Speaking of common enemies.

Nicodemus was dying. I had seen enough people on their last few breaths to know what one looked like. Seen way too much of that, these days.

I squatted by his body while he breathed in staggered rhythm. Something had punctured one of his lungs, not badly enough to kill him but badly enough to make his body operate on a greatly reduced lung capacity. I had the feeling I knew who had done it, too.

"So... Dresden..."

"Don't talk, okay?" I said gruffly. Leave it to me to have some sympathy for the devil. "You sound like a poor man's Darth Vader."

That might have been a mistake. He laughed, and it didn't take long before the laughing was that kind of wheezy choke they try to approximate in the movies but never get quite right. Wheezing turned to struggling for breath, turned to taking long sets of shallow breaths, pant pant pant wheeze. Pant pant wheeze. I reached to loosen the noose around his neck, except it wasn't there.

Well, it was and it wasn't. It was still there but it was withered, burnt, scorched, something. Something had taken it and twisted it and drained it of whatever it was that had kept it there for millennia. However it had gotten around his neck, Biblically or otherwise, somehow someone had changed its purpose to steal his life instead of preserve it. The holes in his lung, thigh, and wrists were just a nice touch. There were probably ones in his feet, too, just to complete the irony.

"Is he..."

I nodded. "He's on his way."

"Good." Nicodemus closed his eyes and breathed shallow breaths for a while. I sat back and waited for Marcone to show up with the lawyers.

He wanted a treaty. He wanted a truce. Something like one of those, I wasn't quite clear on what it was and he hadn't used either term specifically. What he had said was that he wanted to make a deal. He had information that I could use, and I had the ability to make the people who had killed him and his daughter pay. Tessa wasn't in the bargain. Either she was dead, in which case it wasn't his problem and she had probably met a very nasty and satisfying end anyway, or she was the traitor or in with the traitor, in which case she fell under the purview of the deal anyway.

The third possibility that she had actually given up the coin did occur to me, but since I couldn't think of a single damn circumstance in which that was in the same galaxy as probable I let it go.

"What do you want?" I asked him. Again. He rolled his eyes at me from beneath his eyelids, I could tell. Or maybe that was the Denariian in him rolling its eyes. After all these years I wasn't sure there was a difference between them anymore, but there was definitely a difference between them looking at me. If that made any sense at all. It didn't always make sense to me.

Nicodemus shook his head after a second. "I want more life, Dresden." I refrained from making the Blade Runner joke and hoped that Elaine would be proud of me. "I want to live, like any other creature. And I want my child, my daughter, to live and be happy. All else after that is negotiable. But I am dying. I have lived long enough in this skin to know that."

I also refrained from saying that if he'd lived long enough to die once before, at least, to know what that felt like, then he was a pretty rare individual. However, since I'd already killed myself at least once it would kind of have been hypocritical to make fun, so I didn't.

"Failing that?"

He exhaled, choked and exhaled some more. "Failing that, I want the bastard who killed me dead. And I want him to suffer before he dies."

You could power a small sun with hatred like that. Living for millennia hadn't just taught him life and death, it had taught him how to really carry a grudge. All right then.

"We may be able to accomplish that."

Marcone at that angle would have blotted out the sun, if the sun was still visible. I had the feeling the sun was still in the sky, all kinds of havoc would have been wreaked on the tides and the moon and everything else if it wasn't, but we couldn't see it if we had the world's biggest telescope. The wily bastard still managed to loom impressively.

"Marcone."

He nodded politely to me. "Dresden."

"Lord Marcone," Nicodemus wheezed.

"Nicodemus."

"Doctor Scott."

Both of them glared at me. I hadn't known Nicodemus even knew the finer points of musical theatre.

"To business," Marcone reminded us all, with a firm voice, that we didn't have time to dick around. "Nicodemus, you have an offer to make."

"I do." He forced himself to sit up, even, drawing himself up despite whatever pain he might be feeling to sit so that his eyes were roughly level with ours. Then again, for all I knew, he liked pain better than he liked the indignity of lying back. It wouldn't have surprised me. "Harry Dresden..."

There was enough of a pause between my first and last names to make me very nervous.

"... I come to you under flag of truce and an oath of non-violence to you and yours, to swear that I will tell you the truth as far as I know it about your Black Council..."

Marcone interrupted him. I didn't even have to raise my hand. "The whole truth, and nothing but the truth?"

"So help you God," I muttered. Nicodemus either didn't hear me above his Vadering or he was ignoring me, I couldn't tell which.

"The entire truth of what I know, as far as I know it, about your Black Council. And in return, you will eradicate all members of said Council that you can find and are able to." He coughed, which helped me ignore what the rest of that probably was. Something involving torturing people into oblivion. No, I wasn't up for that.

But the wording had been able to. I wondered if he had chosen that so that I wouldn't be reluctant to agree, thinking about future plans and enemies I might get killed trying to take down, or if he had known I would have some sort of qualms about this. Taking on the Denariians was bad enough. Taking on Denariians who had betrayed their own kind already could be suicide.

"I swear it on my magic."

It might have been my imagination but I was pretty sure, somewhere, a bell was ringing. Maybe it was just my skull.

"And I swear by my power and my coin," his voice took on a strange, dual-layered note, like two people speaking at once just a half-beat out of sync. "That I will tell you everything that I know, as truthfully as I know it, about your Black Council."

There should have been something to mark the occasion. Maybe those bells again. A wizard and a fallen angel in a human body (at least, I thought he'd been human) making nice and trading information with each other. In pursuit of a higher goal, though. Maybe Murphy was right about common enemies being the oldest source for allies. Maybe Nicodemus was just tired, and done.

Either way, I didn't have much less left to lose, myself. "All right, Nicky," I gave him my best shit-eating grin, and Marcone rolled his eyes at me. "Thrill me."

"Do you think he was telling the truth?"

Marcone shook his head as we walked back to the cars. The very armored cars, surrounded by very armed and armored guards. I'd say this for him, he knew how to get the resources. Even in the face of Armageddon. I wondered how well his employees's families were doing on the inside. Or if they even had families.

"Does it matter? He believed he was telling the truth. He must have, by your own rules, or he would have destroyed his coin."

"And his power." I snorted. "Not that that matters much since he was dying anyway. Nice promise from a dying man."

"Do you have much of a choice other than to believe him?" Marcone gestured me into the car, and I had the feeling he was getting tired of me nitpicking. I couldn't blame him. We didn't exactly have the resources to go choosing our sources of information, and here I was taking apart some of the first constructive intel we'd gotten in a while.

I shook my head and grunted like the grudge-holding ape I was being. "Guess not."

We got in the limo. The third member of our party had waited in the car, on account of exactly what had happened out there. I didn't tell Thomas what had happened to Nicodemus's coin, and neither did Marcone. None of the three of us wanted to find out what would happen if Thomas got ahold of any coins, let alone Nicodemus's. Right now it was just as heavily guarded as we were, in the hands of the only priest I knew I could trust, on its way to a safer place than the Vatican. It still wasn't much, but it was something. God, I was getting cynical in my old age.

"Did he give you what you needed to know?"

My brother's voice was raspy and hoarse; he hadn't fed in weeks. Not really. I had only the faintest idea of how much he was hurting and I wanted to make it go away, but I couldn't. None of us could. He accepted that with good grace, as much as could be expected. Given the circumstances, there wasn't much of anything we could do.

At least Justine was safe, he said, and that was the only thing he said the two times I'd brought it up.

"He gave us enough. Whether or not it was the truth..." I shrugged, and Marcone glared at me.

"He's been saying that since we left the meeting," the mobster commented sourly.

Thomas even chuckled at that. "You know what they say about the devil quoting scripture. Even if it is the truth, do you think it'll do us any good?"

"Nhf," I agreed. That was always the sticky point. The names Nicodemus had given us, the information, could have changed the moment they found out about him. Or the moment they found out he intended to tell us. "I will say, though, it explains the power behind this. And some of the... the feel of it." I groped for words. Magic wasn't an exact science, okay? That's why it was magic, and not science.

"Lesser White Court with the... the Nickelheads' power to back them up, plus the fear and darkness spell over the city?" Thomas dug the heels of his hands into his eyes and muttered something that sounded suspiciously like it had the word 'Skavis' in it. "That would be enough to cause all this, but what is it for?"

I grimaced. "That's the sickening part. It's not a Darkhallow, not this time. It's something worse."

Thomas stared at me and Marcone. To my surprise, Marcone looked away before I did. "What could possibly be worse than this? Or a Darkhallow, whatever that involves."

"The end of the world as we know it." That, from Marcone, sardonic and tired and sounding what I would have called scared if it wasn't Marcone talking. Marcone didn't get rattled. Not because of a pesky little thing like an Apocalypse.

"Dramatic as that is, he's kind of right. They're planning on literally bringing Hell to earth, starting with the Outsiders."

Everyone twitched.

"Armageddon, Ragnarok, whatever you want to call it, it basically amounts to the same thing. The doors fly open and something goes through, whether it's us to the Rapture or them to our world. Which might be their equivalent of Rapture." Come to think of it. Eew. "That's all this is. It's one big, big-big summoning spell. Or a portal spell, he wasn't specific on the details, and I get the feeling that's something that could go either way. They're just plain hammering at the barriers between the worlds until they fall apart and it all pours in together. Outsiders come here, or we go there."

Thomas grunted. "If I had to choose, I'd rather it be Outsiders coming here..." Marcone looked at him, startled, then nodded slowly.

I was missing whatever it was they had just agreed on. "What?" I didn't like it much. I never liked missing things, but this was a little more crucial than usual.

"We've already evacuated almost everyone who can or is willing to leave. Everyone else is either a mercenary in my pay who may be told of the risks, a soldier.. or a cop," that was a nod to Murphy. "Who would volunteer to stay, or an enemy. Unless your Wardens can bring force to bear on the city..."

I snorted. "Johnny, they can't even bring force to bear on a couple of vampires in their backyard, right now." Yes, I was being annoying. It happened when I got nervous. "We're it. We're all there is. What are you talking about?"

"Blockade the city," he said, at the same time as Thomas adopted his gruff Marine voice.

"Take off and nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."

Outsiders as xenomorphs. I couldn't say it was a bad analogy. Still. "You do realize you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of people here?" Which is, a voice in my head said at the same time, better by far than hundreds of thousands of people that were in the city. And the hundreds of millions more that would die if we let Outsiders into the world. I could feel a headache starting just above and behind my left eye. "Christ..."

"I doubt he's coming, but we could have asked..."

"Shut up, Marcone."

He showed me that shark-like grin. "Sorry."

No, he wasn't. Just for that, I rolled my neck and cracked as much of my spine as I could, even if the only one who was wincing here was me. Thomas looked at me, steadily. "It's the best solution we have right now, Harry." His lips twitched in the first smile I'd seen out of him in weeks. Maybe months. "You always did like blowing stuff up, anyway."

"You set a couple of buildings on fire..." I shook my head. "I... okay. I don't like it, and I'd rather chew on my own liver than set off a nuke in Chicago..."

"But if the Outsiders make it here you really will get a chance to find out what your liver tastes like."

"Pretty much. Let's make that the option of increasingly likely last resort, though. I'll tell the others, and we'll see what they have to say." We were getting close to the hotel. Not much more to say, and it was getting dire enough that once I stepped out of the limo, I didn't know if I'd see either of them again. That wasn't a feeling I liked much, either.

Nuking Chicago. Huh. "You know, I think I read about this in an RPG once..."

Marcone stared blankly at me, while Thomas just laughed. I missed my brother, sometimes. "Get out of the car, you dork. Come back when you have a real plan to save the world."

I grinned at him, and hoped it didn't look as manic as it felt. "Count on it."

I used to be a big fan of Richard Matheson, too. Now that the end of the world was coming, though, all of those apocalyptic books were taking on a definite melancholy tone.

Marcone's limo dropped me off at the hotel. I didn't go in. I wanted some alone time, me and my nightmares and all those dark doubts that were gnawing at my innards and percolating in my brain like some sort of pot of crappy police station coffee. The girls didn't need to hear any of that.

Everything was coming to a head at once. This wasn't how I'd wanted it to go down, but the Black Council had gotten the jump on me. On everyone. Hell, for all I knew, the Black Council had gotten the jump on itself. This certainly didn't seem to be the same kind of long-range planning they'd shown earlier. Maybe the Council was fracturing over something. Bad guys generally did that, on account of how none of them could trust each other. Maybe they were losing their power base. Not that that seemed to be doing us any good.

Hell if I knew what was going on.

I wound up in a church graveyard not too far from the hotel. It looked even more morbid in the dim light. The darkness wasn't natural, and it didn't feel like it; there wasn't even a moon that waxed and waned and shone through the clouds. It was just pitch black. The street lights still worked, yeah, but they worked 24-7 these days. They couldn't keep replacing the bulbs, either.

This church looked like it had seen better days. I wondered if they were still meeting for Sunday mass, or if they'd been evacuated or were hiding with the rest. Probably hiding. No Wednesday service announcement. If anyone was meeting to worship it was the kind of last ditch huddling in pews that didn't get announced, just happened, as everyone started banding together to find their last shelters. As far as those went, at least, there were worse than churches.

The graveyard was pretty full, too. It was sort of comforting that it looked like it had been filling up slowly over a long period of time. The earliest headstone was laid apparently back in the 1800s, or at least, that was when that person was buried.

I sat my bony ass down on a grave marker and apologized to the resident, because it was only polite. It started to rain a little while I thought about all that was going on, tried to sort it out in my head. Because nothing says existential angst and mortal danger like sitting in the rain in a graveyard, right? I glared up at the sky, as though it would help.

"You just weren't done with us, were you?" Normally I would have put down yelling at God in a rainy graveyard to stress of the moment, but that was before Uriel had turned up. Or at least, a really powerful being claiming to be Uriel, and who was I to judge. "You just had to let this crap loose on us. The Nickelheads. The Black Council. You just keep piling and piling it on, until what? Until we're all dead? Until just the ones You want to save have been saved? After all that work we did for You, and You're just going to leave us here out to dry? At what point exactly are You satisfied?"

"When the work is done."

I did not leap a foot into the air. I fell over because the headstone was slippery. "What the hell are you doing out here?"

Molly was grinning at me, arms folded, as though she hadn't walked up to hear me yelling at her God. Sweet, darling girl. Tolerant, too. "I just figured I'd check up on you."

"Oh. Well, I, was. Um."

"Venting," her grin broadened. "The word is venting. It's okay. We all do it sometimes."

I cleared my throat. "I didn't mean... um." I was pretty sure her father, my friend Michael Carpenter, didn't. Not like that anyway. "We should go back inside. On account of the rain."

"Of course." She took my arm anyway, to steer me straight back to the hotel. Which was probably what I needed instead of more time to brood, but it still made me want to ... something. She was just a kid. She didn't deserve this. "We'll manage," she said then, as though she was reading my thoughts. Knowing her, and knowing me, she was probably just reading the expression on my face. "Faith manages."

I snorted. "Your father?"

"Nah. Saw it on a TV show once."

They didn't even ask why we were laughing like a pair of loons when we staggered into the lobby.

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