“We weren’t there to kill Fomor,” I said. “We went to get Valmont. We got her. That’s all.”
“If I hadn’t been there,” Ascher said, “that thing would have torn you apart.”
“Good thing you were there then,” I said. “You’ve got some game. I’ll give you that. Fire magic is tricky to use that well. You’ve got a talent.”
“Okay,” Ascher said, seemingly mollified. “You’ve got no idea how many guys I’ve worked with that don’t want to admit they got saved by a girl.”
“Gosh,” I said, glancing at Karrin. “It’s such a new experience for me.”
Karrin snorted, and pulled the car over. We’d made it back to the slaughterhouse.
“Tell Nicodemus we’ll be back at sunrise,” I said.
Valmont said nothing. But she took off the slightly too large shoes and passed them back to Ascher.
“Sure,” Ascher said. “Don’t bleed to death or anything. This is too interesting.”
“Meh,” I said.
She flashed me another smile, took her shoes, and slid out of the limo. Karrin didn’t pause to watch her reenter the building, but pulled out again at once.
I looked back over my shoulder at Valmont. “You okay?”
She took off the sunglasses and gave me a very small smile. “Nicodemus. He’s really back there?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“And you’re going to burn him?”
“If I can,” I said.
“Then I’m good,” she said. She turned her eyes back to the night outside. “I’m good.”
Karrin stared at Valmont in the mirror for a moment, frowning. Then she set her jaw and turned her eyes back to the road.
“Where?” I asked her quietly.
“My place,” she said. “I called Butters the minute the alarms started going off at the hotel. He’ll be waiting for us.”
“I don’t want anyone else tangled up in this,” I said.
“You want to take on the Knights of the Blackened Denarius,” Karrin said. “Do you really think you can do it alone?”
I grunted, tiredly, and closed my eyes.
“That’s what I thought,” she said.
The limo’s tires whispered on the city streets, and I stopped paying attention to anything else.
Twelve
Karrin’s house is a modest place in Bucktown that looks like it should belong to a little old lady-mainly because it did, and Karrin never seemed to have the time or heart to change the exterior much from the way her grandmother had it painted, decorated, and landscaped. When we pulled up, there were already cars on the street outside. She slid the town car into the drive and around to the back of the house.
Before she had settled the car into park, I turned to Valmont and asked, “What’s in the file?”
“A profile of a local businessman,” Valmont replied at once.
“Anyone I know?”
She shrugged, reached into her purse, and passed me the file, which she had rolled up into a tube. I took it, unrolled it, and squinted at it until Karrin flicked on a reading light. It was on for about five seconds before it stuttered and went out.
“Nothing’s ever easy around you, is it?” she said.
I stuck my tongue out at her, tugged my mother’s silver pentacle amulet out of my shirt, and sent a gentle current of my will down into it. The silver began to glow with blue-white wizard light, enough to let me scan over the file.
“Harvey Morrison,” I read aloud. “Fifty-seven, he’s an investment banker, financial adviser, and economic securities consultant.” I blinked at Karrin. “What’s that?”
“He handles rich people’s money,” she said.
I grunted and went back to reading. “He goes sailing in the summer, golfing when the weather is nice, and takes a long weekend in Vegas twice a year. No wife, no kids.” There was a picture. I held it up. “Good-looking guy. Sort of like Clooney, but with a receding hairline. Lists his favorite movies, books, music. Got a biography of him-grew up in the area, went to some nice schools, parents died when he was in college.”
“Why him?” Karrin asked me.
I looked back at Valmont.
She shrugged her shoulders. “He looked pretty unremarkable to me. No obvious graft or embezzling, which is a given for someone operating at his level.”
“Honest men?” I asked, with minimal cynicism.
“Smart crooks, when they steal,” she said. “He’s a trusted functionary like hundreds of others in this town.”
“Gambling problem?”
She shrugged. “Not an obvious one, from his records. The Fomor don’t rate him as a particularly vulnerable target for manipulation.”
“They have files on money guys?” I asked.
“They’ve been buying information left and right for the past couple of years,” Valmont said. “Throwing a lot of money around. It’s been a real seller’s market.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everyone’s buying,” Valmont said. “Fomor, White Court, Venatori, Svartalves, every paranormal crew who isn’t trying to keep a low profile. That’s why I ran this job-it’s the third one this month. You want to make some fast money, Dresden, and know some juicy secrets, I can put you in touch with some serious buyers.”
I blinked at that information. “Since when have you been all savvy on the supernatural scene?”
“Since monsters killed my two best friends.” She shrugged a shoulder. “I made it my business to learn. I was sort of startled how easy it was. No one really seems to spend all that much effort truly hiding from humanity.”
“There’s no need to,” I said. “Most people don’t want to know, wouldn’t believe it if you showed them.”
“So I’ve realized,” Valmont said.
“Why him?” Karrin asked. “What’s Nicodemus’s interest?”
I pursed my lips and sucked in my breath through my teeth thoughtfully. “Access,” I said. “Gotta be.”
“What do you mean?”
I held up Harvey’s picture. “This guy can get us something that no one else can. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
“Whose money does he handle?” Karrin asked.
I scanned the file. “Um. . there’s a client list here. Individuals, businesses, estates, trusts. Most of it is just numbers, or has question marks. Several of them are listed as unknown.”
“Pretty standard,” Valmont said. “Guys like that operate at high levels of discretion. What has Nicodemus told you about this job?”
“The final objective, and you,” I said. “None of the steps in between.”
“Keeping you in the dark,” she said. “Keeps the carrot in your mind, but makes it harder for you to betray him if you aren’t sure what comes next.”
“Jerk,” I muttered. “So we don’t know what Nicodemus has in mind yet, but I bet you anything that Harvey here is step two.”
“Makes sense,” Karrin said.
“All right,” I said. “No details to any of the Chicago crew, okay? We’re playing pretty serious hardball. If word of this leaks, it could reflect on Mab badly, and that could get a little crucifixiony for me.”
Karrin grimaced. “So you also want to keep them in the dark and give them information on an as-needed, step-by-step basis?”
“Don’t want to,” I said. “Need to. The irony is not lost on me, but like I said, I’m playing this one kind of close to the chest.”
I closed my eyes again and checked on my body. The same feelings of vague discomfort and weariness seemed to permeate my limbs, and a faint twinge of what might have been the beginnings of a muscle cramp tugged at my back. The silver stud in my ear continued to weigh a little too much, and to pulse with cold at the very edge of comfort.
A gut instinct told me that Mab’s little painkiller wasn’t actually helping me, except to hide the pain I would otherwise be feeling. I’d poured out a lot of energy into just a couple of spells back at the hotel, and doing it without my tools had been hard work. I’d been forced to draw upon the Winter mantle just to keep the pace I needed to stay alive. There wasn’t any hard information on how the mantle would interact with my abilities, since to the best of my knowledge there had never been a Winter Knight with a wizard’s skills before-but I was pretty sure that the more I leaned on that cold, dark power, the more comfortable I would get in doing so, and the more potential it would have to change who and what I was.