“Eh?” Ascher asked.
“Kept in the dark and fed bullshit,” Binder reported calmly.
“Ah.”
“—but this is going beyond the pale, even for me. You ask us to trust you about the plan to get into what should be an impenetrable vault. You ask us to trust you that our share will be waiting next to whatever it is you want. You ask us to trust you and believe that Tessa isn’t on some kind of jihad that will get us all killed, but won’t tell us what it is about.” I looked around the table at my criminal confederates. “Trust is kind of a two-way street, Nicodemus. It’s time to give something.”
“Or you’ll do what, precisely?”
“Or maybe we’ll all walk away from a bunch of empty promises without a sliver of proof to back them up,” I said.
Nicodemus narrowed his eyes. “Dresden and his woman are obviously in accord,” he said.
Karrin scowled.
Nicodemus ignored her. “What about the rest of you?”
“What he said,” Valmont said quietly.
Ascher folded her arms, frowning.
Binder sighed. “Twenty. Million. Quid. Think, girl.”
“We can’t spend it if we’re dead from sticking our heads into a hole and getting them whacked off,” Ascher said firmly.
Nicodemus nodded. “Grey?”
Grey tented his fingertips in front of his lips for a moment and then said, “The personal aspect of this interference troubles me. A job of this sort requires pure professionalism. Detachment.”
Binder made a nonverbal sound of agreement with Grey’s statements.
“I will not walk away from a job once I’ve agreed to it—you know how I operate, Nicodemus,” Grey continued. “But I would sympathize if another professional of less ability and less rigid standards did so.”
Nicodemus regarded Grey thoughtfully for a moment. “Your professional recommendation?”
“The wizard has a point,” Grey said. “He is an annoying, headstrong ass, but he isn’t stupid. It would not be foolish for you to invest some measure of trust to balance what you ask for.”
Nicodemus mused over that for a moment and then nodded his head. “One ought not hire an expert and then ignore his opinion,” he said. Then he turned to the rest of us. “Vault Seven contains, in addition to a standard division of gold and jewels, a number of Western religious icons. It is my intention to retrieve a cup from the vault.”
“A wha’?” Binder asked.
“A cup,” Nicodemus replied.
“All this,” Binder said, “for a cup.”
Nicodemus nodded. “A simple ceramic cup, something like a teacup, but lacking any handle. Quite old.”
My mouth fell open and I made a choking sound at approximately the same time.
Grey pursed his lips and let out a slow whistle.
“Wait,” Ascher said. “Are you talking about what I think you’re talking about?”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Karrin said quietly.
Nicodemus made a face in her direction. “Miss Murphy, please.”
She gave Nicodemus a small, unpleasant smile.
Binder clued in a second later. “The bloody Holy Grail? Is he bloody kidding?”
Valmont turned to me, frowning. “That’s real?”
“It’s real,” I said. “But it was lost more than a thousand years ago.”
“Not lost,” Nicodemus corrected me calmly. “It was collected.”
“The cup that caught the blood of Christ,” Grey mused. He eyed Nicodemus. “Now, what possible use could you have for that old thing?”
“Sentimental value,” Nicodemus said with a guileless smile, and straightened the skinny strands of his grey tie. “I’m something of a collector of such artifacts myself.”
The tie wasn’t a tie, unless you meant it in a very literal sense. It was a length of simple old rope, tied into the Noose—the one that Judas used to hang himself after betraying Christ, if I understood it correctly. It made Nicodemus all but unkillable. I didn’t know if anyone else in the world knew what I knew: that the Noose didn’t protect him from itself. I’d nearly strangled him with it the last time we’d crossed trails—hence his roughened voice.
Grey didn’t look like he believed Nicodemus’s answer, but that hadn’t stopped him from being satisfied with it. He looked around the room and said, “There. You know more than you did. Is it enough?”
“Tessa,” I said. “What’s her beef with you going after the Grail?”
“She wants it for herself, of course,” Nicodemus said. “I’ll deal with Tessa before we launch. It won’t become an issue for the job. You have my personal guarantee.”
Grey spread his hands. “There,” he said. “That’s good enough for me. Binder?”
The stocky little guy screwed up his eyes in thought and nodded slowly. “Ash?”
“All right,” Ascher said. “Sure. That’s enough for me, for now.”
“But . . . ,” I began.
Ascher rolled her eyes. “Oh, don’t be such a whiny little . . .” She turned to Binder. “Git?”
“Git,” he confirmed.
“Don’t be such a whiny little git, Dresden,” Ascher said. “I’m hungry.”
The more I could force Nicodemus to bend, the more of his authority would drain away from him. The more someone else defended him, the more he would stockpile. Time to try another angle. “And you aren’t the only thing in here that is,” I said to Ascher, and pointed at the goat pen. “Before I go anywhere else, I want to know what’s been picking off the livestock.”
“Ah,” Nicodemus said. “That.”
“Yeah, that.”
“Does it matter?”
I glowered at him. “It kind of does,” I said. Then, thoughtfully, I raised my voice to carry a little farther. “Whatever big, ugly, stinking, stupid thing you’ve got hanging around in here with us probably doesn’t deserve to be in this company. Given our goal, I don’t see the point in taking along a mindless mound of muscle.”
Grey winced.
I felt it almost at once. The hairs on the back of my neck suddenly started trying to crawl up onto my scalp. Part of me kicked into a genuine watery-bellied fear reaction, something purely instinctive, a message from my primitive hindbrain: A large predator was staring at me with intent.