Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

That gave even the demonic suits pause. Cities aren’t just streets and buildings—they are collectives of sheer will, of the determination of every person who helped build them and every soul whose work and life maintains them. To something from the Nevernever, a place like downtown Chicago is an alien citadel, a source of power and terror. Mordor, basically. (One does not simply walk into Mordor—except that was exactly what everyone in the story did anyway.)

Similarly, Binder’s goons were not sufficiently impressed with the Loop to let it stop them from pursuing Butters. They put on a surge of speed and gained on him, and for a moment, it looked like they might nab him again—but he hurled a second glass globe of forget-me mist to the street and disrupted the pursuit at exactly the right moment. Butters let out a shriek of terrified defiance and shook his fist at his pursuers as several staggered in confusion, stumbling into their packmates.

Then the Genoskwa appeared out of nowhere on the sidewalk in front of a café and kicked a stone planter the size of a hot tub directly into Butters’s path.

Butters had maybe a whole second to react and nowhere near enough time to steer around the planter. The Genoskwa had acted with calm, precise timing. Butters did the only thing he could do: He let go of the skateboard strap and leapt into the air.

He wasn’t wearing padding and he didn’t have a helmet. That dopey little skateboard had been moving at thirty miles an hour, and all that waited to receive him was cold asphalt. If he’d been in a car with an airbag, I’m sure he’d have been fine—but he wasn’t.

I ground my teeth and prepared a spherical shield to catch him with—but while that would protect him from the fall, it would also mean that he could be briefly held inside it until his momentum was spent. Without the skateboard, the suits or the Genoskwa would catch him in a few heartbeats, and I would be forced to fight to defend him, bringing my mission to an unfortunate conclusion.

So be it. You don’t leave friends, even friends twisted up with mistrust, to the monsters.

But instead of falling onto the street and splattering, or into my shield and getting us both subsequently killed, Butters’s too-billowy overcoat flared with orange sparks and spread out into a giant, cupped wing shape. He windmilled his arms and legs with a high-pitched, creaking shout, and then tucked himself into a ball while the orange light seemed to gather the coat into a resilient sphere around him—one that bounced once when it hit the street, and then rolled several times, dumping him onto the street more or less on his feet.

The little guy darted straight away from the Genoskwa, for which I did not blame him, up the steps of the nearest building—as it happened, the Art Institute of Chicago. The nearest of the suits leapt at his unprotected back.

I flung my staff forward with a howl of “Forzare!” and smashed the suit with invisible power in midair, flinging him just over Butters’s shoulder as he leapt. “Dammit!” I howled, with as much sincerity as I could muster—which wasn’t much. “Clear my line of fire!”

Butters shot an aghast look over his shoulder at me, and stumbled away, fetching up against the northernmost of the two lion statues outside the Art Institute. He darted a look at the statue, licked his lips, and hissed something beneath his breath.

Orange light flooded out of the inner folds of his coat and promptly seeped into the bronze of the statue, confirming how he was managing all of these tricks.

Bob.

Bob the Skull was running around loose, like some kind of bloody superhero sidekick.

Bob had been the one powering the skateboard. Bob had guided the ropes that had flown from Butters’s wrist. Bob had manipulated Butters’s coat to bring him in to a safe landing.

Damn. Bob was kind of awesome.

It only stood to reason. Though Bob was a spirit, he had always been able to manipulate physical objects—and if he had mostly only done so with fairly small, fairly light things in the past, like romance novels or his own skull, there was no reason that I knew that he might not have tried something larger. I’d always assumed he simply lacked the motivation.

But I’d rarely removed Bob from my lab for a reason. To be exercising that kind of control over the spirit, Butters had to be in possession of Bob’s skull, like, right now. He was actually carrying the skull around, probably in that backpack, and that meant that Bob’s allegiance was as fragile as Butters’s ability to remain in physical possession of the skull itself. If someone like Nicodemus got hold of the skull, with Bob’s centuries of experience and knowledge, I shuddered to think what my old friend might be used to accomplish.

Of course, that concern abruptly dwindled to a secondary issue as I realized what Butters had commanded the spirit to do.

Orange firelight-sparks suddenly erupted from the eyes of the enormous bronze lion. Then, moving exactly as if it had been a living beast, the thing turned its head toward me, crouched, and let out an enormous and authentically leonine roar.

“Oh, crap,” I said.

“Hold them off!” Butters shouted.

The lion roared again.

“Dammit, Butters,” I snarled under my breath, “I’m helping!”

And then several tons of living bronze predator, guided by the intelligence and will of the most powerful spirit of intellect I had ever encountered, flung itself directly at my head.

Twenty-eight

It had been a good long while since I’d had a freaking lion coming at me, and at the time it had been one of the genuine flesh-and-blood variety, from the zoo. I’d never had something made entirely of metal try to kill me before, unless you counted the instruments of the occasional would-be vehicular homicide that came my way, and never both at the same time—so actually that made this a first.

And that’s important in a job. Fresh challenges. What would I do without them?

Without the Winter mantle on my side, I think Bob might have taken my head off of my shoulders. But instead, I ducked, fast enough and low enough to avoid the enormous paw that flashed toward me in anticipation of the move, and Bob flew over me, crashing into a pair of Binder’s suits with juggernaut enthusiasm. They went flying like ninepins, and the bronze lion whirled toward me, far too fast for something so massive, and crouched to leap at me again.

And one of the lion’s golden orange glowing eyes, the one away from the street, shivered down in the barest little wink imaginable.

Bob got it.

My former lab assistant thundered, “Die, traitor!” and then roared again.

“Watch out, he’s loose!” I screamed to a nearby suit, reeling back toward him and fighting to keep the sudden grin off my face. “He’ll tear us all apart!”

“Rargh!” Bob screamed and came rushing at me again.

I flung myself to one side at the last second, when the suit wouldn’t see Bob coming until it was too late. The bronze lion smashed into the suit, sending it tumbling in a whirl of broken limbs, to smash into the side of the Art Institute. It exploded into gelatinous clear goo, its physical vessel simply too mangled to enable the spirit Binder had summoned to continue animating it, and the lion let out a roar of triumph, and turned toward the next nearest suits.

“I’ll get him!” I shouted. I pointed my staff at Bob and snarled, “Fuego!” A blast of pure fire erupted from the staff, missed the rampaging lion statue by inches, and took a pair of suits full-on, setting them ablaze and causing them to issue weird howls of frustration and rage as it began to consume their physical forms.

Furious, the burning suits flung themselves at Bob, and the hunting-pack mentality of the demons prompted the others to leap at the rampaging statue as well. Bob roared, his eyelights blazing merrily, and started batting them around like Mister playing with multiple catnip lures on a string.

I hopped back from the immediate vicinity of the havoc and looked around wildly for Butters. I checked his last direction but saw nothing—except an

empty plastic sports-drink bottle rolling slowly down the sidewalk, pushed by the mild wind coming in from the north, exactly like the kind I used to store a potion in when I made one.

Butters was in the wind. Hell, maybe literally. It had been a long time since I’d brewed that escape potion that had saved me from a toad demon, but if I’d had a twenty, I’d have bet it against a piece of bubble gum that Butters had duplicated my old formula and used it to pull a quick vanishing act in the confusion.

Because confusion there was: The explosions and roaring and noise had done exactly what I had hoped they would, and attracted attention. Though the muffling effect of the weather had dulled the sounds, and though it was well after business hours, that didn’t mean that the area around us was wholly empty of life. Lights had begun to flick on. Faces had begun to appear at windows in nearby buildings.

One of the cardinal points of common sense, in the supernatural world, is that you don’t get yourself involved with mortal authorities. The average individual mortal (or twenty) might not be a match for a real supernatural predator. I’m pretty sure the serious bad guys, like the hulking, hairy one standing in the shadows across the street from the Art Institute, could take on a riot’s worth of mortals without hesitation, and expect victory. But in a city like Chicago, starting a rumble with humanity wouldn’t mean fighting a score of mortals, or a couple of hundred. It would mean thousands, and more important, it would mean tangling with those who had the training and equipment to be a genuine threat.

People had actually begun to appear on the street, from inside the café and a nearby sandwich shop. Cell phones were coming out. And Chicago PD had maybe half a dozen stations within a mile of where I stood.

“What are you waiting for?” I shouted toward the Genoskwa, and pointed at the animated statue. “Lend a hand, big guy!”

The Genoskwa glowered at me for a second, and then at the rampaging Bob. There was a flash of ugly yellow tusks, a glitter of malicious and angry eyes, and then the creature faded from sight, turning as it vanished, and starting up the street in the direction Butters had last been going.

Worse, there was a sound of rushing wind overhead, and something dark and swift passed between me and some of the higher lights in the area, sending a multitude of wavering, flickering shadows across the street. I squinted up into the rain and mist, and saw nothing but a large, winged form, moving fast, in the same direction.

Well, crap.

Nicodemus and Anduriel had taken to the air. I had no doubt that the Genoskwa could track Butters as well as any hound, and that escape potion, if that’s what he’d used, would only transport him a relatively short distance, maybe a couple of blocks. It would be only a matter of time before Nicodemus spotted Butters or the Genoskwa picked up his trail—and he no longer had Bob to propel his skateboard or cover his back.