Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

“I liked the music,” he said.

* * *

I took the extra box of diamonds and went to see Marcone.

Molly came with me, but I didn’t need her intuition to know who I would find there. When we got there, she looked at the building and said, “That bitch.”

“Yeah,” I said.

I knocked at the door of the Brighter Future Society. It was a small but genuine castle that Marcone had paid to move to Chicago. It was not lost on me that he had erected the damned thing on the lot formerly occupied by the boardinghouse whose basement I’d rented for years. Jerk.

The door opened and a man the height and width of a drawbridge glowered down at me. He had long hair, a mad bomber’s beard, and enough muscle to feed a thousand hungry vultures.

“Your name is Skaldi Skheldson,” I said. “You know who I am. I’m here to see Marcone and his guest.”

Skaldi frowned. Skaldi’s frown would have been intimidating if I hadn’t spent the past few days hanging out with the Genoskwa.

I bobbed an eyebrow at him and said, “Well?”

The frown became a scowl. But he stepped aside and let me in. I said, “Thanks,” and headed for the conference room. I knew right where it was. I’d visited when I was a mostly dead ghost. Skaldi hurried to keep up with me. The fact that I already knew where I was going appeared to leave him a little unsettled.

Wizard.

We passed several other Einherjaren as I walked through the building, and opened the door to the conference room without knocking.

Mab was inside, seated at one end of the table, her expression distant and implacable, her back ramrod-straight. Her dress and her hair were both pitch-black, as were her eyes, all the way across her sclera. She was here, then, in her aspect of Judgment.

People die when Mab shows up in black. The last time I’d seen her in that outfit, two Faerie Queens had bled out onto the soil of Demonreach.

Seated at her right hand, wearing a charcoal-grey suit, was Gentleman Johnnie Marcone, Baron of Chicago under the Unseelie Accords—and made so, at least in part, by my own signature. There might have been slightly more silver at his temples than the last time I’d seen him, but it only made him look more distinguished. Otherwise, he looked exactly as he always did: calm, alert, impeccably groomed, and as merciful as a lawn mower’s blade.

“You could have told me from the beginning,” I said to Mab.

She regarded me with flat black eyes and tilted her head, a curiously birdlike gesture.

“You were balancing the scales with Nicodemus,” I said. “But it was never about paying back a favor. And it wasn’t about foiling his scheme. This was full-scale political vengeance.”

Very, very slowly, Mab lifted her hands and placed them flat on the table in front of her. Her nails were black and looked sharp enough to slice silk.

“You set Nicodemus up from the very beginning,” I said. “You, Hades, and Marcone.”

Marcone tilted his head from one side to the other and said nothing.

“It’s the only thing that makes sense,” I said. “Why you sent Molly away—because she’d have known you were up to something. Why the plans to Marcone’s vault were available. Why the bodies got cleaned up, and why the cops didn’t crawl all over this thing when it was done. Hell, they’re probably spinning the shoot-out and the explosions as some kind of terrorist attack. And I’ll bet you anything that the squires found themselves offered a new job, now that their demigod has fallen from grace. Right?”

A ghost of a smile haunted Marcone’s lips.

“Nicodemus violated your Accords,” I said to Mab. “He kidnapped Marcone. He abducted the emissary appointed under the Accords. This was your payback. You arranged for him to get the details about Hades’ vault.” I turned to Marcone. “You built your vault specifically to create the link so that a Way could be opened there. All so you could set Nicodemus up, years after he wronged you both.” I met Mab’s unwavering gaze and said, “And you dealt him the worst pain you could imagine. You took away his daughter. No, you did even worse—you made him do it himself.”

Neither of them said anything.

But Mab’s raven black nails sank a fraction of an inch into the wood of the table, and her void black eyes glittered.

“Now he’s lost his lieutenant,” I continued. “He’s lost his squires. When word gets out of his treachery, he’ll lose his name. No one will want to work with him. No one will deal with him. From where you’re standing, you’ve done worse than kill him. You’ve wounded him, strangled his power, and left him to suffer.”

A long moment of silence passed.

I turned to Marcone. “And what did you get out of it? You got to build the vault, and to secure the clientele who use it. My money says that Hades was your first depositor. That when he made that gesture of trust in you, others followed his example—and that now you’re holding in trust a treasure trove like none in the supernatural world. And if you got a little payback on Nicodemus as a side effect of that, you didn’t mind it at all. And you’ll have plenty of money to pay to have him hounded down, now that he’s been weakened.”

Marcone’s eyes, the exact green shade of old dollar bills, focused pleasantly on me. Still, he said nothing.

Then Mab finally spoke, her voice sepulchral. “Do you have a point, my Knight?”

“I wanted you to know that I knew,” I said. Then I turned to Marcone. “There were people involved in the robbery. People who aren’t otherwise involved in this affair.”

“People who violated my territory, nonetheless,” Marcone said quietly.

“While helping you get your vengeance,” I said. “Go after Nicodemus as hard as you want. Leave the rest of them out of it. They took nothing from you.”

“They took the life of one of my employees,” Marcone said.

“The woman who did that is dead already,” I said. And I tossed the cash box onto the conference table. It landed with an impressive thump.

Mab frowned.

Marcone raised his eyebrows briefly. “And what is this?”

“It’s weregild,” I said. “You know the word?”

“Salic Code,” he replied, instantly. “Blood money.”

“That’s right,” I said. “That’s for your dead employee’s family. Take care of them with it. And leave my people out of it. It ends here.”

Marcone considered the box and then me. “And if I should disagree with your terms?”

“Then you and I are going to have a serious problem,” I said. I turned to Mab and added, “Right here. Right now.”

Mab’s eyes widened.

If I threw down on Marcone, any number of things could happen—but one of them would certainly be a major disgrace for Mab. She was a guest under Marcone’s roof. For her Knight and instrument to betray that trust would utterly destroy her name in the world—and what’s more, she knew it.

“Come, now, Baron,” Molly said, her voice smooth, soothing. “Consider how much you have gained. You are in the process of destroying the man who truly wronged you. What does it matter if his hirelings go about their business? After all, you might need their services yourself, one day. The offer is a reasonable one.” And on those last words, she reached over to the cash box, unlocked it, and opened it.

Marcone’s expression rarely showed much—but his eyes widened, if only for an instant, as he saw the stones.

I stared at Marcone without blinking or looking away.

Marcone looked up from the diamonds and returned the stare for a long time.

I put my hands on the table, leaned in close to his face, and said, “Just you remember who pulled your ass out of the fire when those maniacs grabbed you. You owe me.”

Marcone considered that for a moment. Then he said quietly, “You did so as a favor to Mab. Not to me.” He reached out and smoothly closed the cash box, then drew it to his side of the table and squared it with the table’s edge. His voice was almost silken—but there was a blade hidden within the folds of it. “However, the fact that there is a debt remains—and I would not see Mab’s name suffer any childish diminishment when she has kept such excellent faith with me. I accept your offer, Dresden. This balances our account.

Do you understand my meaning?”

I understood it, all right. It meant that the next time I crossed him, he would feel perfectly free to waste me.

Which was fine. The feeling was pretty much mutual.

Mab was far too contained to give any reaction to the resolution of the situation, beyond a very, very small nod to Marcone. But she regarded me with a look of displeasure that promised me a reckoning later. Molly got the same glare.

I doubt that my former apprentice looked any more chagrined than I did.

* * *

“. . . the point of having a squadron of angels around the place if they aren’t going to do anything to protect it,” Molly said, exasperated.

We were walking up to Karrin’s room in the hospital. Visiting hours were almost over, but I didn’t want the day to go by before I’d seen her.

“Any kind of supernatural threat, they’d have been all over it,” I said. “Nick obviously knew that, too. That’s why he sent purely vanilla mortals in, with purely mortal weaponry.”

Molly scowled. “It’s a pretty darned huge loophole. That’s all I’m saying.”

“So do something about it,” I said.

“I already have,” she said. “The house is being watched now. And I’m buying the place for sale down the street.”

“You can afford that?” I asked. “Mab pays that well?”

“The account balance I have now has eight zeroes in it,” Molly said. “I could buy the neighborhood if I wanted. There will be someone keeping an eye on my parents’ place, twenty-four seven in case anyone tries the same thing again.”

“Unseelie bodyguards.” I grunted. “Not sure they’re going to like that.”

“They don’t have to like it,” Molly said. “In fact, they don’t even have to know about it.”

“I’m sensing a pattern here, Molly.”

She gave me a quick glance, and for a second, I could see the worry in her eyes. “Harry . . . if you hadn’t been there today . . .” She swallowed. “They’re my family. I have to do whatever I can to protect them.”

I walked for a few steps, thinking, and said, “Yeah. You do.”

She smiled faintly as Karrin’s room came into sight and her steps slowed. “You go ahead. I’ve got some things to arrange. I’ll be back later tonight.”