Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

I was getting a little annoyed now, as well as embarrassed. My face felt as though it had a mild sunburn. “Dammit, Karrin, we’re supposed to be back at the slaughterhouse in twenty minutes. Come on, it’s just not that funny.”

“The look”—she panted, giggling helplessly—“on your . . . face . . .”

I sighed and muttered under my breath and waited for her to recover.

It took her only a couple more minutes, though she drifted back into titters several times before she finally picked herself up off the floor.

“Are you quite finished?” I asked her, trying for a little dignity.

She dissolved into hiccoughing giggles again instantly.

It was highly unprofessional.

Twenty-five

By the time we got back to the slaughterhouse, the sun had gone down, and the night had come on cold and murky. Rain had begun to fall in a fine mist, and the temperature had dropped enough that I could see it starting to coat the city in a fine sheet of ice.

“Ice storm,” Karrin noted as she parked the car. “Perfect.”

“At least it’ll keep people in,” I said.

“Depending on how this goes, that might cut down on innocent bystanders,” she said. “Is Mab messing with the weather again?”

I squinted out at the weather. “No,” I said, immediately and instinctively certain of the answer. “This is just winter in Chicago being winter in Chicago. Mab doesn’t care about innocent bystanders.”

“But she might care about giving you an advantage.”

I snorted and said, “Mab helps those who help themselves.”

Karrin gave me a thin smile. “That thing you did, with the Genoskwa. You threw magic at it.”

“Yep.”

“It didn’t work, I guess.”

“Nope,” I said. “I hit him with my best shot, something Mab gave me. Just drained off him, grounded out.”

“Grounded,” she said. “Like with a lightning rod?”

“Exactly like that,” I said. “The Forest People know magic, and they’re ridiculously powerful, but they understand it differently than humans do. The one I knew used water magic like nothing I’d ever seen or heard of before. This Genoskwa . . . I think he’s using earth magic the same way. On a level I don’t know a damned thing about.”

“Pretend I don’t know a damned thing about earth magic either,” Karrin said, “and bottom-line it for me.”

“I threw the most potent battle magic I know at him, and he shut it down with zero trouble. I’m pretty sure he’ll be able to do it as much as he wants.”

“He’s immune to magic?” Karrin asked.

I shrugged. “If he senses it coming and can take action, pretty much,” I said. “Which makes me think that he’s not all that bright.”

“Hell of a secret to give away when his goal wasn’t to actually kill you.”

“No kidding,” I said. “Maybe he gave me too much credit and assumed I already knew. Either way, I know now.”

“Right,” Karrin said. “Which gives you an advantage. You won’t bother trying to blast him with magic the next time.”

I shuddered, thinking of the creature’s sheer speed and power, and of exactly how little he feared me. I touched the handle of my new revolver, now loaded and in my duster pocket. “With any luck, there won’t be a next time.”

Karrin turned to me abruptly, her expression earnest. “Harry,” she said quietly, “that thing means to kill you. I know what it looks like. Don’t kid yourself.”

I grimaced and looked away.

Satisfied that she’d made her point, she nodded and got out of the car. She’d slung one of her space guns (she’d called it a Kriss) on a harness under her coat, and you almost couldn’t see it when she moved. She rolled around to the trunk, looked up and down the street once, and then took out the rocket launcher and slung it over her shoulder. In the dark, in the rain, it looked like it might have been one of those protective tubes that artists use, maybe three and a half feet long.

“Really think you can hit him with that thing?” I asked.

“It’s weapon enough to handle him,” she said. “If I have to.”

I squinted up at the drizzling mist and said, “I’m getting tired of this job.”

“Let’s get it done, then,” Karrin said.

* * *

This time, when we rolled in, Jordan wasn’t on duty. Maybe he’d been given a shift off to get some sleep. Or maybe Nicodemus was so sure I was about to break through his conditioning and suborn him that he’d moved the kid to a less vulnerable post. Yeah. That was probably it.

When we came in, most of the crew was already downstairs, gathered around the conference table. Even the Genoskwa was standing around in plain sight, albeit in a deep patch of shadow that reduced his visible presence to an enormous, furry shadow. Only Nicodemus and Deirdre were absent—and I spotted Deirdre standing silently on one of the catwalks, looking down at the table, where Binder was telling some sort of animated anecdote or joke.

She looked . . . disturbed. Don’t get me wrong—a girl who goes around biting the tongues out of men’s mouths is disturbed one way or another, but the Denarian killer looked genuinely troubled, or distressed, or something.

Karrin caught me looking at her and sighed. “We can’t afford another damsel, Dresden.”

“I wasn’t thinking that,” I said.

“Sure you weren’t.”

“Actually,” I said, “I was thinking she looked vulnerable. Might be a good time to confront her about how Harvey died.”

Karrin clucked her tongue thoughtfully. “I’ll be at the table.”

“Yeah.”

She descended the stairs, and I ambled out along the catwalk to stand beside Deirdre.

She looked up at me as I approached, her eyes flat. But then her gaze shifted back to the room below.

“And then I said”—Binder snickered, evidently coming to the punch line—“why did you wear it, then?”

Hannah Ascher burst out in a short, hearty belly laugh, and was joined, more quietly, by Anna Valmont. Even Grey smiled, at least a little. The expression looked somehow alien on his oddly unremarkable features.

Deirdre stared down at them all, her expression dispassionate, like a scientist observing bacteria. Her eyes flickered toward me for a second as I approached, her body tensing slightly.

Being a genius interrogator, I asked her, “So. Why’d you kill Harvey?”

She looked at me for a few

seconds, then turned her eyes back to the room below, to watch Karrin come to the table. There was a moment of silence from everyone as they took in her armament. Then Grey rose, suddenly dapper, and offered to help her with the rocket launcher like it was a coat. Karrin let him, giving him an edged smile that she directed past him, to the shadows where the Genoskwa lurked.

“I didn’t kill the accountant,” she said quietly. “Nicodemus said not to.”

That surprised me a little. If she wanted to hide herself from me, she didn’t need to go to the effort of lying. All she had to do was stay silent.

“He said that to all of us,” I said. “Maybe he said something else to you privately.”

“He didn’t,” she said. “My mother killed him with a spell she calls the Sanguine Scalpel.”

“The cuts looked a lot like the ones you would inflict,” I said.

“A cut throat is a cut throat, wizard.”

Tough to argue with that one. “And you chased her.”

“I went to say . . . to talk to her, yes.”

“What did she have to say?”

“Personal things,” Deirdre replied.

I narrowed my eyes.

Something wasn’t jiving here. Deirdre was demonstrating absolutely no emotion about her mother, which in my experience is the next best thing to impossible for almost anyone. Hell, even Maeve had carried enormous mother issues around with her. If Tessa was really trying to beat Nicodemus and Deirdre to the Holy Grail, there should have been something there. Frustration, irritation, fear, anger, resignation, something.

Not this distant, cool clarity.

Tessa wasn’t after any Grail.

But what else could motivate her?

Deirdre looked up from below and studied me calmly. “He knows that you mean to betray him, you know.”

“Makes us even,” I said.

“No, it doesn’t,” she said, in that same distant voice. “Not even close. I’ve seen him disassemble men and women more formidable than you, dozens of times. You don’t have a chance of tricking him, out-planning him, or beating him.” She stated it as a simple fact. “Mab knows it, too.”

“Then why would she send me?”