Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

I shuddered visibly. “You are an extremely creepy man,” I said. I looked back at Nicodemus. “I can see a possible problem.”

“Yes?”

“Marcone is not a dummy,” I said. “He’s gone up against supernatural powers more than once. He knows that sooner or later, he and I are going to get into it. He doesn’t make mistakes often, and he never fails to learn from them. He’ll have supernatural precautions as well as physical ones.”

“Such as?” Nicodemus asked.

“If I was him,” I said, “I’d have something rigged to shut down all the electronic gizmos and close off the vault as soon as the building’s power got disrupted—which just might happen when Ascher and I start throwing magic around. In fact, I’d set it up to happen as soon as any amount of magic started flying.”

“It would be smart,” Binder said in agreement. “Don’t think it’d be too hard to fix, either. Have circuits set up around the place, something delicate that would go out without too much trouble.”

“Like the ones in cell phones or something,” I added. “Those things go to pieces if a wizard looks at them funny.”

“Yeah,” Binder said, nodding. “I can use one, but only just. Had to start keeping it powered off when I took up with Ash, here.”

“Assuming such a . . . wizard alarm, I suppose, exists,” Nicodemus said, “how shall we defeat it?”

“Not a problem for me,” Binder said. “It wouldn’t even blink. These two, though, we’d have to . . .”

I eyed Binder sourly and rubbed at the itch on my neck again.

“Sorry, mate,” he said. He sounded genuine about it. “Thorn manacles,” he said to Nicodemus. “You know the ones?”

“I have some in stock,” Nicodemus said. “Though mine are svartalf make, not faerie. Steel. I suppose they’ll keep the talent of you and Miss Ascher suppressed as much as possible. Simpler than keeping running water flowing over you both, in any case.”

He gave me a small smirk when he said it. He’d once had me chained up under a freezing-cold stream to prevent me from using my talents to escape or make mischief. If another good man hadn’t given himself in exchange for me, I might have died there. Thorn manacles were uncommon but by no means unattainable magical bindings that accomplished the same thing, dampening a wizard’s powers to the point of uselessness.

And they hurt like a son of a bitch. In fact, if he had some that worked the same way but were made of steel, they were going to hurt me to an outstanding degree, given how they functioned.

I returned Nicodemus’s smirk with a wintry smile.

Binder continued, either ignoring or not noticing the look between Nicodemus and me. “Once the two of them are inside, get them into a circle before the manacles come off,” Binder said. “That will contain the excess energy when they work their mojo. It should help.”

“Mmm,” Nicodemus mused. “We’ll have to change the entry plan. Dresden won’t be able to provide a distraction. We’ll have to use more”—he glanced toward the Genoskwa—“overt means.”

In the darkness, a faint gleam of yellow appeared beneath the Genoskwa’s eyes.

Hell’s bells, the thing was smiling.

Karrin shot me a look. She was thinking the same thing I was: The Genoskwa wasn’t going to distract anything, except by ripping its head off. Depending on when we went in, God only knew how many people might be in that bank—people with absolutely no knowledge of its provenance. Even the building’s security forces wouldn’t necessarily know they worked for the outfit. And hell, when you got right down to it, I wasn’t willing to feed even a mobster to something like the Genoskwa at Nicodemus’s behest.

I rubbed at my neck again and said, “Nah, I got it still.”

“Excuse me?” Nicodemus said.

“Noisy distraction? I’ll handle it. No sense showing our secret weapon early if we don’t have to do it, right?”

Nicodemus smiled faintly. “What, wizard? Without your talents?”

“I hadn’t planned on using them anyway,” I said. “Could be someone was going to get hurt during this. The White Council takes a pretty dim view of magic used for that kind of thing—and I have to think about my future. You want loud and obvious? Not a problem.”

The Genoskwa’s voice came rumbling from the shadows. “He’s soft.”

“He’s smart,” I said in harsh rejoinder. “The harder you hit things on the way in, the harder Marcone’s going to be ready to hit back on the way out. Hell, if you make a big enough stink, you’ll have the cops there, too. There are only about thirteen thousand of those guys running around Chicago, but I’m sure the eight of us can handle them. Right?”

The Genoskwa let out a low growl. “I am not afraid of them.”

“Sure you aren’t,” I said. “That’s why you cruised all over the place invisible the past two days, because you didn’t care if you were spotted.”

“Gentlemen,” Nicodemus said, his voice raised and slightly tense. And then he paused, frowning, his head cocked partly to one side, as if trying to identify a distant sound.

Ascher suddenly looked up, frozen in the act of scratching her arm again, and said, “Dresden? Do you feel that?”

The itching on the back of my neck resolved itself into a full-on creepy sensation, the awareness of someone watching me. I closed my eyes and extended my other senses, reaching out with my talent to feel for magic in the air around me—and found the eavesdropping spell almost at once.

Ascher had already given us away with her comment, so there was no point in being cute about it. “Someone’s listening in on us,” I breathed, coming to my feet.

“Where?” Nicodemus spat.

Ascher pointed to the far end of the slaughterhouse. “There, not far. Just outside, I think.”

The sensation abruptly vanished as the spell winked out of existence—but not before I’d found the spell’s focus—the thaumaturgic version of the bug that had been planted so that the eavesdropper could hear us.

“Binder,” Nicodemus said at once.

Binder had already produced a hoop of wire from his suit coat’s pocket. He moved to a clear space of floor, gave it a toss with a flick of his wrist, and the wire unreeled and unfolded into a circle almost three feet across. It landed on the floor even as Binder spoke a few words, and filled with amber light.

Binder was a chump sorcerer, but he had one trick that he could do really, really well—summoning a small army of creatures from the Nevernever that he had somehow bound to his will. It took him less than two seconds to whistle up the first of his suits—humanoid figures dressed in something that resembled a badly fitted suit, their proportions and features looking almost normal, until one looked at them a little more closely. The demonic servitor flung itself up out of the circle like an acrobat emerging from a trapdoor in the stage, and Binder tapped his foot down onto the circle of wire in perfect time, releasing the suit from the circle’s confinement as it tumbled clear. Then he lifted his foot and dropped it down again in metronomic time as a second suit emerged from the Nevernever, and a third, and a fourth, and so on.

“Spell’s gone,” Ascher reported. “He heard us. He’s running.”

“He’s heard too much,” Nicodemus said, and turned to Binder. “Can your associates track him?”

“Like bloodhounds,” Binder confirmed.

Nicodemus nodded. “Kill him.”

Binder let out a short whistle and cocked a finger in the direction Ascher had indicated. The suits needed no more indication than that. They bounded off in that direction with greater than human agility.