Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

The bone hadn’t actually come out of the skin, but it looked like it would only take a little push to make it happen. My forearm was swollen up like a sausage. The area around the upraised bone was purple and blotchy, and something that looked like blisters had come up on my skin. Michael took my arm and laid it out straight on the table. He began to prod it gently with his fingertips.

“Radial fracture,” he said quietly.

“You’re a doctor now?”

“I was a medical corpsman when I served,” he replied. “Saw plenty of breaks.” He looked up and said, “You don’t want to go to the hospital, I take it?”

I shook my head.

“Of course not,” he said. He prodded some more. “I think it’s a clean break.”

“Can you set it?”

“Maybe,” he said. “But without imaging equipment, I’ll have to do it by feel. It could heal crookedly if I’m not good enough.”

“I’d kill most of that equipment just by walking into the room with it,” I said.

He nodded. “We’ll have to immobilize the wrist right away once it’s done.”

“Don’t know if I can afford that.”

“You can’t not afford it,” he replied bluntly. “Assuming I get it set, one twist of your hand will shift the bone at the break. You’ve got to immobilize and protect it or the ends will just grind together instead of healing.”

I winced. “Can you do a cast?”

“There’s too much swelling,” he said. “We’ll have to splint it and wait for the swelling to go down before it can take a proper cast. I could call Dr. Butters.”

I flinched at the suggestion. “He’s . . . sort of wary of me right now. And you know how much he doesn’t like working on living people.”

Michael frowned at me for a moment, studying my face carefully. Then he said, “I see.” He nodded and said, “Wait here.”

Then he got up and went out his back door, toward his workshop. He came back a few moments later with a tool-bag of items and set them out on the table. He washed his hands, and then took some antibacterial towelettes to my arm. Then he took my wrist and forearm in square, powerful hands.

“This will hurt,” he advised me.

“Meh,” I said.

“Lean back against the pull.” Then he began pulling with one hand, and putting gentle pressure on the upraised bone with the other.

It turned out that even the Winter Knight’s mantle has limits. Either that, or the batteries were low. A dull, bone-deep throb roared up my arm, the same pain you feel just before your limbs go numb while submerged in freezing water, only magnified. I was too tired to scream.

Besides.

I had it coming.

After a minute of pure, awful sensation, Michael exhaled and said, “I think it’s back in place. Don’t move it.”

I sat there panting, unable to respond.

Michael wrapped the arm in a few layers of gauze, his hands moving slowly at first, and then with increasing confidence—old reflexes, resurfacing. Then he took the rectangular piece of sheet aluminum he’d brought in from his workshop, gave my arm a cursory glance, and used a pair of pliers and his capable hands to bend it into a U-shape. He slid it over my hand at the knuckles, leaving my thumb and fingers free. The brace framed my arm most of the way to my elbow. He slid it back off and adjusted the angle of the bend slightly before putting it back on. Then he took a heavier bandage and secured the brace to my arm.

“How’s that?” he asked, when he was finished.

I tested it very, very gingerly. “I can’t twist my wrist. Of course, there’s a problem with that.”

“Oh?”

I spoke as lightly as I could. “Yeah, I can’t twist my wrist. What if there’s some incredibly deadly situation that can only be resolved by me twisting my left wrist? It could happen. In fact, I’m not quite sure how it could not happen, now.”

He sat back, his eyes steady on my face.

I dropped the joking tone. “Thank you, Michael,” I said. I took a deep breath. There was no point in saying anything else, here. It must have been the broken arm talking, telling me it was a good idea to open up to someone. “I should go.”

I started pushing myself up.

Michael took his cane, hooked the handle around my ankle and calmly jerked my leg out from beneath me. I flopped back into the chair.

“Harry,” he said thoughtfully. “How many times have I saved your life?”

“Bunch.”

He nodded.

“What have I asked you for in return?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Ever.”

He nodded again. “That’s right.”

We sat in silence for a long time.

Finally, I said, very quietly, “I don’t know if I’m one of the good guys anymore.”

I swallowed.

He listened.

“How can I be,” I asked, “after what I’ve done?”

“What have you done?” he asked.

It took me another minute to answer. “You know about Mab. What I am now. The deal I made.”

“I also know that you did so intending to use that power to save your daughter’s life.”

“You don’t know about Susan,” I said. I met his eyes. “I killed her, Michael.”

I don’t know what I looked like—but tears suddenly stood out in his eyes. “Oh, Harry.” He looked down. “She turned, didn’t she? What happened?”

“That son of a bitch, Martin,” I said. “He . . . he set her up. Sold out the family that had Maggie. I think he did it to set me on a collision course with the Red King, maybe hoping to focus the White Council on the war effort a little harder. But he had inside knowledge of the Reds, too. He’d worked for them. Was some kind of double agent, or triple agent—I don’t know. I don’t think he was running a grand scheme to get to one specific moment . . . but he saw his chance. The Red King was getting set to kill Maggie as part of a ritual bloodline curse. The curse was meant to kill me and . . . other people, up my family tree.”

Michael raised his eyebrows.

“But the ritual was all loaded up and Martin saw a chance to wipe out the whole Red Court. All of them. He popped Susan in the face with the knowledge of his treachery and she just snapped . . .” I shuddered, remembering it. “I saw it coming. Saw what he was doing. Maybe I could have stopped it—I don’t know—but . . . I didn’t. And she killed him. Tore his throat out. And . . . she started to change and . . .”

“And you finished the ritual,” he said quietly. “You killed her. You killed them all.”

“The youngest vampire in the whole world,” I said. “Brand-new. And they all originated from a single point—the Red King, I guess. Their own curse got every one of them. The whole family.”

“Every Red Court vampire,” Michael said gently, “was a killer. Every one of them, at one point, chose to take someone’s life to slake their thirst. That’s what turned them. That choice.”

“I’m not shedding tears over the Red Court,” I said, contempt in my voice. “The fallout from taking them all out at once . . . I don’t know. Maybe I’d wish I could have done it differently. With more planning.”

“One doesn’t destroy an empire built on pain and terror neatly,” Michael said, “if history is to be any indicator.”

I smiled bleakly. “It was a little hectic at the time,” I said. “I just wanted to save Maggie.”

“May I ask you a question?”

“Sure.”

“After she started to turn . . . how did you subdue Susan?”

I sat for a time, trying to remember the moment less clearly.

“You didn’t,” he said gently, “did you?”

“She . . . she was turning. But she understood what was happening.”

“She sacrificed herself,

” Michael said.

“She allowed me to sacrifice her,” I snarled, with sudden, boiling fury. “There’s a difference.”

“Yes,” Michael said quietly. “There’s a cost for you in that. A burden to be carried.”

“I kissed her,” I said. “And then I cut her throat.”

The silence after I said that was profound.

Michael got up and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Harry,” he said quietly, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry you were faced with those awful choices.”

“I never meant . . .” I swallowed. “I never meant for all those things to happen. For Susan to get hurt. For Mab’s deal to stick. I never meant to keep it.”

Real pain touched his eyes. “Ah,” he said quietly. “I’d . . . wondered. About the after.”

“That was me,” I said. “I arranged it. I thought . . . if I was gone before Mab had a chance to change me, it would be all right.”

“You thought . . .” Michael took a slow breath and sat down again. “You thought that if you died, it would be all right?”

“Compared to me becoming Mab’s psychotic monster?” I asked. “Compared to letting the Reds kill my daughter and my grandfather? Yeah. I regarded that as a win.”

Michael put his face in his hands for a moment. He shook his head. Then he lifted his face and looked up at his ceiling, his expression a mixture of sadness and frustration and pain.