Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

Deirdre promptly swarmed halfway down the stairs, and then there were several sharp sounds of impact, as her metallic hair shot out, surrounding Ascher, and slammed onto the floor around her. The flat ribbonlike hairs spread out, edge down, scraping along the marble tile like a squeegee, sweeping the standing water away.

Ascher looked like she nearly had a heart attack when Deirdre did that, and cast a glare up at the Denarian. But then she took the can and sprayed a layer of what looked like some kind of aerosolized plastic or rubber onto the floor. She laid it out in a large circle around her, overlapping the circle onto the wall and continuing it up to a few inches above her head. It was lopsided, but technically a circle didn’t have to be a perfect one to contain the magic. It was just a lot more efficient—not to mention professional—that way.

Ascher, who was looking damned appealing in her wet clothes (and dammit, how could I blame my reaction on the Winter mantle when it was being held at bay by iron?), went over the circle again, making sure the plastic spray was especially thick at the joints of the floor and wall. Then she nodded once, bent, and twisted her wrist so that a couple of drops of her blood fell from the manacles onto the circle. It snapped up into place at once, a screen of invisible energy, and she promptly unlocked her manacles and dropped them onto the floor at her feet. Then she narrowed her eyes, touched her finger to the wall inside the circle, and murmured a quiet word.

Light sprang out from her fingertip, sudden and fierce, and steam began to hiss up where droplets of water fell onto her hand or the wall. She began to move her fingertip slowly, and I watched as marble and the drywall and the concrete and metal beneath it began to crack and blacken and part. Glowing motes and sparks flew back from her, falling thickly on her hand and her arm, then blackening and dropping to the floor, burning holes in her sleeve but leaving her flesh, as far as I could see, untouched.

I lifted my eyebrows at that. I mean, I guess I could turn my finger into an arc welder, sure, but that wouldn’t mean that my entire hand wouldn’t burn to a crisp as I did it. That kind of inurement to the elements required an entirely different order and magnitude of talent—talent very few wizards, in my experience, possessed.

Man. When Ascher said she mostly worked with fire, she wasn’t kidding.

Binder and his troops came into the bank while she was working, and Binder immediately scouted out the place and started assigning groups to various defensive positions. As he did that, Anna Valmont slid silently across the floor until she stood near me. She looked at the thorn manacles on my wrist.

“I can’t stand to look at those things,” she said. “It must hurt.”

I bit down on a sharp reply. She wasn’t looking for that by standing near me. “Yeah, pretty much.”

She fiddled with her gear and licked her lips. “How long, do you think, before you can take them off?”

“No idea,” I said. “Depends on Ascher, I guess.”

There was a loud snapping sound and a squeal of parting metal from below, and Ascher half snarled, “That’s right, bitch,” and began putting her manacles back on in a businesslike fashion.

It had taken her less than three minutes to slice an opening large enough to admit a big guy into the reinforced wall.

She smeared the circle with her foot, and the excess energy of the spell dispersed into the air to be immediately smothered by the falling water. Then she put her hand on the cut section and began to push.

Grey slid in front of her and said, “Best let me go first, Miss Ascher.” He set his shoulders and almost casually shoved the cut section of wall down, and it fell through to the hallway beyond with a satisfying boom—and was instantly echoed by the hollow, coughing blast of a shotgun from the hallway beyond.

Grey was flung off of his feet to the ground, where he promptly became the origin point of a growing puddle of blood.

Ascher let out a choked sound and flattened herself desperately to the side of the opening, into the shelter of the unexposed side of the stairwell.

The shotgun boomed twice more, and then Deirdre was through the opening. The shotgun went off again, and then a man screamed.

Then silence.

I snarled wordlessly. I rushed down the stairs to check on Ascher, and then peered through the hole in the wall. Deirdre crouched beyond it, on all fours like a wary cat, her hair spread out around her and moving slowly, like strands of kelp in a gentle current. A fourth guard lay unmistakably dead on the floor in front of her, his shotgun still gripped loosely in his hand.

“Grey,” Nicodemus said, his voice tight.

Of course he was worried about Grey. Grey hadn’t done his job with the retina scanner yet.

Ascher was shaken but untouched. I gave her shoulder a quick squeeze and turned to Grey, trying to remember what I knew about first aid and tourniquets.

I needn’t have bothered. Grey had already begun sitting up even before I turned around, and his hair was mussed. Other than that, and the bloodied clothing, he looked entirely healthy. His expression was annoyed. “Damn, that hurts.”

“Whiner,” I said. “One little load of buckshot to the chest.” I offered him my hand.

Grey stared blankly at my hand for a second, as if it had taken him a moment to remember what the gesture meant. Then he took it and I pulled him up to his feet. He wobbled once, and then shook his head and steadied.

“You okay?” I asked.

He gestured at all the blood on the floor. “Hit my heart. I’ll be fine in a minute.”

“Man,” I said, impressed. “Takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”

Grey showed me his teeth, then turned, poised and contained once more, and stalked through the doorway after Deirdre.

Hannah Ascher got slowly to her feet and stood staring down at the smeared puddle of blood on the floor. She swallowed and started back up the stairs.

I put out a hand and stopped her. “It’ll take the cops time to get here, but you probably don’t want to be standing around on the first floor when they do,” I said.

“Too right,” said Binder, coming up behind Valmont, still at the stairway’s top and nudging her down like a bulldog herding a hesitant child. “Bullets are no respecters of persons. Go on, girl. And Ash, love, don’t forget to fill my pack.”

Ascher had a couple of empty black backpacks slung over her shoulder. “I know, I know. The red ones.”

Nicodemus came to the top of the stairs, dragging the unconscious guard, and came down the steps, taking the guard along none too gently. Once he had the man to the bottom, he interlaced his handcuffs with those of the men already on the floor and cuffed him there.

“Well-done, Miss Ascher,” Nicodemus said. “We’ll secure the hallway and you can repeat your excellent performance on the second do

or. Miss Valmont, if you would accompany us, please—I’ll want you working on the main vault door the moment we have access to it.”

Anna Valmont tensed beside me, her fingers fretting over the surface of her tool roll, constantly wiping droplets of water away.

“Michael,” I said, “why don’t you go on in and make sure Valmont has everything she needs?”

Michael arched an eyebrow at me, but nodded, and came down the stairs to Anna Valmont’s side. He gave her an encouraging smile, which she returned hesitantly, and the two of them went on through in the wake of the others.

“Dresden,” Nicodemus said, his tone amused. “Surely you don’t think I’d do anything to the woman simply because her purpose had been served?”

“Not if you want that Way opened, you won’t,” I said.

Nicodemus smiled at me. He had buckled on a sword belt bearing the long blade he’d used earlier and a curved Bedouin dagger. “There, you see. You can learn to play the game after all.” He vanished through the security door. A moment later, a huge shadow moved through the narrow stairway. I never saw the Genoskwa go by, but I felt the brush of patchy fur against the skin of my right hand, smelled a faint reek of its odor in the air, and bits of ash and the scent of burned hair came from the edges of the torched opening as the huge beast squeezed through it.

“This stinks,” Binder said a moment later, his voice pitched low. “This stinks all to hell.”

“Hah,” I said. “Maybe it’s just the furball.”

He snorted, and we waited in silence for another three or four minutes, until Ascher reappeared, newly muddy with ashes and soot from burning through the second wall, wearing the manacles again. “That big thing creeps me out,” she said.

“Too right,” Binder said. “Gotta wonder what something like that wants with jewels, eh?”

He wasn’t wrong about that.

“You’re right,” I said. “It smells.”

Ascher traded a long look with Binder. “Should we leave?”

Binder grimaced. “And leave Old Nick unable to get through his fiery gate? He’d take that personal, I think. What is Uncle Binder’s Rule Number Two?”