was sipping tea, her spring-muscle body coiled up into a lazy-looking ball at one end of the couch. I sat in the chair across from her. My big grey cat, Mister, was sprawled in my lap, luxuriating and purring while I rubbed his fur.

“You’ve taken good care of him,” I said. “Thank you.”

“He’s good company,” she said. “Though I wonder if he wouldn’t like it b

etter with you.”

I moved from Mister’s back to rubbing behind his ears exactly the way he liked best. His purr sounded like a miniature motorboat. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed the little furball until he’d come running up and thrown his shoulder against my shins. Mister weighed the next best thing to thirty pounds. I wondered how the diminutive Karrin had managed to keep from being knocked down by his affection every time she came home. Maybe she had applied some principle of Aikido out of self-defense.

“He might,” I said. “I’m . . . sort of settled now. And there’s nothing on the island big enough to take him. But it’s cold out there in the winter, and he’s getting older.”

“We’re all getting older,” Karrin said. “Besides. Look at him.”

Mister rolled onto his back and chewed happily at my fingertips, pawing at my arms and hands with his limbs without extending his claws. Granted, he was a battle-scarred old tomcat with a stub tail and a notched ear, but damn if it wasn’t cute, and I suddenly felt my eyes threaten to get blurry.

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s kind of my buddy, isn’t he?”

Karrin’s blue eyes smiled at me over the rim of her teacup. Only attitude kept her from being an itty-bitty person. Her golden brown hair was longer than it had been since I could remember offhand, tied back into a ponytail. She wore yoga pants, a tank top, and a flannel shirt and had been practicing martial arts forms of some kind when I arrived.

“Of course,” she said, “you could do it the other way, too.”

“What do you mean?”

“You could live here,” she said. Then added, a beat too quickly, “In Chicago. You could, you know. Move back to town.”

I frowned, still playing with my cat. “I don’t . . . Look, when the next freak burns down my place, maybe I won’t get as lucky as I did last time.”

“Last time you wound up with a broken back and working for a monster,” Karrin said.

“Exactly,” I said. “And it was only because of literal divine intervention that none of my neighbors died.” I shook my head. “The island isn’t a kind place, but no one is going to come looking for trouble there.”