Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

“Perhaps,” he said, his eyes distant. “Or perhaps I’m the only one who isn’t.”

Anna Valmont moved to my side and said quietly, “Look.”

I looked.

Deirdre’s corpse stirred.

No, that wasn’t right. There was movement at the corpse, but the body wasn’t moving. Instead, a faint, silvery glow seemed to begin radiating from it. Then there was motion, and the glow coalesced into a humanoid shape, which after a moment refined itself into a translucent silvery shade in the shape of Deirdre. She sat up from the corpse, separating herself from it, and rose to her feet. She turned and paused, frowning down at the body, and then lifted her own hand and stared at it.

Behind her, the same silvery glow that had surrounded the body began to suffuse the solid stone image of an archway carved in the next wall. It spread to the edges of the carving where a silvery translucent lever appeared, in the same place the lever had been on the previous two gates.

Deirdre’s shade turned to look at her father. She smiled, sadly. Then she turned and drifted over to the lever. She wrapped ghostly hands around it and pulled it slowly down. The light in the stone intensified, becoming brighter and brighter, until there was a flash and it was gone, taking Deirdre’s shade and the stone alike with it, leaving an open archway in their place.

Light poured from the archway.

Golden light.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Nicodemus said, his voice calm, “we have done it.”

Forty

I just stood there for a moment, still stunned at what Nicodemus had done.

I tried to think of what would have to happen to motivate me to do something like that to Maggie. And it just didn’t click. There was nothing, nothing on earth I wouldn’t do to protect my child.

But you were willing to cut her mother’s throat, weren’t you? said a bitter little voice inside me. Are you any better?

Yeah. I was better. What I’d done to Susan had been at least partly her choice, too, and we’d done it to save Maggie and by extension the tens or hundreds of thousands or millions of victims the Red Court would have claimed in the future.

Nicodemus had consigned his daughter to death for what? A room welling up with a golden glow that . . .

Okay.

I’m not what most people think of as a greedy sort of guy, but . . .

All of us rolled forward a few steps, toward that golden light. Even Michael.

“That’s it,” Anna Valmont said quietly.

Ascher swallowed, and let out a nervous little laugh. “What do you think is in there?”

“Fortune and glory, kid,” I said. “Fortune and glory.”

“Dresden, Ascher,” Nicodemus said. “Check the way in for any further magical defenses. Valmont, watch for mechanical booby traps. The Genoskwa will accompany you and intercede should any guardian appear.”

“I thought once we were through the three gates, we were in the clear,” I said.

“My specific information, beyond here, is limited to inventory,” Nicodemus said. “It is at this point that I had assumed the intervention of more mythic forces, if they were to be had.”

“He’s right,” Valmont said. “You never assume you’re in the clear until you’ve gotten the goods, gotten away, and gotten liquid.”

“Michael,” I said, “come with. Just in case there’s anything big, bad, and smelly that tries to kill me.”

The Genoskwa let out an almost absentminded growl. His beady eyes gleamed reflected golden light.

“Of course,” Michael said. He carried Amoracchius at port arms, across the front of his body, grasping the blade lightly in one gloved hand with the other on the handle, rather than sheathing it.

“Grey,” Nicodemus said, “watch the rear. If you see anything coming, warn us.”

“Going to be hard to collect my loot from out here,” Grey said.

“I’ll spell you once I have the Grail.”

Grey nodded, albeit reluctantly. “All right.”

“Dresden,” Nicodemus said.

I took point, with Ascher on my right hand and Valmont on my left. Michael and the Genoskwa followed, a pair of mismatched bookends, though I noted that the Genoskwa was not making threatening noises or gestures at the wielder of Amoracchius. The Swords have a way of inspiring that kind of wariness in true villains.

I shook my head and focused on the task at hand, moving forward slowly, my magical senses extended, searching for any hint of wards, spells, or energies or entities unknown. Beside me, I could feel Ascher doing the same thing, though my sense of her was that she was tuned in on a slightly different bandwidth than I was, magically speaking. She was hunting for more subtle traps, illusions, psychic land mines. She wouldn’t be able to detect as many things as I would, but she would probably be better at spotting what she was looking for. Valmont had removed an old-style incandescent flashlight from her bag, one that was unlikely to fail in our presence unless some serious magical energy started flying. She shone it carefully, slowly on the ground and sweeping the walls ahead of us, watching for the shadows cast by trip wires, or pressure plates, or whatever other fiendish things she would probably know all about finding.

We crossed to the arch, one slow step at a time, and then into the tunnel. I strained my senses to their utmost.

Nothing.

And then we were in Hades’ vault.

. . . it . . .

. . . uh . . .

Imagine Smaug’s treasure hoard. Now imagine Smaug with crippling levels of obsessive-compulsive disorder and fanatic good taste.

It’s a pale description, and in no way a substitute for seeing it in person, but it’s the best I can do, except to say that looking upon Hades’ treasure vault made me feel like a dirty, grubby rat who had gnawed his way into the pantry. And my heart lurched into thunder. And I’m reasonably certain the pupils of my eyes vanished, to be replaced by dollar signs.

The light came primarily from the outstretched hands of two twenty-foot-tall golden statues in the center of the room. I found myself walking to one side, enough to see the details of each statue. Both consisted of the shapes of three women, standing back to back, in a triangle, their arms thrust outward and up, palms lifted to the ceiling. One of the women was an ancient crone. The next was a woman in the full bloom of her strength and maturity. The third was that of a young woman, recently matured out of childhood. The flames of one statue burned golden-green. The other statue’s flames were an icy green-blue.

And just looking at that, my heart started beating faster all over again.

Because I’d met every single one of them. I recognized their faces.

“Is that Hecate?” Ascher murmured, staring up at the statues in awe. “The triple goddess of the crossroads, right?”

I swallowed. “Uh. It . . . Yes, it might be.”

And it might also be Grannies Summer and Winter, Mab, Titania, Sarissa, and Molly Carpenter. But I didn’t say anything about that.

I pulled my eyes down from the statues and forced myself to look around the rest of the vault.

The room was about the size of a football field. The walls were a parquet of platinum and gold triangles, stretching up out of sight overhead. The floor was a smooth surface of white marble shot through with veins of pure, gleaming silver. Corinthian columns supported rooftops straight from ancient Athens in scores of small, separate display areas around the vault. Some of them were raised as much as seven or eight feet off the floor, and had to be reached by stairs of more silver-shot marble. Others were sunken in descending rows in a curling bow that looked almost like a Greek amphitheater, if it had been built with box seating.

I looked at the nearest . . . shrine. Or display case. Or whatever they were.

The spaces between the columns had been filled with walls made from bricks of solid gold.

Those were just the backdrop. The backdrop.

The nearest case was filled with paintings by Italian Renaissance masters, all working in the theme of divinity, showing images of saints and the Virgin and the Christ. Veneziano. Donatello. Botticelli. Raphael. Castagno. Michelangelo. Freaking da Vinci. Maybe fifty paintings in all, each displayed as meticulously as they might have been in the Louvre, in protected cases, with lights shining just so upon them from oddly shaped lanterns that might have been made from bronze and that put out no smoke whatsoever.

Surrounding the paintings, framing them, was a variety of topiary shapes—except instead of being made from living plants, I saw, after several glances, that they’d been made from emeralds. I couldn’t tell how whatever craftsman had shaped them had done it. Hell, I could barely tell that they weren’t plants at all. A fountain poured water silently into a shining pool in the display’s center, but then I saw that it wasn’t water, but diamonds, tiny and shining, pouring out in streams that somehow gave the impression of liquid.

That fountain could have filled every backpack we’d brought with us, plus all the improvised containers we could manufacture from our clothes. Never mind the emeralds. Never mind the tons of gold. Never mind the hundreds of millions of dollars in priceless art, paintings that had probably been written off as lost forever.

That was only one of the displays. And, I realized, as I swept my eyes slowly around me, it was one of the more modest ones.

“Okay,” Ascher breathed, her eyes wide. “I don’t know if I’m about to pass out or have an orgasm.”