Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

“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?”

“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.”

Ten

So, 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 kid

ding 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.