Skin Game: A Novel of the Dresden Files

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.”

 

“Doubt it would make him any angrier than he’s already going to be,” I said. “But ripping off this vault isn’t the job.”

 

Grey considered me for a moment and then nodded. “Right. I’ll get the crew.” He turned and jogged to the entrance to the vault—

 

—and was suddenly pulled out of the vault and into the security room beyond by an abrupt and severe force.

 

“Yeah, that can’t be goo—,” I started to say.

 

Before I could finish, Tessa in her mantis form blurred through the vault door, fantastic in her speed, terrifying in her strength, and slammed the door closed behind her. Her rear legs rotated the inside works of the door—meant to allow the door to be locked or unlocked from the inside—and the lock of the heavy vault door shut with a very final-sounding clack.

 

Suddenly, the only light came from some tiny floor lamps along either wall, and they gleamed madly from the mantis’s thousands of eye facets.

 

“You,” came her buzzing, two-layered voice, poisonous with hate. “This is your fault.”

 

“What?” I said.

 

My hand went to the thorn manacles still on my wrist—and then froze. Michael and the others were outside, in the booby-trapped security room. If I started throwing magic around, even at this distance, I would almost certainly trip the antiwizard fail-safe Marcone had built into it.

 

“No matter,” Tessa spat. “Your death will end the chain even more readily than the accountant’s.”

 

And then a furious Knight of the Blackened Denarius came hurtling toward me with insectile speed—and if I used a lick of magic to fight her, I’d blow my friends to Kingdom Come.

 

 

 

 

 

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