Текст книги "Cold Days"

Автор книги: Jim Butcher

Соавторы: Jim Butcher
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Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 35 страниц)

That got a reaction from everyone. The Redcap dropped into a crouch, hands up in a defensive posture. Several Sidhe took rapid steps back.

“Holy Mother of God,” Murphy breathed.

Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the grisly missile lying on the sidewalk, so their heads weren’t directed toward the future, weren’t able to see that the situation was about to change again.

“Hey,” I said, in exactly the same tone. “Weren’t there six of you guys a minute ago?”

Eyes swept back up in time to see the brush swaying where something had dragged the Sidhe from the opposite end of the line, on my right side, into the bushes, and more screams erupted, clawing at the rain-drizzled air.

“Sith,” hissed one of the female Sidhe, her widened eyes darting everywhere, followed by the barrel of her composite-material pistol. “Cat Sith.”

Her attention wasn’t on me, and I took the opening. I slammed my will down through my numbed right arm, snarling, “Forzare!”

At the same instant, Thomas turned his gun on the Redcap and opened fire.

Invisible force hit the female Sidhe with more or less the same energy as a small car doing twenty-five or thirty. It should have been a lot more than that, and focused on a smaller area, but in my current condition it was everything I had thrown into the best single punch I could throw. She hadn’t been able to counter the spell as it struck, and was flung back away from me. She bounced once in a bed of flowers, and then tumbled into the lake.

Meanwhile, the Redcap and the other Sidhe darted in every direction and blurred to near-invisibility behind their veils. Thomas might have hit one of them. It was hard to hear any sounds of impact or screams of pain over the thunder of the ridiculously large rounds used in his Desert Eagle. Other guns went off, too.

Adrenaline surged and I shoved myself to my feet, shouting, “Fall back!”

Something flashed by me, and then Cat Sith appeared from behind his own veil, leaping with all four paws extended, his claws unsheathed. He landed on what looked like empty air, and his legs moved in a blur of ripping, supernaturally powerful strikes. Blood fountained from the empty air, and Sith bounded away, vanishing again, as one of the Sidhe appeared in the space where Sith had been. The Sidhe’s upper body was a mass of blood and shredded flesh, his expression shocked. He crumpled slowly to the ground, his eyes wide, as if trying to see through complete darkness. His hands clenched aimlessly a few times, and then he went still.

I turned to run and staggered woozily. Karrin saw it and darted in close to my side, preventing me from falling. She didn’t see Ace, behind her, produce a small pistol and aim it at her back.

I shouted and lurched down on top of him. The gun went off once, and then I had his gun arm pinned to the ground beneath both of my forearms and the whole weight of my body. Ace cursed and swung a fist at me. I slammed my forehead into his nose a bunch of times. It took the fight out of him, and his head wobbled dazedly.

There was a high-pitched shriek and a tiny armored form covered in fishhooks hurtled into my face and neck. My injuries swelled into agony again as the damned little metal hooks pierced my skin. I got a quick glimpse of a miniature sword flashing toward my eye. I flinched in a big roll that took me off of Ace, flinging my head in a circle to counter the motion of the little sword with centrifugal force. It cut into my eyebrow and missed my eyeball, and a flood of scarlet blocked out half of my vision.

After that, things were fuzzy. I swatted at Captain Hook with my forearm, and on the third blow the barbed hooks tore free of my skin. A hand with the strength of a hydraulic crane gripped the back of my coat and dragged me to my feet, and then my brother was helping me move. I sensed Karrin on my blind side, shouting something to Thomas, and then the Desert Eagle started thundering on that side of my body.

A Sidhe exploded from the brush, visible and wounded, with Cat Sith in hot pursuit. The Sidhe leapt into the air, shimmered, and transformed into a hawk with golden brown feathers. Its wings beat twice, gaining maybe ten feet of altitude—until Cat Sith sailed through the air in a spectacular pounce, landed on the hawk’s back, and they both plunged down into the waters of the lake.

After that, there was a lot of movement that hurt like hell, and I would have fallen a dozen times without my brother’s support. Then I was being half thrown into the back of the Hummer, coming down on the custom leather seats hard, and too exhausted to do more than pull my feet in so that they wouldn’t get slammed in the door. Both of the front doors opened and closed, and the engine, already running, roared to life, the acceleration pressing me back against the seat for a moment.

We drove for a few minutes before I was able to start sitting up. When I finally did, I found Thomas driving, with Karrin riding shotgun, holding Thomas’s Desert Eagle in her hands and turned in the seat to steadily watch the road behind us.

My brother glanced up at me in the rearview mirror and winced. “You look awful.”

I could see out of only one eye. I reached up to the other one with my hand and found blood smearing it shut and beginning to dry. I leaned to look in the rearview mirror. I had quite a bit of blood on that side of my head. The hooks had made some messy, if not large holes in my skin when they came out.

Karrin’s eyes flicked toward me for just a second, and she might have gotten a little pale, but she didn’t let any other emotion touch her face. “Looks like we’re clear. No one back there.”

Thomas grunted. “They can use magic, and Harry left a bunch of blood on the ground. If they want to follow us, they can.”

“Dammit,” Murphy breathed. “Castle?”

“And have Marcone’s people cleaning the blood off him?” Thomas asked. “Fuck that.”

“Amen,” I agreed woozily.

“Where else, then?” Karrin asked. “Your apartment?”

Thomas shook his head emphatically. “Too many people will see us taking him in. They’ll call the authorities. And Lara has eyes on the place. If I take a wounded wizard in there, she’d show up faster than Jimmy John’s.” He grunted in discomfort as the truck hit a bump in the road.

Karrin turned toward him and leaned over to examine him. “You’re hit.”

“Only one,” Thomas said calmly. “If it was bad, I’d have bled out by now. Gut shot. Don’t worry about it.”

“Don’t be an idiot,” Karrin said. “You know how easy it is for these things to go septic? You’ve got to take care of this.”

“Yeah, as soon as we stop somewhere.”

“Molly’s place,” Karrin said. “It’s under the aegis of Svartalfheim. No one’s getting in there without a major assault.”

“Right,” I said, the word slurring a little. “There.”

“Dammit, Dresden,” Karrin said, her voice exasperated. “Just lie down until we can look at you.”

I threw her a salute with my right hand and paused, feeling an unfamiliar weight on my arm.

I looked. Captain Hook dangled from it, half a dozen of his armor’s barbs caught in the denim of my jacket. I peered at the tiny armored figure and then poked him with a fingertip. He let out a semiconscious little moan, but the hooks had effectively immobilized him.

“Huh,” I said. Then I cackled. “Hah. Hah, hah, heh hahhah.”

Thomas glanced over his shoulder and blinked several times. “What the hell is that?”

“A priceless intelligence asset,” I replied.

Thomas lifted his eyebrows. “You’re going to interrogate that little guy?”

“If Molly has a turkey baster, maybe you can waterboard him,” Murphy said in an acid tone.

“Relax,” I said. “And drive. We need to . . .”

I forgot what I had been about to say we needed to do. I guess all that cackling had really taken it out of me. The world turned sideways and the leather of the backseat pressed up against my unwounded cheek. It felt cool and nice, which was a stark contrast to the waves of pure ache and steady burn that pulsed through my body with every heartbeat.

The world didn’t fade to black so much as turn a dark, restless red.

Chapter

Twenty-seven

I woke up when someone shoved a branding iron into my neck.

Okay, that isn’t what happened, but I was coming out of unconsciousness at the time, and that was what it seemed like. I let out a curse and flailed with my arms.

“Hold him, hold him!” someone said in an intent voice. Hands came down on my arms, pressing them back against a smooth, rigid surface beneath me.

“Harry,” Thomas said. “Harry, easy, easy. You’re safe.”

There were lights in my eyes. They weren’t pleasant. I squinted against them until I could see Thomas’s upside-down head looming over me.

“There you are,” Thomas said. “We were getting worried.” He lifted his hands from my arms and gave the side of my face something somewhere between a pat and a slap. “You weren’t waking up.”

I looked around me. I was lying on the table in Molly’s apartment, the same spot where we’d seen to Toot’s injuries earlier in the day. There was the sharp smell of disinfectant in the air. I felt terrible, but less terrible than I had in the car.

I turned my head and saw a wiry little guy with a shock of black hair, a beaky nose, and glittering, intelligent eyes. He picked up a metal bowl in one hand, and moved a pair of needle-nose pliers in the other, dropping something into the bowl with a clink. “And he just wakes up?” Waldo Butters, Chicago’s most polka-savvy medical examiner, asked. “Tell me that isn’t a little creepy.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

Butters held up the metal bowl, tilting it so that I could see inside. Several tiny, bright, sharp, bloodied pieces of metal were inside. “Barbs from those fishhooks,” he said. “Several of them broke off in your skin.”

I grunted. My collapse in the car made more sense now. “Yeah,” I said. “Any kind of iron gets under my skin, it seems to disagree with the Winter Knight’s bundle of awesome. Takes the gumption right out of me.” I started to sit up.

Butters very calmly put his hands on my chest and shoved me back down. Hard. I blinked at him.

“I don’t do assertive much,” he said apologetically. “I don’t really like doctoring people who are still alive. But if I’m going to do it, dammit, I’m going to do it right. So. You stay put until I say you can get up. Got it?”

“I, uh . . .” I said. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Smart,” Butters said. “You have two giant bruises where the lower halves of your arms usually go. You’re covered in lacerations, and a couple need sutures. Some are already inflamed. I need to clean them all out. That’ll work best if you hold still.”

“I can do that,” I said. “But I’m feeling all kinds of better, man. Look.” I held up my hands and wiggled my fingers. They felt a little tight. I glanced down at them. They were a mottled shade of purple and swollen. My wrists and forearms were blotchy with bruises and swollen, too.

“Harry, I once saw an addict pound his fist into concrete until he’d broken nearly every bone in his hand. He never even blinked.”

“I’m not on drugs,” I said.

“No? There’s damage to your body’s machinery. Just because you aren’t feeling it doesn’t mean it isn’t there,” Butters said firmly. “I’ve got a theory.”

“What theory?” I asked, as he got to work on the cuts.

“Well, let’s say you’re a faerie queen with a need for a mortal enforcer. You want the guy to be effective, but you don’t want to make him too powerful to handle. It seems reasonable to me that you might fiddle with his pain threshold. He’s not actually any more indestructible, but he feels like he is. He’ll ignore painful things like . . . like knife wounds or . . .”

“Gut shots?” Thomas suggested.

“Or gut shots, right,” Butters said. “And most of the time, that is probably a huge advantage. He can Energizer Bunny his way right through your enemies—and then, when it’s over, there he is. He feels great, but in reality he’s all screwed up and it’s going to take his body weeks or months to repair itself. If you don’t like the job he’s done, well, there he is all weakened and vulnerable. And if you do like it, you just let him rest and use him again another day.”

“Wow, that’s cynical,” I said. “And calculating.”

“I’m in the right ballpark, aren’t I?” Butters asked.

I sighed. “Yeah, it sounds . . . very Mab-like.” Especially if what Maeve had said about me being dangerous to Mab was true.

Butters nodded sagely. “So, as strong or quick or as fast to heal as it makes you, just remember: You aren’t any more invincible to trauma than before. You just don’t notice it when something happens. . . .” He was quiet for a moment and then asked, “You didn’t even feel that, did you?”

“Feel what?” I asked, lifting my head.

He put the heel of his hand on my forehead and pushed it down again. “I just stitched up a three-inch-long slice over one of your ribs. No anesthetic.”

“Huh,” I said. “No, I didn’t. . . . I mean, I felt something; it just wasn’t uncomfortable.”

“Supports my theory,” he said, nodding. “I already did that cut over your eye while you were out. That’s a beauty. Right down to the bone.”

“Courtesy of Captain Hook,” I said. “He had this bitty sword.” I glanced up at Thomas. “We’ve still got Hook, right?”

“He’s being held prisoner on a ceramic-lined cookie sheet in the oven,” Thomas said. “I figured he couldn’t jigger his way out of a bunch of steel, and it would give him something to think about before we start asking questions.”

“That’s an awful thing to do to one of the Little Folk, man,” I said.

“I’m planning to start making a pie in front of him.”

“Nice.”

“Thank you.”

“How long was I out?” I asked.

“About an hour,” Thomas said.

Butters snorted. “I’d have been here sooner but someone broke into my house last night and I was cleaning up the mess.”

I winced. “Uh, yeah. Right. Sorry about that, man.”

He shook his head. “I’m still kind of freaking out that you’re here at all, honestly. I mean, we held your funeral. We talked to your ghost. It doesn’t get much more gone than that.”

“Sorry to put a speed bump on your mental train track.”

“It’s more of a roller coaster, lately, but a good mind is flexible,” Butters said. “I’ll deal with it; don’t worry.” He worked for a moment more before adding, in a low murmur, “Unlike some other people.”

“Eh?” I asked him.

Butters just looked up across the large apartment and then went back to work.

I followed the direction of his gaze.

Karrin sat curled up in a chair beside the fireplace, on the far side of the big apartment, her arms wrapped around her knees, her head leaning against the chair’s back. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was open a little. She was evidently asleep. The gentle snoring supported that theory.

“Oh,” I said. “Uh. Yeah. She didn’t seem to handle it real well when I was ghosting around. . . .”

“Understatement,” Butters breathed. “She’s been through a lot. And none of it made her a bit less prickly.”

Thomas made a low sound of agreement.

“She’s run most of her friends off,” Butters said. “Never talks to cops anymore. Hasn’t been speaking to her family. Just the Viking crew down at the BFS. I’m hanging in there. So is Molly. I guess maybe we both know that she’s in a bad place.”

“And now here I am,” I said. “Man.”

“What?” Thomas asked.

I shook my head. “You gotta know Karrin.”

“Karrin, eh?” Thomas asked.

I nodded. “She’s real serious about order. A man dying, she can understand. A man coming back. That’s different.”

“Isn’t she Catholic?” Thomas asked. “Don’t they have a guy?”

I eyed him. “Yeah. And that makes it so much easier to deal with.”

“Medically speaking,” Butters said, “I’m pretty sure you were never dead. Or at least, never dead and beyond revival.”

“What, were you there?” I asked.

“Were you?” he countered.

I grunted. “From my end, it went black, and then I woke up. Ghosty. Then it went white and I woke up. Hurting. Then did a bunch of physical therapy to recover.”

“Wow, seriously, PT?” Butters asked. “How long?”

“Eleven weeks.”

“Yeah, that really leans things toward ‘coma’ for me.”

“And all the angels and ghost stuff,” I said. “Which way does that make them lean? In your medical opinion?”

Butters pressed his lips together and said, “No one likes a smart-ass, Harry.”

“I never liked him anyway,” Thomas confided to him.

“Why don’t you do something useful?” I said. “Go outside; see if anyone is lurking out there, waiting to kill us the second we walk out.”

“Because Molly has to go with me each and every time or they won’t let me back in, and she’s out dealing with your scouts,” Thomas said. “You worried about that faerie crew using your blood to track you?”

“Not sure. Using it is trickier than most people think,” I said. “You’ve got to keep it from drying out, and you’ve got to get it undiluted. It was raining, so if someone wanted my blood, they’d have had to get to it pretty quick—and it looked like Sith was keeping them busy.”

“Sith?” Butters asked.

“Not what you’re thinking,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, clearly disappointed.

“Besides,” I said to Thomas, “I’m less worried about them using it to follow me than using it to make my heart stop beating. Or you know . . . explode out of my chest.”

Thomas blinked. “They can do that?”

“Oh, my God,” Butters said, blinking. “Is that what that was?”

“Yes, they can do that, and probably, if you mean all those murders around the Three-Eye drug ring bust,” I answered them. “Butters, what’s the story here? You done yet?”

“Empty night,” Thomas said, his manner suddenly serious. “Harry . . . shouldn’t we be putting up circles or something?”

“No point,” I said. “If they’ve got your blood, they’ve got you, period. Maybe if I ran and hid somewhere in the Nevernever, but even then it isn’t certain.”

“How much blood do they need?” Butters asked.

“Depends,” I said. “Depends on how efficient their magic is—their skill level. Depends on how fresh the blood is. Depends on the day of the week and the phase of the moon, for all I know. It isn’t something I’ve experimented with. The more energy they’re sending your way, the more blood they need.”

“Meaning what?” Butters asked. “Sit up so I can dress these.”

I sat up and lifted my arms out of the way as I explained. “A tracking spell is hardly anything, in terms of energy input,” I said. “They wouldn’t need much at all for that.”

Butters wound a strip of linen bandage around my midsection several times. “But if they want to make your head explode, it takes a lot more?”

“Depends how good they are,” I said. “They don’t have to crush your head into paste, sledgehammer style. Maybe they put an ice pick up your nose. Less force but concentrated into a smaller area, see?” I shuddered a little. “If they’ve got my blood and can use it, I’m fucked and that’s that. But until that happens, I’m going to assume that I still have a chance and proceed as if I do.”

There was a silence then, and I realized that both Butters and Thomas were just staring at me.

“What? Magic is dangerous stuff, guys,” I said.

“Yeah, for all of us,” Butters said, “but, Harry, you’re . . .”

“What? Bulletproof?” I shook my head. “Magic is like the rest of life. It doesn’t matter how much a guy can bench-press, or if he can break trees with his hands. You put a bullet through his brain, he dies. I’m pretty good at figuring out where to stand so as to avoid that bullet, and I can shoot back a lot better than most people—but I’m just as vulnerable as everybody else.”

I frowned at that thought. As vulnerable as everybody else. Something nagged at me from beneath the surface of my conscious calculations, but I couldn’t poke it into visibility. Yet.

“Point is,” I said, “if they were going to try to kill me with it, they’ve had time to do that already.”

“Unless they’re saving it for the future,” Butters said.

I made sure not to growl out loud. “Yes. Thank you. Are you finished yet?”

Butters tore off a final piece of medical tape, stuck the end of the bandage down with it, and sighed. “Yeah. Just try not to . . . well, move, or jump around, or do anything active, or touch anything dirty, or otherwise do anything else that I know you’re going to do anyway in the next twenty-four hours.”

“Twelve hours,” I said, swinging my legs down from the table.

“Oy.” Butters sighed.

“Where’s my shirt?” I asked, standing.

Thomas shrugged. “Burned it. You want mine?”

“After you got your guts all over it?” I asked. “Ew.”

Butters blinked and looked at Thomas. “My God,” he said. “You’ve been shot.”

Thomas hooked a thumb at Butters. “Check out Dr. Marcus Welby, MD, here.”

“I’d have gone with Doogie Howser, maybe,” I said.

“Split the difference at McCoy?” Thomas asked.

“Perfect.”

“You’ve been shot!” Butters repeated, exasperated.

Thomas shrugged. “Well. A little.”

Butters let out an enormous sigh. Then he picked up the bottle of disinfectant and a roll of paper towels and started cleaning off the table. “God, I hate this Frankenstein-slash–Civil War medicine crap. Give me a second. Then lie down.”

I left them to pad across the apartment to my bedroom. To Molly’s guest bedroom. I opened the door as quietly as I could so that I wouldn’t wake Karrin, and went in to put on another secondhand shirt.

I found one that was plain black, with the Spider-Man emblem on it in white. The black uniform. The one that made Spidey switch teams for a bit, and which eventually gave him all kinds of grief. It seemed fitting.

I slipped into it and turned and nearly jumped out of my boots when Karrin quietly shut the bedroom door behind her.

I stood there for a long moment. The only light was from a single small, glowing candle.

Karrin faced me with an opaque expression. “You don’t call,” she said, one corner of her mouth quirked into an expression that wasn’t a smile. “You don’t write.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Coma.”

“I heard,” she said. She folded her arms and leaned back against the door. “Thomas and Molly both say it’s really you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “How’d you find me?”

“Scanner. The last time a bomb went off in this town, it was in your office building. I hear another one goes off in the street, and then reports of explosions and gunfire out over the lake just after dawn this morning. Math wasn’t hard to do.”

“How’d you follow me?”

“I didn’t,” Murphy said. “I staked out Thomas’s place and followed the guy who was following you.” She moved a foot absently, touching the back of her other calf with it as if scratching an itch. “His name was Ace . . . something, right?”

I nodded. “You remember.”

“I try to keep track of the bad guys,” she said. “And on an entirely unrelated note . . . I hear you belong to Mab now.”

The words hit me like a slap in the face. Karrin had been a detective for a long time. She knew how to manipulate a suspect.

I guessed I was a suspect, then.

“I’m not a cocker spaniel,” I said quietly.

“I’m not saying you are,” she said. “But there are creatures out there that can do things to your head, and we both know it.”

“You think that’s what happened?” I asked. “That Mab’s bent my brain into new shapes?”

Her expression softened. “I think she’ll do it slower,” she said. “You’re . . . an abrupt sort of person. Your solutions to problems tend to be decisive and to happen quickly. It’s how you think. I’m willing to believe that you found some kind of way to prevent her from just . . . I don’t know. Rewriting you.”

“I told her if she tried it, I’d start being obstreperous.”

“God,” Karrin said. “You haven’t started?”

She half smiled. For a second, it was almost okay.

But then her face darkened again. “I think she’ll do it slower. An inch at a time, when you aren’t looking. But even if she doesn’t . . .”

“What?”

“I’m not angry at you, Harry,” she said. “I don’t hate you. I don’t think you’ve gone bad. A lot of people have fallen into the trap you did. People better than either of us.”

“Uh,” I said. “The evil-Queen-of-Faerie trap?”

“Christ, Harry,” Murphy said quietly. “No one just starts giggling and wearing black and signs up to become a villainous monster. How the hell do you think it happens?” She shook her head, her eyes pained. “It happens to people. Just people. They make questionable choices, for what might be very good reasons. They make choice after choice, and none of them is slaughtering roomfuls of saints, or murdering hundreds of baby seals, or rubber-room irrational. But it adds up. And then one day they look around and realize that they’re so far over the line that they can’t remember where it was.”

I looked away from her. Something in my chest hurt. I didn’t say anything.

“Do you understand that?” she asked me, her voice even more quiet. “Do you understand how treacherous the ground you’re standing on has become?”

“Perfectly,” I said.

She nodded a few times. Then she said, “I suppose that’s something.”

“That all?” I asked her. “I mean . . . is that the only reason you came in here?”

“Not quite,” she said.

“You don’t trust me,” I said.

Her eyes didn’t meet mine, and didn’t avoid them either. “That will depend largely on the next few minutes.”

I inhaled through my nose and out again, trying to stay calm, clear, even. “Okay,” I said. “What do you want me to do?”

“The skull,” she said. “I know what it is. So does Butters. And . . . it’s too powerful to be left in the wrong hands.”

“Meaning mine?” I asked.

“I’ll tell you what I know. I know you broke into his house when he was at work and took it. I know you left Andi with cuts and bruises. And I know you wrecked the place a bit along the way.”

“You think that means I’ve gone bad?”

She tilted her head slightly to one side, as if considering. “I think you were probably operating under some kind of harebrained lone-hero rationale. Let’s say . . . that I’m concerned that you have enough things to juggle already.”

I thought about snapping at her but . . . she had a point. Bob was a resource far too powerful to be allowed to fall into the hands of anyone who wouldn’t use him responsibly. And I’d been doing the Winter Knight gig full speed for about twelve hours, and I’d already had some disturbing realizations about myself. Twelve hours.

What would I be like after twelve days? Twelve months? What if Karrin was right, and Mab got to me slow? Or worse: What if I was just human? She was right about that, too. Power corrupts—and the people being corrupted never seem to be aware that it’s happening. I’d just told Butters that I wasn’t magically bulletproof. What kind of arrogant ass would I be if I assumed I was morally infallible? That I would be wise and smart and savvy enough to avoid the pitfalls of power, traps that had turned better people than me into something horrible?

I didn’t want her to be right. I didn’t like the idea at all.

But denial is for children. I had to be a grown-up.

“Okay,” I said, my throat tight. “Bob’s in that satchel out in the living room. Give him back to Butters.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I found where you left the swords.”

She meant the two Swords of the Cross, two of three holy blades meant to fill the hands of the righteous in the battle against true evil. I’d wound up babysitting them, being their custodian. Mostly they’d sat around in my place gathering dust. “Yeah?” I said.

“I know how powerful they are,” she said. “And I know how vulnerable they are in the wrong hands. I’m not telling you where they are. I’m not giving them back to you. I’m not negotiating.”

I exhaled slowly. A slow, hard anger rolled into a knot in my guts. “Those . . . were my responsibility,” I said.

“They were,” she said. There was something absolutely rigid in her blue eyes. “Not anymore.”

The room suddenly felt too hot. “Suppose I disagree.”

“Suppose you do,” she said. “What would you do if you were in my position?”

I don’t remember moving. I just remember slamming the heel of my hand into the door six inches from the side of Karrin’s head. It sounded like a gunshot, and left me standing over her, breathing harder, and the difference in our sizes was damned near comical. If I wanted to, I could wrap my fingers almost all the way around her throat. Her neck would break if I squeezed.

She didn’t flinch. She didn’t move. She looked up at me and waited.

It hit me, what I was thinking, what my instincts were screaming at me to do, and I suddenly sagged, bowing my head. My breath came out in uneven jerks. I closed my eyes, tried to get it under control.

And then she touched me.

She rested her hand lightly on my battered forearm. Moving carefully, as if I were made of glass, her fingers slid down my arm to my hand. She took it gently and lowered it, not trying to force anything. Then she took my right hand in her left. We stood that way for a moment, our hands clasped, our heads bowed. She seemed to understand what I was going through. She didn’t push me. She just held my hands and waited until my breathing had steadied again.

“Harry,” she said quietly then. “Do you want my trust?”

I nodded tightly, not trusting myself to speak.

“Then you’re going to have to give me some. I’m on your side. I’m trying to help you. Let it go.”

I shuddered.

“Okay,” I said.

Her hands felt small and warm in mine.

“I . . . we’ve been friends a long time,” I said. “Since that troll on the bridge.”

“Yes.”

My eyes blurred up, stupid things, and I closed them. “I know I’ve screwed up,” I said. “I’m going to have to live with that. But I don’t want to lose you.”

In answer, Murphy lifted my right hand and pressed it against her cheek. I didn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t hear it in her voice or her breathing, but I felt a slight dampness touch my hand.

“I don’t want to lose you, either,” she said. “That scares me.”

I didn’t trust myself to speak for a long time.

She lowered my hands slowly, and very gently let me go. Then she turned to the door.

“Karrin,” I said. “What if you’re right? What if I change? I mean . . . go really bad.”

She looked back enough for me to see her profile, and a quiet, sad smile.

“I work with a lot of monsters these days.”