Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

Her reasoning made me like her a little more. Her tone doubled it.

Nicodemus smiled. “I’ll make that clear to you before we go in. For now, suffice to say that it is a single, small article of relatively little monetary value.”

Liar, I thought.

“As I said to Dresden before, he has known me only as an adversary. Much of my reputation has been made from those who have opposed me—those who survived the experience, that is.” He smiled and took a sip of coffee. “There is another side to that coin. One does not operate for as many years as I have by betraying allies. It simply isn’t practical. Certainly, one uses every weapon one has when dealing with foes—but when I work with associates, I do not turn aside or leave them behind. It is not from any sense of sentiment. It is because I do business with many people over the course of centuries, and treachery is a bad long-term investment. It simply isn’t good business.”

Liar, I thought. But maybe a little less emphatically than I had before. What he was saying made sense. In the supernatural world, there were plenty of people and things that counted their life spans in centuries. Wrong a wizard when he’s young, for example, and you could wait three hundred years to find out he was never able to put it behind him—and has been working to gain the clout he needs to make it clear to you that your actions were unacceptable. Cross a vampire, and it could haunt you for millennia.

A certain degree of cutthroat pragmatism was what made any kind of alliance between various supernatural entities possible. I’d seen it between my grandfather and a professional assassin called the Hellhound. I’d seen it when squaring off against various bad guys, over the years, most of whom were willing to make a deal of some kind. Hell, I’d done it, with Mab, and she was doing it again with Nicodemus by sticking me here.

So it was entirely possible that he was on the up-and-up. Or at least that he was as sincere as I was about following through on the whole alliance thing. We had to get his McGuffin and get out again. Until then, I was betting, he might be good to his word.

And after that, everything would be up in the air.

On the other hand, Nicodemus had gone out of his way to remove as much memory of himself as possible from the human race, by destroying records of his deeds over the centuries. Guys who are on the up-and-up don’t go to those lengths to hide what they’ve done.

Not that it mattered. Mab had given her word. I had to play nice until we had grabbed the loot from Hades, or until Nicodemus tried to stick a knife in my back.

Fun, fun, fun.

I flipped to the second page of the folder and found a photo of a woman I knew, and hadn’t seen in . . . Hell’s bells, had it been almost ten years? She hadn’t changed much in that time, except for maybe looking leaner and harder. I wasn’t sure she’d be at all happy to see me, and I knew for damned sure what she would think of Nicodemus.

And since when had I become the guy that things happened to ten years ago?

Nicodemus continued in his lecture voice. “Entry to the target in the Nevernever requires us to find a matching site here in the mortal world. That means breaking into a high-security facility in the real world before we can even get started in the Nevernever.”

I raised my hand.

“Pursuant to that,” Nicodemus said, and then paused. He sighed. “Yes, Mr. Dresden?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “She’s never going to work with you.”

“Probably not,” Nicodemus agreed. “She may, however, work with you. We need an expert in security systems with a working knowledge of the supernatural world. The pool of such individuals is rather small. I’ve arranged a meeting with her at a local event in approximately ninety minutes. You and Miss Ascher will make contact and convince her to join our cause.”

“Suppose she won’t?” I asked.

“Be more convincing,” he said. “We need her in order to proceed.”

I clenched my teeth, and then nodded once. Hell, if he needed her to make it happen, then by screwing this up, maybe I could make sure it didn’t. “Fine. But it’s me and Murphy.”

“No,” Ascher said. “It’s me and Binder.”

“I’m afraid the event is a formal one,” Nicodemus said. “I’ve taken the liberty of securing appropriate attire and identities for Dresden and Miss Ascher, neither of which would be compatible with Miss Murphy or Binder. Perhaps Miss Murphy could serve as your driver. She has the shoes for it.”

I couldn’t actually hear Karrin grind her teeth, but I knew she had.

“Binder,” Nicodemus said, “I have another errand for you. You’ll need to pick up the fourth—pardon, Miss Murphy, the fifth—member of the team at the train station. He’s stated that he’ll only meet someone he knows.”

Binder nodded once. “Who is it?”

“Goodman Grey.”

Binder’s face went pale. “Ah. Yes, I’ve worked with the gent.”

“Who is he?” Ascher asked.

“He’s . . . not a man to cross,” Binder said. “But a pro. I’ll pick him up. Smoother that way.”

Ascher pressed her lips together, as if she didn’t like it, but nodded. “Fine, then.” She looked down the table at me and smiled. “Well, Dresden, it looks like it’s time to put on our party dress.”

“Gee,” I said. “What fun.”

And I closed the folder on the picture of Anna Valmont.

Eight

Deirdre brought me a garment bag and pointed me to a small employees’ kitchen and break room with another pair of work lights set up in it. I went in, closed the door, and opened the garment bag. There was a black tux inside with all the necessary accoutrements. I held it up enough to determine that it looked like a tolerable fit.

For a moment, I had a few paranoid misgivings. What if the entire point of the exercise had been to get me to take off the coat so that they could open fire with a machine gun and grease me through the wall? I already knew what it was like to be shot, and I was pretty well over the experience. Visions of Sonny Corleone danced in my head.

But I didn’t think that was going to happen. Karrin was on guard outside. There was no way they’d move a gun into position without her at least making noise to warn me. Then, too, Nicodemus had plans in motion. I didn’t think he’d want to jeopardize his “faithful associate” image until he could screw everyone over much more dramatically and permanently. And if he just murdered me outright, Mab would take it personally. I don’t care how long you’ve been in business. If you cross Mab, you can skip your next five-year plan.

So I doffed the coat, stripped down, and started getting dressed in the tux.

I was at pretty much the damnedest point of the process when the door opened again, and Hannah Ascher prowled into the room, carrying a garment bag of her own.

She gave me a slow and blatant once-over, that small smirk still on her mouth.

I’m pretty sure the temperature of the room didn’t literally go up, but I couldn’t have sworn to it. Some women have a quality about them, something completely intangible and indefinable, which gets called a lot of different things, depending on which society you’re in. I always think of it as heat, fire. It doesn’t have to be about sex, but it often is—and it definitely was with Hannah Ascher.

I was extremely aware of her body, and her eyes. Her expression told me that she knew exactly what effect she was having on me, and that she didn’t mind having it in the least. I’d say that my libido kicked into overdrive, except that didn’t seem sufficient to cover the rush of purely physical hunger that suddenly hit me.

Hannah Ascher was a damned attractive woman. And I’d been on that island for a long, long time.

I turned my face away from her and tried to ignore her while I laid out my cummerbund. Mighty wizards do not get rattled because someone sees them standing around in their boxer briefs.

“Dam

n, Dresden,” she said, taking a few steps to one side and looking me over again. A slow smile spread over her mouth. “Do you work out?”

“Uh,” I said. “Parkour.”

The answer seemed to amuse her. “Well. It’s definitely working for you.” She hung the garment bag up on a cabinet handle and unzipped it by feel, her eyes on me the whole time. “So many scars.” She had long arms. Her fingers brushed my shoulder. “What’s that one?”

The touch sent a zing of sensation down my spine and through my belly. There wasn’t anything magically coercive about it. I’d been on alert for that kind of nonsense from the moment my feet had hit the shore. It was worse than that—chemistry, pure and simple. My body had the idea that Ascher was exactly what I needed, and it wasn’t paying any attention to my brain.

I pulled my shoulder away from her, gave her a glare, and said, “Hey. Do you mind?”

She folded her arms, her smile widening. “Not at all. Where’d you get it?”

I glowered and turned back to my tux. “The FBI shot me, maybe twelve years ago.”

“Seriously?” Hannah asked. “It faded out really well.”

“It’s like that with wizards,” I said.

“Your left hand,” she said. “That’s from fire.”

“Vampire’s flunky,” I said. “Homemade flamethrower.”

“Which Court?” she asked.