Here is Veron, appearing in the passenger seat!

"I think that went rather well," says Veron, smiling a little.

  "Show off," snorts his soul.

"It was for a good cause."

"It did! We got the information we needed! And now we're going to find... something. In the suburbs, apparently, that's fun." He passes David the address. "Do they have suburbs in your universe?"

"Uh, no. Unless 'suburb' means 'under city,' in which case, yes, but they tend to be filled with monsters."

"No, no, we've got that too, we just call it the Undertown. Secret magic thing. Suburbs are like... you've got a city, right, and that's fine, but then the city parts of the city fill up with businesses and offices and stuff, and there's no room for people to actually live. So the people all get shunted out into this big ring of town around the city, and they have nice pretty houses and they drive into the city every day and the place itself is very pretty and incredibly boring. That's suburbs."

"... Huh. Okay. Yep, nope, don't have those."

"That's where we're going."

They drive. Soon enough they leave the city and arrive, as promised, in the suburbs. Michael's house was in the suburbs too, now that Veron has a comparison point. This particular neighborhood is a bit more soulless, though; the ground is unnaturally flat, with no hillocks or valleys in the snow over it, and all the houses are identical. Most of them seem uninhabited. Perhaps they were built recently.

Eventually they pull up to a charming house identical to the last fifty charming houses they've passed, except for the faint suggestion of tracks in the snow covering the front path. Also, if someone had supernaturally enhanced senses of some kind, they might still be able to smell blood beneath the clean scent of winter.

Harry exits the car first, holding his staff in one hand but keeping the other stretched out to the side. "Hello the house!" he calls out. "This is Dresden. I'm here to talk."

After a very tense minute, the door opens and a man's voice calls back, "Come in, then. But keep your hands where I can see them."

Harry leans back into the car. "Well, you heard the man. Let's go in. And keep our hands where he can see them."

"Sure," agrees Veron, eyeing the creepy clone houses with vague distaste. Eugh.

He exits the car, hands held far apart from his body, in an easily viewable location.

David follows suit. They head inside.

"Hendricks," Harry says to the preposterously large man at the door, who is holding a gun as oversized as he is. "Pleasure to see you."

"Dresden," Hendricks says. "And Dresden. And... somebody. What do you want?"

"I'm here to save Marcone," Harry says.

Hendricks raises an eyebrow.

Abruptly, a woman's voice crackles from a speaker in the wall. "Send them up."

The eyebrow goes higher. "Should I check for weapons?"

There's an electronically transmitted sigh. "Nathan, if you're under the impression that Harry Dresden is going to assassinate me, especially right now, I'm happy to disabuse you of that misconception. Just send them up."

Hendricks shrugs and points them to the stairs. Harry starts up them.

The carpeting on the stairs is cheap, with nylon fibers sticking out of the weave. Also, it's stained - increasingly so as they go along, until it's almost sodden - with blood.

Veron trails after dutifully, at first carefully putting his feet where they won't land in blood, and then giving that up as a lost cause without some acrobatics. He's not much in the mood to show off anymore.

While he goes, he eyes the place and mentally plans out defensive strategies for it, memorizing what pieces of the layout he sees and plotting ways he could take advantage of it. They might end up in a fight while here, and not with the defenders of the place. Best to be prepared.

Eventually they get to the end of the blood trail, which leads into a bedroom. In the bedroom, predictably, is a bed. On the bed, predictably, is a mutilated corpse... no, it just moved. The woman on the bed is alive, she's just also got half her guts hanging out a slash across her abdomen. The bleeding appears to have slowed, if only because there's not enough left in her to do much flowing.

Apart from the hole in her torso, she's beautiful. Tall, and strongly but elegantly built; there's a greyish cast to her pale skin, but that'd be the blood loss. She's dressed in what was once a finely tailored business suit, and is no longer that. Beside her on the bed rests a massive battleaxe, its head spattered with green blood.

"Hell's bells," Harry breathes.

"Goodness," the woman says, forcing a grimacing smirk. "You'd think you never saw someone disemboweled before."

"Gard. It's... good to see you again, but a shame about the circumstances."

Gard shrugs, wincing. "It's not the first time I've had my guts ripped out. I'll be alright; Monoc Securities has a hell of a health plan."

She gestures to a tube of, according to the label, heavy-duty modeling glue, and then to a few inches of the wound, which look to have been stuck together.

David raises his eyebrows. "Impressive."

Veron considers his stash of healing potions, and whether or not it would be wise to hand one over to a strange mobster. ... Eeeeeh, probably not, but he kind of doesn't want to be that asshole that refuses to help a person in need because of their profession or personal history. Due to his profession and personal history, he has the habit of buying and carrying quite a lot of healing potions. If she'll be okay without them, then she doesn't need some of his best.

"If I may, ma'am?" He retrieves one of the healing potions in question and slides it over to, apparently, Gard. "Healing potion. That does not look comfortable; it'll help with healing and the pain."

Gard raises an eyebrow. "Dresden?"

"He's not lying," Harry confirms.

She considers the potion, then downs it. Some color returns to her cheeks, and she lets out some accumulated breath as the glued-together section of the wound closes over.

"Thank you," she says. She takes advantage of her renewed vitality to push a loop of intestine back into herself and glue together some more of the gash. It looks agonizing, but her expression barely changes. "Why are you here?"

"I need to help Marcone."

"That's highly implausible."

"I didn't say I want to help Marcone. But it's my ass on the line if I don't."

"I see." She reinserts some more of her innards. "You need to call in the White Council. The Accords have been breached."

Harry falls silent.

"Oh, they're going to fucking love that."

'Accords'? The White Council thing he can make sense of, he recalls Harry mentioning them before, but he has no idea what accords are being referred to here, or how they've been breached, or why that matters. He makes a note to ask about this later, but for now he'll avoid interrupting the important talk with his silly questions. Dresden's (Dresdens'?) got a handle on this, anyway, Veron is pretty sure he's here to be sneaky and stab things. This seems a bit too convoluted for a random lost person to wander in and get a handle on what's going on in any kind of reasonable amount of time.

It is at this moment that the window explodes, and something lands claws-first on Gard's still-open stomach.

The creature is vaguely humanoid in shape, hardly larger than a child, but covered in glossy red-and-black chitin, with serrated arm-blades like a praying mantis. Its oversized, multifaceted eyes gleam with an inner fire, an orange-red glow—and immediately above the first set of eyes another set, this one blazing with sickly green luminescence, blink and focus independently of the first pair. A sigil of angelic script burns against the chitin of the insect-thing’s forehead.

The Knight of the Blackened Denarius lets out a brassy roar, then leaps for Harry like a bullet.

Well, that's alarming and needs to get stabbed. Veron gets to making this happen. Behold: how he is in fact faster than a Knight of the Blackened Denarious, and how the creature now has some new piercings in uncomfortable places. Like eye sockets. The two on the top, one with the short sword of ice, one with the short sword of acid. Veron's a nice guy like that.

The creature doesn't like that at all! It shrieks, then turns to lunge at Veron.

Then Gard pulls an assault rifle from under the bed, sets it against her hip, and starts firing. There's two or three seconds of deafening thunder as the bullets, fired at near point-blank range, pulverize the demon's flesh, painting the walls of the room with sickly pink ichor. Then the rifle slips from Gard's fingers as the recoil takes its toll on her already injured body. There's not much left of the demon but scattered pieces, but from Gard's face, it doesn't look like she's going to be doing that - or anything else - again any time soon.

There's sounds of more gunfire downstairs, and animalistic roars. "Hendricks," Gard gasps. "He's- outgunned."

Harry nods firmly and runs downstairs. A few seconds later, he shouts "FORZARE!" and there's the sound of a very large animal going through a wall.

And then, the pieces of demon shudder and start piecing themselves back together.

"Oh, for fuck's sake," David growls.

Veron briefly considers setting the bits of demon on fire, then decides that this carpet has been through enough. Also: it would sure be bad if the little bits of this demon attacked things while also on fire. Acid would have taken care of regeneration if it were like a troll, so the mechanism by which it regenerates must be different.

He then considers the morality of stabbing a demon thing with a soul eating sword. If anything needs to be stabbed with a soul eating sword, it's probably a demon, so he retrieves Ex-Enserric from the Bag of Holding to get to making that happen. Stab.

The movement abruptly stops. 

From one of the larger pieces falls a coin. Silver, tarnished with age, but with a gleaming pattern of clean metal on its surface in the shape of the same sigil from the demon's forehead. 

David hisses and flinches back. "Don't touch it," he says sharply. "Do not. I don't want to deal with demonically possessed versions of either of you, that sounds like a fucking terrible time."

"Agreed. Super, super bad time, let's never do it," says Veron, taking several measured steps away from the coin.

  "I think we could take it!" says a bit of David's coat, a possum poking her head out from under his collar to peer at the coin.

"No."

"Let's not test that," David agrees.

David checks his leather glove for holes. Finding none, he gingerly picks up the coin, places it into a small box he retrieves from his coat pocket, and replaces the box in his coat. Then he exhales.

"There you will sit," he tells his pocket firmly.

  David's collar hisses at his pocket.

"Do I need to extract you from the nice man's coat so you don't to anything rash," says Veron.

  ".... no," grumbles the possum, grumpily. "But we could definitely take it. For the record."

"Noted. I'm gonna go check on Harry and the general downstairs situation."

Downstairs, Harry is battling a slithering green monster with spiraling antlers. There's also a furry black corpse in the entryway with matching holes in its head and stomach. Another silver coin lies invitingly beside it.

Harry lights his opponent on fire. Hendricks, who is standing nearby with his oversized gun, takes the opportunity to shoot it in the head. It slumps to the floor and a coin falls out of the stump.

"...wasn't expecting to win that one," Harry admits.

Hendricks grunts in agreement.