Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

“Heh,” I said. “Probe.”

“Wizard,” Grey said, a trifle impatiently, “are you sure you want to keep pushing it like this?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Think so.”

“Grey, stand by,” Nicodemus said. “Should Valmont open the vault, we’ll need you to handle the scanner.”

Grey grunted and said, “Guess I’d better put my game face on.”

And once again, he seemed to quiver in place, a motion that I couldn’t quite track with my eyes, and suddenly Grey was gone and poor Harvey was standing there, looking nervously through the scorched entry of the vault. More gunfire rang out and Grey-Harvey flinched, darting quick glances behind him.

Huh.

“Bloody hell,” Valmont muttered, reaching for another tool. She started operating the combination lock, watching a bobbing needle on some kind of sensor as she did. “Impossible to work with all this jabber.”

“I could make some white noise for you,” I said helpfully, and followed by saying something like, “Kssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh.”

“Thank you, Dresden, for that additional distract—” Her eyes widened in sudden terror and she stopped breathing.

I felt my spine go rigid with anticipation. If those claymores went off, there was no way my duster was going to save me from that much flying metal. I clenched my teeth.

Valmont looked up at me, abruptly showed me a tigress’s smile, and said, “Gotcha.” Then she pushed a final button with a decisive stab, and the vault door made an ominous clickety-clack sound. She turned the handle, and the enormous door swung ponderously open. “Schmuck gangster from Illinois, indeed.”

“Get that UV light on the wards again,” I said.

“On it,” Valmont said.

“Grey,” Nicodemus said.

Grey-Harvey hopped rather nimbly through the wards as Valmont illuminated them, and went through the vault door.

I went with him, my senses alert to any other bits of magical mayhem that might be waiting for us inside Gentleman Johnnie Marcone’s vault.

It was huge. Fifty feet wide. A hundred feet long. Barred doors that looked sufficient to keep out King Kong stood at intervals along the walls. Each of the barred doors had a steel plaque on it bearing a number and a name. The first one on the right read: LORD RAITH—00010001. The room behind it was piled with boxes of about the right size to hold large paintings, strong-box-style crates, and several pallets bearing bricks made of bundles of hundred-dollar bills, stacked up in four-foot cubes and wrapped in clear plastic.

The strong room on the other side of us had a plate that read: FERROVAX—00010002, and it was filled with row upon row of closed, fireproof safes.

And there were eleven more rooms on each side of the vault.

In between the barred doors were storage lockers, shelves loaded with precious artwork, and more of those giant cubes of money than I really wanted to start counting.

It was the fortune of a small nation. Maybe even a not-so-small nation.

And the only door in the place with a little computerized eye-scanning thing next to it was at the very, very far end of the vault, in the center of the rear wall—the Storage Cubby of the Underworld.

“Looks like that’s it,” I said.

For a second, Grey-Harvey said nothing. I looked at him. He was scanning the room, slowly.

“It’s just money,” I said. “Get your head in the game.”

“I’m looking for guards and booby traps,” he said.

I grunted. “Oh. Carry on.”

“I shouldn’t be here,” Grey muttered, almost too quietly to be heard. “This is stupid. I’m going to get caught. I’m going to get caught. Someone will come for me. Those things will get me.”

I gave him a somewhat fish-eyed look. “Uh,” I said. “What?”

Grey blinked once and then looked at me. “Huh?”

“What were you talking about?” I said.

He frowned slightly. The frown turned into a grimace and he rubbed at his forehead. “Nothing.”

“The hell it was,” I said.

“I’m too Harvey right now,” he said. “He doesn’t like this situation very much.”

“Uh,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘too Harvey’?”

“Shifting this deep isn’t for chumps,” he said. “It’s nothing you need to worry about. Trust me.”

“Why should I do that?”

His voice turned annoyed. “Because I’m a freaking shapeshifter and I’m the one who knows, that’s why.” He eyed me. “You’d better wait here. Manacles or not, those retina scanners are damned finicky.”

“I’ll stop short,” I said, and started walking to the end of the vault. I didn’t doubt that Grey was right about the scanners, but I’d have to be a lot more gullible than I was to let someone like him out of my sight if I could help it. I stopped thirty or forty feet short of the back wall, and Grey-Harvey sidled up to the panel. He lifted his fingers and tapped out a sequence of maybe a dozen or fifteen numbers into the keypad, swiftly, as if his fingers knew it by pure reflex. A panel rotated when he was done, and a little tube appeared. He leaned down and peered into it, and red light flashed out. He straightened, blinking, and a second later there was a quiet clack.

“Here goes nothing,” he said, and turned the handle on the door to the strong room.

The door to the mortal vault of the God of the Underworld (labeled HADES—00000013) opened smoothly, soundlessly. It would have taken more muscle to get into Michael’s fridge.

Grey turned to me, resuming his own shape, and his mouth twisted into a perfectly invincible smirk. “Damn, I’m good.”

“Okay,” I said. “Go get everybody else. I’ll get the Way ready.”

Grey turned to go and then paused, eyeing me.

“If I wanted to shut this thing down,” I said, “I could have done it pretty much anytime in the past twenty minutes.” I shifted to a maniacally indeterminate European accent and said, “We’re going through.”

“The Black Hole?” Grey asked, incredulously. “Nobody quotes The Black Hole, Dresden. Nobody even remembers that one.”

“Hogwash. Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Perkins, and Roddy McDowall all in the same movie? Immortality.”

“Roddy McDowall was just the voice of the robot.”

“Yeah. And the robots were awesome.”

“Cheap Star Wars knockoffs,” Grey sneered.

“Not necessarily mutually exclusive,” I said.

“I wasn’t worried about you scrubbing the mission,” he said. “I was thinking you might indulge yourself in a little Robin Hood action against this Marcone character.”