Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

The air had gone thick with dust and heat and the smell of brimstone. Half of the freaking amphitheater had been buried by fallen stone. One of the enormous statues was covered to the thighs.

And Hannah Ascher and Lasciel were gone.

A few last stones fell, clattering over the mess, bouncing. I noted, dimly, that their arches didn’t look the way they should have. Gravity was indeed something heavier here than in the physical world. It was so heavy, in fact, that I thought I might just close my eyes and stay on the floor.

“Harry,” Michael breathed.

“Sorry about that, Hannah,” I heard myself mutter. “I’m sorry.”

Michael put his hand on my shoulder. “Harry? Are you all right?”

I shook my head, and gestured weakly at the fallen rock with one hand. “Hell’s bells, Michael. That wasn’t even a fight. It was just murder. She wasn’t a monster. She just made a bad call. She let that thing inside her and . . . it just pushed her buttons. Drove her.”

“It’s what they do,” Michael said quietly.

“Could have been me over there . . . There but for the grace of God goes Harry Dresden.”

Michael limped around to stand in front of me, slapped me lightly on the cheek, and said, “We don’t have time for this. Reflect later. We’ll talk about it later. Get up.”

The blow didn’t hurt, but it did startle me a little, and make me shake my head. The immediate exhaustion of slinging that much power around began to fade, and I shrugged off the lethargy that went with it. The ugly, prickling cold was still coming closer.

“Harry,” Michael said, “are you with me?”

“Headache,” I muttered. And then I realized what that meant. Mab’s earring burned like a tiny frozen star in my ear, and my head was beginning to pound anyway.

I was running out of time. And unless I could get everyone back to the first gate and open the Way back to Chicago, it was running out for everyone else as well. I planted my staff and pushed myself to my feet. I felt creaky and heavy and tired and I couldn’t afford to let that matter.

Everything snapped back into focus, and I swiped at something hot and wet in my eyes. “Okay,” I said. “Okay. Let’s get Grey and get the hell out of here.”

Just then, something that looked vague and lean, and had huge batlike wings, streaked through the air toward us from the far side of the amphitheater. One of its wings faltered, and it tumbled out of the air, hit the marble floor, and started bouncing. The form rolled several times, and when it stopped, Grey was lying there looking dazed. The lower half of his face, as well as his hands and forearms were soaked with scarlet blood.

“Michael,” I said.

We moved together, getting Grey onto his feet between us, and started back toward the entrance to the vault, skirting the hellish heat coming off of the rubble. “Grey,” I said, “what happened?”

“He got smart and shifted down,” Grey said. “My jaws slipped. But something got in his eyes, and I disengaged before he could reverse the hold on me.”

From somewhere behind us came the Genoskwa’s furious roar and the crash of another column falling. Then another roar, pained, that grew deeper in register as the Genoskwa assumed Ursiel’s demonform again and rose up onto his hind legs, coming into sight of us. Doing so put his head damned near twenty feet off the ground, and though we were most of the way up the amphitheater stairs, Ursiel’s glowing eyes and the Genoskwa’s ruined and bloody eye sockets were level with my own. The demon-bear opened his jaws and roared in fury.

“He looks pissed,” I squeaked.

“Certainly hope so,” Grey said, slurring the words a little. He was only barely supporting his own weight, and his eyes still looked vague. “Gimme sec, be fine.”

Ursiel dropped back down to all sixes and started toward us. He was limping on the leg Michael had cut, but it wasn’t just flopping loosely the way it should have been. Hell’s bells, he recovered fast.

“Valmont,” I said to Grey. “Where is she?”

“Sent her back to the first gate,” Grey said, “with your magic artif . . . art . . . toys.”

“That’s it,” I said to Michael. “You’re hurt. Grey’s scrambled. Get him back to the first gate and do it as fast as you can.”

Michael clenched his jaws. “You can’t fight Ursiel alone, Harry. You can’t win.”

“Don’t need to fight him,” I said. “Just need to buy you two some time to get clear. Trust me. I’ll be right behind you.”

Michael closed his eyes for a second and then gave me a quick nod and shouldered Grey’s weight more thoroughly. “God be with you, my friend.”

“I’ll take whatever help I can get,” I said, and stopped at the top of the amphitheater stairs, while Michael half carried Grey back out the way we’d come.

My head pounded. I shook the sheathed knife out of my sleeve and dropped it into the duster pocket with my overgrown revolver, then checked the Shroud to make sure it was secure.

From the far rear of the vault, I heard something let out an eerily windy-sounding cry, and the sensation of cold around me grew more and more intense, gaining an element of irrational, psychic terror to go with it. An instant later, other cries echoed the first, and the sensation of unthinking panic swelled. My heart sped up to a frantic pace and my limbs felt shaky and weak.

The shades were coming.

Ursiel let out another furious roar and then the twenty-foot horned bear the size of a main battle tank broke into a lumbering run as it came up the stairs toward me, fangs bared, intent upon mayhem.

And rather than turning to flee like a sane person, I brandished my staff in one hand, flew him the bird with the other, and screamed, “Hey, Yogi! Here I am! Come get some!”

Forty-seven

Ursiel was too big to fight.

Look, people go on and on about how size isn’t everything, and how the bigger they are, the harder they fall, but the people who say that probably haven’t ever faced down a charging demon-bear so big it should have been on a drive-in movie screen. As a defensive adaptation, sheer size is a winner. It’s a fact. Ask an elephant.

But.

As a hunting adaptation, size is only good when the things you’re hunting are also enormously huge. Successful predators aren’t necessarily bigger than the things they take down—they’re better armed, and just big enough to get the job done if they do it right. Too much bulk and nimble prey can escape, leaving the hunter less able to handle a broad range of targets.

Grey had done something brilliant, in blinding the Genoskwa: He’d forced it to rely upon Ursiel’s eyes. That meant, apparently, that he had to stay in that giant bear form to do it. If the Genoskwa had been able to pursue me in his natural form, he would have caught me and torn me apart in short order—I’d seen him move. The bear might have been an irresistible mass of muscle, claws, and fangs, but I’d had a little experience with very, very large creatures on the move, and I’d learned one important fact about them.

They didn’t corner well.

Ursiel closed in and went into a little bounce, a motion as close to a pounce as something that size could manage, and I darted to one side. Harry Dresden, wizard, might have bought the farm right there. But Sir Harry, the Winter Knight, dodged the smashing paws and snapping jaws by a tiny margin, hopped back several yards, and shouted, “Olé! Toro!”

Ursiel roared again, but its head swung around toward the retreating forms of Michael and Grey. Ursiel was no tactical genius, from what I’d seen of it, but both it and the Genoskwa were predators—and Michael and Grey were wounded and vulnerable. It could catch them and dispatch them easily and then hunt me down at its leisure, like a cat dealing with so many troublesome mice.

So I lifted my staff, pointed it at the demon-bear, and shouted, “Fuego!”

The blast of fire I sent at him wasn’t much. I didn’t fe

el like passing out from exhaustion at the moment, and both the Genoskwa and Ursiel had displayed a troublesome resistance to my magic. That wasn’t the point. The mini-blast of flame struck the bear in the side of the nose, and while it didn’t sear the flesh, it singed some hairs and I bet it stung like hell.

The bear’s head whipped back toward me and it rolled a step forward. Then the glowing eyes brightened and it swung again toward the wounded men, now leaving the vault. The conflict of wills going on between the Genoskwa and the Fallen angel was all but visible.