Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

“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.

Thirteen

Open 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 w

ere 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.