“Something like that,” he said. “The coins, Dresden.”

I reached into the pocket of my duster and…

“What the hell,” I said.

The Crown Royal bag was gone.

I checked my other pockets, careful of the coin I’d taken from Magog—and careful not to reveal its presence to Nicodemus. No bag. “It’s gone.”

“Dresden, don’t even try such a pathetic lie on m—”

“It’s gone!” I told him with considerable heat, none of it feigned. Eleven coins. Eleven freaking cursed coins. The last time I remembered definitely having them had been up at the tower, when I’d jingled them for Nicodemus.

He stared at me for a moment, his eyes searching, and then murmured something under his breath. Whispers rolled from the shadows around him. I didn’t recognize the language, but I did recognize the tone. I wondered if the angelic tongue had swear words, or if they just said nice words backward or something. Doog! Teews doog!

Nicodemus’s sword came up as swiftly as a flickering snake’s tongue and came to rest against my throat. I didn’t have time to flinch; it was that fast. I sucked in a quick breath and held very, very still.

“These marks,” he murmured. “Thorned Namshiel’s strangler spell.” His eyes drew a line from the last apparent mark on my neck down to the duster pocket that the bag of coins had been in. “Ah. The strangulation was the distraction. He picked your pocket with one of the other wires before he was incapacitated. He did that to Saint…someone-or-other, in Glasgow in the thirteenth century.”

There’s nothing like getting taken with an old trick, I guess. But that meant that Namshiel had been working together with someone else—someone else who had to have been hanging around to collect the coins after he’d taken them from my pocket and tossed them off to the side in the confusion. Someone who hadn’t been pulling a fade after all.

“Tessa and Rosanna,” I said quietly. “They got their collection of thugs back. They bailed at just the right moment to ruin your plan, too.”

“Deceitful bitches,” Nicodemus murmured. “One of them is our own Judas; I was sure of it.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “What?”

“That’s why I let them handle the more, shall we say, memorable aspects of the Archive’s initiation to our world,” Nicodemus said. “I suppose now that the child is free, she’ll have some rather unpleasant associations with those two.”

“And you’re telling me this why?”

He shrugged a shoulder. “It’s somewhat ironic, Dresden, that I can talk to you about this particular aspect of family business. You’re the only one that I’m sure hasn’t gone over to this new force—this Black Council of yours.”

“How can you be so sure about me?” I asked him.

“Please. No one so obstreperous has been corrupted by anything but his own pure mule headedness.” Nicodemus shook his head, never taking his eyes off me. “Still. My time here has not been wasted. The Knights carried away Namshiel’s coin, so Tessa has lost her sorcery teacher. I heard Magog’s bellow end quite abruptly a few moments ago, just before you walked out of the same building, so with any luck Tessa’s heaviest bruiser is out of the game for a time as well, eh?” Nicodemus smiled cheerily at me. “Perhaps his collar is in one of your pockets. And I have Fidelacchius. Removal of one of the Three is profit enough for one operation, even if I did lose this chance at gaining control of the Archive.”