Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

I found myself inside the quarterstaff’s reach, and promptly slammed my head against the end of the ghoul’s muzzle. He let out a yowl of surprise and anger, his forward momentum abruptly stalled, and I followed up with a one-armed push using every bit of muscle the Winter mantle could muster.

The ghoul staggered back several steps and then his feet went out from under him!

Hope sparked and kindled will. As the ghoul fell, I let out a triumphant howl of “Infriga!”

Winter howled into the little store for the fifth time in maybe sixty seconds, blanketing the fallen ghoul warrior in absolute cold and boiling fog. I panted frantically for a couple of seconds, until the fog boiled away enough to let me see the warrior ghoul in its frozen sarcophagus.

“Harvey!” I croaked. “Harvey, sound off!”

“Oh God!” Harvey sobbed. “Oh God!”

“Yeah, or that,” I muttered, and hurried toward the sound.

I reached him just as the other two ghouls pounded their way through the wall. Harvey let out a shockingly high-pitched squealing sound and scrambled in helpless panic on the slippery ice.

I raised my frost-coated right hand, gathered my will for another spell—

—and found a patch of white blankness in front of my eyes. I blinked and suddenly I was sitting on the ice next to Harvey, wondering how I’d gotten down there.

Winter, I realized. I called up too much power, too fast, with too little chance to rest. I’d burned up my reserves of magical energy, to the point where it threatened to rob me of consciousness. But even now, I didn’t feel magically exhausted.

Of course you don’t feel it, dummy. You’re the Winter Knight.

I blinked a couple of times, and then looked down at my left arm, which was sending me some sort of odd, pulsing sensation.

My duster’s sleeve was being distended from the inside by something pointy. It took me an effort of conscious observation and logical processing to realize that it was my own broken arm.

A seven-foot section of the ice wall suddenly shattered and fell to the floor with a groan.

I shoved myself to my feet with my good arm as the other two warrior ghouls came through the opening.

No magic.

No weapons.

No options.

I set my teeth in a defiant, futile snarl and the ghouls pounced.

Nineteen

Both ghouls came at me, as the most dangerous target in sight, ignoring the sobbing Harvey. I didn’t blame them. I’d have made the same call.

All three of us were wrong.

The warrior ghouls came at me from different angles, so that I could have nailed only one of them, even if I’d had the energy to call up another blast of Winter. It meant that one ghoul had to bound to one side and then rush me. The other one just leapt over Harvey’s screaming figure.

Goodman Grey killed that one first.

As the ghoul passed over him, Harvey’s eyes went cold and calm, and one arm swept out. I didn’t see it actually change, as much as I had an impression that the arm was, for a second, in an entirely different shape—a hard, inward-curving sickle, moving with fantastic speed. There was a shearing sound combined with a thunk, like a schoolroom paper cutter, but wetter and meatier, and suddenly the ghoul’s top and bottom halves were spinning off on separate arcs.

Then the second ghoul was on top of me, and even with the extra strength of the Winter mantle, it was everything I could do to keep its teeth off my throat. If it hadn’t been for my duster, its claws would have shredded my torso in the second it took Grey to reach me.

There was a sense of motion more than anything I could actually see, and something vaguely gorilla-like seized the ghoul in enormous hands, and threw him away from me with such power that I heard joints dislocating from the force of the throw. The ghoul hit a still-standing portion of the wall of ice and went right through it, splattering fluids in the process. Before it had gone all the way through the wall, a blur that reminded me of some kind of big hunting cat hit it in midair and bore it to the ground, out of sight behind the fog and the rubble of the wall.

The ghoul let out a single, weak, gurgling scream.

Then it went quiet.

Something moved on the other side of the wall. A few seconds later, there was a long exhalation and Goodman Grey appeared, stepping calmly over what was left of the wall. Something was twitching in death on the floor beyond him, though I couldn’t make out any details—and didn’t want to. Ghouls don’t die easy, and they don’t go out any way but messy. The one he’d bisected was making scrabbling noises from two different directions in the fog.

He looked around for a moment, pursed his lips and nodded, and said, “Good move, splitting them up like that, and in the fog, too. Smart. Don’t see that much in people your age.”

“There’s always more of them than me,” I said, and got to my feet. I had a feeling that I didn’t want to be sitting on the ground bleeding, with a broken arm, around Goodman Grey. You don’t give predators like that ideas—and at that moment, the casually dressed, unremarkable-looking little guy was scaring me more than had the ghouls and Tessa together.

I kept any tremor out of my voice and asked, “Where’s Harvey?”

“Over here,” Grey said. He looked exactly as relaxed as he had before, as if he had just paused to throw away an empty paper cup, rather than tearing two ghouls to shreds. His eyes lingered on my wounded arm. “I only had a few seconds to make the switch and he wouldn’t quiet down. I had to knock him out.”

I gave him a hard look. Then I took a couple of steps to the frozen ghoul who had taken my staff from me and reached down to wrench it free of the Winter ice. It crumbled for me obligingly, yielding the tool back into my hand. A couple of the ghoul’s clawed fingers broke off and came with it. I shook them off of it with a grimace, turned to Grey, and said, “Show me.”

He lifted his eyebrows at me for a moment. He might have smiled a bit, but nodded and waved for me to follow him. He didn’t seem in the least worried about turning his back on me.

Hell’s bells. For all I knew, the shapeshifter had eyes in the back of his head.

Grey led me to the side of the sales floor, where old metal-frame shelves had once held magazines. He grabbed one and hauled it easily aside.

Harvey Morrison’s corpse lay on the other side.

His throat had been cut, neatly, by something sharp. There was an unholy mess on the floor around him. His eyes were open and staring sightlessly up at the ceiling. The blood was still pulsing out, though he was white enough that I knew that it was too late. He was dead. His body was still figuring it out.

I lifted my eyes slowly to Grey.

The shapeshifter stared down at Harvey with a very faint frown on his face. He looked up at me and said, “Huh. Awkward.”

“You think this is funny?” I asked him. I knew my voice sounded hot.

“I think it stinks,” Grey said, and looked back at Harvey. “I only choked him out.”

“You would say that, though, if you were trying to screw me over.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Grey said. “I’d tell you I cut his cowardly throat because it was simpler.”

“You would?”

“It’s not as if you frighten me, Dresden. Lying well takes a lot of effort, and it gets old after a few centuries. Mostly I don’t bother.” He nudged Harvey’s shoulder with the toe of his shoe. “But someone went to a lot of effort to get this done. Did it fast. Got out just as fast.”

“Where’s Deirdre?” I asked.

“She was supposed to be chasing her mother away after you bloodied her nose for her.” He knelt down on the floor beside Harvey and then leaned closer, inhaling through his nose like a hound. “Nngh.” He considered for a moment. “Too much fresh blood and damned ghoul stench. Can’t get anything through it.” He looked

up at me. “What about you?”

“If I had twenty-four hours to collect gear and another five or six to go over the place, maybe I could turn up something,” I said.

We looked at each other. I think we were both thinking that the other one wasn’t telling us something he knew. Except that I was actually ignorant, whereas I was pretty sure Grey had scented more than he let on. But he struck me as the suspicious sort.

Evidently, Grey had me figured the same way. He let out an impatient sigh. “Wizard. You know I’m telling you the truth, right?”

“Right,” I said. “Sure you are. We’re a trustworthy bunch of Boy Scouts.”

That got what almost looked like a genuine wry smile out of him. He leaned down and closed Harvey’s eyes with one hand, the motion almost respectful. In the same gesture, he ran his fingers through the thickening puddle of blood.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Getting what we came for,” he said. “Got to have the blood sample for what’s coming up. You’ll have to tell Nicodemus where I am.”

“And where’s that?”