goodman grey

I tracked Grey, staring hard at him as he took up position at the fourth corner of the square centered on me and Michael, watching him as he set the pack of diamonds and artifacts to one side and cracked his knuckles, smiling.
“I never pretended to be anything but a villain,” he said to me, as if baffled by my glare. “Should have seen this one coming, wizard.”
“You really killed her?” I asked.
“No particular reason not to. It was quick.”
“You are a treacherous son of a bitch,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. “Maybe you should have been the one to hire me, then.”
His response made me grind my teeth.
There weren’t going to be any temptations offered this time, no bargains to think twice about, and no cavalry was about to ride over the horizon. Nicodemus meant to kill us.
Michael and I could not win this fight.
I heard him take a deep breath and murmur a low, steady prayer. He set his feet and raised his sword to the high guard.
I gripped my staff mostly in my right hand, holding it across my body with a few fingers of my damaged left arm, and called forth my will and Winter, readying for a hopeless battle.
Lasciel turned her hands palms up, and searing points of violet light appeared in them. Waves of heat shimmered around Hannah Ascher’s body.
Anduriel seethed up around Nicodemus like a dark cloak made from a breaking wave, foaming around the slender man as he raised his sword and started forward.
Ursiel let out a subsonic rumble that shook my chest, and the Genoskwa’s beady eyes stared hate from the face of the prehistoric demon-bear.
Grey tensed and crouched slightly, his bland features relaxed and amused.
And I stopped being able to fight back the maniac’s grin that had been struggling to get loose as I played my hole card and said, “Game over, man. Game over.”

Skin Game Chapter 43, Page 367


A good con doesn’t just happen.
It’s all about the setup.
Let’s rewind.
Set the Wayback Machine for three mornings ago, just after walking out of that first meeting with Nicodemus and Deirdre at the Hard Rock, while riding away in the limo with Mab.
I told her who I wanted to see.
For a moment, she didn’t react. Her eyes were locked somewhere beyond the roof of the limo, her head tracking slowly, as if she could still see Nicodemus and Deirdre in their suite. There was no expression on her face, absolutely none—but the interior of the car had dropped several degrees in temperature, purely from the intensity of whatever she wasn’t showing.
“You grow in wisdom, my Knight,” she said a moment later, turning her head back to face the front. “Slowly, perhaps, but you grow. He is the logical person to consult in this matter. I have already arranged a meeting.”

Skin Game Chapter 44, Page 369


“Have you seen this guy in action?” I asked. “Nicodemus Archleone is . . . He’s better than me. Smart, dangerous, ruthless, and experienced. All by himself, he’d be bad enough. I’ve never even seen him go to his bench. All the other Denarians whip out their Fallen buddies left and right, but Nicodemus, as far as I can tell, mostly uses his to chauffeur him around. I’ve got no idea what Anduriel can do, because Nick has never had to fall back on him.”
“Perhaps that’s because Nicodemus understands just as well as you do where true power comes from,” Kringle said.
I arched an eyebrow at that. “Knowledge,” I said. I thought about it, putting pieces together. “Wait. You’re telling me that he doesn’t use Anduriel in fights because Anduriel isn’t a fighter.”
“Any of the Fallen are absolutely deadly in battle,” Kringle said severely, “even hampered as they are. But the Master of Shadows doesn’t prefer to operate that way, no.”
Nicodemus’s control over the gang of superpowered lunatics was starting to make more sense now. “Master of Shadows. That’s an old, old phrase for a spy master.”
“Exactly,” Kringle said. “Nicodemus knows very nearly as much as I do. Anduriel has the potential to hear anything uttered within reach of any living being’s shadow, and sometimes to look out from it and see.”
My eyes widened and I looked down at my own shadow on the table.
“No,” Kringle said. “That’s why Mab remains here, to secure this conversation against Anduriel. But you must exercise extreme discretion for the duration of this scenario. There are places Anduriel cannot reach—your friend Carpenter’s home, for example, or your island, now that you have awakened it. And the Fallen must know to pay attention to a given shadow, or else it’s all j
ust a haze of background noise—but you can safely assume that Anduriel will be listening very carefully to your shadow during this entire operation. Anything you say, Nicodemus will know. Even writing something down could be compromised.”
“Hell’s bells,” I said. If that was the case, communicating with my friends would just get them set up for a trap. Man, no wonder Nicodemus was always a few steps ahead of everyone else. “I’m . . . going to have to play the cards really damned close to my chest, then.”
“If I were you, I’d hold them about three inches behind my sternum, just to be sure,” Kringle said.
I swigged beer and drummed my fingers on the table. “Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Good to know. But it’s not enough. I need another advantage.”
“I never find having too many advantages any particular burden.”
“What would be perfect is a plant of my own,” I said. “Someone Nicodemus doesn’t see coming. But to work that angle, I’d have to know who he was getting together, someone he already planned to have in place.”
Kringle took on the air of a professor prompting a stumbling protégé. “How could you work with this theoretical person, without the ability to speak with him, to coordinate your efforts?”
“Hide it in plain sight,” I said, “disguised as something else. Code.”
“Interesting. Go on.”
“Uh . . . ,” I said. “He’d be taking his cues from me, so mostly he’d be the one asking me questions. Tell him to refer to me as ‘wizard’ just before he asks a question relating to the situation at hand. The first word of my response would be the answer. Then we could make the actual conversation sound like something else entirely. We play along until it’s time for me to make my move. Then I use the phrase ‘game over’ and we hit them.”
Kringle took a pull of his beer. “Not bad. Not perfect, but then, it never is.” He set his bottle aside and reached down into the sack by his foot. He rummaged for a moment and then produced a large envelope, which he offered to me.
I regarded it carefully. Gifts have an awful lot of baggage attached to them among the Fae, and both Kringle and I were members of the Winter Court. “I didn’t get you anything,” I said.
He waved his other hand negligently. “Consider it a belated holiday gift, free of obligation. That island is a tough delivery.”
“Prove it,” I said. “Say ‘ho, ho, ho.’”
“Ho, ho, ho,” he replied genially.
I grinned and took the envelope. I opened it and found a photo and a brief description inside.
“Who is this?”
“A covert operative, a mercenary,” Kringle replied. “One of the best.”
“I’ve never heard of him.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Because he’s covert?”
I bobbed my head a bit in admission of the point. “Why am I looking at his picture?”
“There are four operatives who could play one role Nicodemus needs filled in this venture,” he said. “Two of them are currently under contract elsewhere, and the third is presently detained. That leaves Nicodemus only one option, and I know he won’t exercise it until the last possible moment—and he’s not far away.”
“You think if I get to him first, I can hire him?”
“If I make the introduction and we establish your communication protocol under Mab’s aegis? Yes.”
“But if he’s a mercenary, he can by definition be bought. What’s to stop Nicodemus from outbidding me?”
Kringle sat back in his seat at that, considering the question. Then he said, “If you buy this man, he stays bought. It’s who he is.”
I arched an eyebrow. “You’re asking me to trust a stranger’s professional integrity?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Kringle said. “I’m asking you to trust mine.”
I exhaled, slowly. I took a long pull of beer.
“Well, hell,” I said. “What’s the world coming to if you can’t trust Santa Claus?” I leaned forward, peering at the printed summary and said, “So let’s meet with Goodman Grey.”

Skin Game Chapter 44, Page 372-375


I hadn’t quite finished the “r” sound in “game over” before Grey had crossed forty feet of intervening space and was on top of Ursiel and the Genoskwa.
One second, Grey was standing there, looking smug and anticipatory. The next, there was a blur in the air and then a creature was clawing its way up Ursiel’s back. It was about the size and vaguely the shape of a gorilla, but the head on its shoulders might have belonged to some kind of hideous werewolf-bulldog hybrid, and grotesquely elongated claws tipped its hands. Its weird golden eyes were Grey’s. Before Ursiel could realize that he was under attack, the Grey-creature was astride its ursine back, fangs sinking into the huge hump of muscle there, oversized jaws locked into place. The huge bear-thing reared up onto its hind legs, only for Grey to reach around to its head with gorilla-length arms and sink nine-inch claws like daggers into its eyes.

Skin Game Chapter 45, Page 377