by Jim Butcher
I lay there for a second, exhausted and panting. Then I sat up and looked around.
The cats were gone, vanished as if they’d never been there.
I heard someone walk out of the alley behind me, and my body went tense and tight, despite my weariness. Then a young woman’s voice said, in a passable British accent, “The Little Folk are easily startled, but they’ll soon be back. And in greater numbers.”
I sagged in sudden, exhausted relief. The bad guys hardly ever quote Star Wars.
“Molly,” I breathed.
A tall young woman dressed in rather shabby secondhand clothing crouched down next to me and smiled. “Hey, boss. Welcome home.”
Chapter Thirteen
“Grasshopper,” I said, feeling myself smile. “Illusion. Very nice.”
Molly gave me a little bow of her head. “It’s what I do.”
“Also good timing,” I said. “Also, what the hell? How did you know I was . . . ?”
“Alive?”
“Here, but sure. How did you know?”
“Priorities, boss. Can you walk?”
“I’m good,” I said, and pushed myself to my feet. It wasn’t as hard as it really should have been, and I could feel my endurance rebuilding itself already, the energy coming back into me. I was still tired—don’t get me wrong—but I should have been falling-down dizzy and I wasn’t.
“You don’t look so good,” Molly said. “Was that a tux?”
“Briefly,” I said. I eyed the car. “Feel like driving?”
“Sure,” she said. “But . . . that’s pretty stuck, Harry, unless you brought a crane.”
I grunted, faintly irritated by her tone. “Just get in, start it, and give it gas gently.”
Molly looked like she wanted to argue, but then she looked down abruptly. A second later, I heard sirens. She frowned, shook her head, and got into the car. The motor rumbled to life a second later.
I went down the stairwell where the car’s tires were stuck, set down Bob’s skull, and found a good spot beneath the rear frame. Then I set my feet, put the heels of my hands against the underside of the Caddy, and pushed.
It was hard. I mean, it was really, really gut-bustingly hard—but the Caddy groaned and then shifted and then slowly rose. I was lifting with my legs as much as my arms, putting my whole body into it, and everything in me gave off a dull burn of effort. My breath escaped my lungs in a slow groan, but then the tires were up out of the stairwell, and turning, and they caught on the sidewalk and the Caddy pulled itself the rest of the way.
I grabbed the skull, still with the mostly limp Toot-toot inside it, staggered back up out of the stairwell and into the passenger side of the car. I lifted my hand and sent a surge of will down through it, muttering, “Forzare,” and the overstrained windshield groaned and gave way, tearing itself free of the frame and clearing Molly’s vision.
“Go,” I grated.
Molly went, driving carefully. The emergency vehicles were rolling in past us, and she pulled over and drove slowly to let them by. I sat there breathing hard, and realized that the real effort of moving that much weight didn’t hit you while you were actually moving it—it came in the moments after, when your muscles recovered enough to demand oxygen, right the hell now. I leaned my head against the window, panting.
“How’s it going, buddy?” I asked a moment later.
“It hurts.” Toot sighed. “But I’ll be okay, my lord. The armor held off some of the blow.”
I checked the skull. The eyelights were gone. Bob had dummied up the moment Molly was around, as per my standing orders, which had been in place since she had first become my apprentice. Bob had almost unlimited knowledge of magic. Molly had a calculated disregard for self-limitation when she thought it justified. They would have made a really scary pair, and I’d kept them carefully separate during her training.
“We need to get off the street,” I said. “Someplace quiet and secure.”
“I know a place just like that,” Molly said. “What happened?”
“Someone tossed a gym bag full of explosives at my car,” I growled. “And followed it up with the freaking pixie death squadron from hell.”
“You mean they picked this car out of all the other traffic?” she asked, her tone dry. “What are the odds?”
I grunted. “One more reason to get off the street, pronto.”
“Relax,” she said. “I started veiling the car as soon as we passed the police. If someone was following you before, they aren’t now. Catch your breath, Harry. We’ll be there soon.”
I blinked, impressed. Veils were not simple spells. Granted, they were sort of a specialty of Molly’s, but this was taking it up a notch. I didn’t know whether I could have covered the entire Caddy with a veil while driving alertly and carrying on a conversation. In fact, I was pretty sure I couldn’t.
Grasshopper was growing up on me.
I studied Molly’s profile while she drove. Stared, really. I’d first met her years ago, when she was a gawky little kid in a training bra. She’d grown up tall, five-ten or a little more. She had dark blond hair, although she had changed its color about fifty times since I’d met her. At the moment, it was in its natural shade and cut short, hanging in an even sheet to her chin. She was wearing minimal makeup. The girl was built like a particularly well-proportioned statue, but she wasn’t flaunting it in this outfit—khaki pants, a cream-colored shirt, and a chocolate brown jacket.
The last time I’d seen Molly, she’d been a starved-looking thing, dressed in rags and twitching at every sound and motion, like a feral cat—which was hardly surprising, given that she’d been fighting a covert war against a group called the Fomor while dodging the cops and the Wardens of the White Council. She was still lean and a little hyperalert, her eyes trying to watch the whole world at once, but that sense of overly coiled spring tension was much reduced.
She looked good. Noticing that made things stir under the surface, things that shouldn’t have been, and I abruptly looked away.
“Uh,” she said. “Harry?”
“You look better than the last time I saw you, kiddo,” I said.
She grinned, briefly. “Right back atcha.”
I snorted. “It’d be hard to look worse. For either of us, I guess.”
She glanced at me. “Yeah. I’m a lot better. I’m still not . . .” She shrugged. “I’m not exactly Little Miss Stability. At least, not yet. But I’m working on it.”
“Sometimes I think that’s where most of us are,” I said. “Fighting off the crazy as best we can. Trying to become something better than we were. It’s that second bit that’s important.”
She smiled, and didn’t say anything else. Within a few moments, she had turned the Caddy into a private parking lot.
“I don’t have any money for parking,” I said.
“Don’t need it.” She paused and rolled down the cracked window to wave at an attendant operating the gate. He glanced up from his book, smiled at her, and pushed a button. The gate opened, and Molly pulled the Caddy into the lot. She drove down the length of it, and pulled the car carefully into a covered parking spot. “Okay. Come on.”
We got out of the car, and Molly led me to a doorway leading into an adjacent apartment building. She opened the door with a key, but instead of moving to the elevators, she guided me to another doorway to one side of the entrance. She unlocked that one too, and went down two flights of stairs to a final door. I could sense magical defenses on the doors and the stairs without even making an effort to open myself up to it. That was a serious bunch of security spells. Molly opened the second door and said, “Please come in.” She smiled at Toot. “And your crew with you, of course.”
“Thanks,” I said, and followed her inside.
Molly had an apartment.
She had an apartment big enough for Hugh Hefner’s birthday party.
The living room was the size of a basketball court, and it had eleven-foot ceilings. There was a little bar sep
arating the kitchen from the rest of the open space. She had a fireplace with what looked like a handmade living room set around it in one corner of the room, and a second section of comfy chairs and a desk tucked into a nook lined with built-in bookshelves. She had a weight bench, too, along with an elliptical machine, both of them expensive European setups. The floors were hardwood, broken up by occasional carpets that probably cost more than the floor space they covered. A couple of doors led off from the main room. They were oak. Granite countertops. A six-burner gas stove. Recessed lighting.
“Hell’s bells,” I said. “Uh. Nice place.”
Molly shrugged out of her jacket and tossed it onto the back of a couch. “You like?” She walked into the kitchen, opened a cabinet door, and pulled out a first-aid kit.
“I like,” I said. “Uh. How?”
“The svartalves built it for me,” she said.
Svartalves. They were some serious customers in the supernatural scene. Peerless artisans, a very private and independent folk—and they tolerated absolutely no nonsense. No one wants to get on the bad side of a svartalf. They weren’t exactly known for their generosity, either. “You working for them?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “This is mine. I bought it from them.”
I blinked again. “With what?”
“Honor,” she said. She muttered something and flicked a hand at a chandelier hanging over the table in the little dining area. It began to glow with a pure white light as bright as any collection of incandescent bulbs. “Bring him over here, and we’ll see if we can’t help him.”
I did so, transferring Toot from the skull to the table as gently as possible. Molly leaned down over him, peering. “Right through the breastplate? What hit you, Toot-toot?”
“A big fat jerk!” Toot replied, wincing. “He had a real sword, too. You know how hard it is to convince any of you big people to make us a sword we can actually use?”
“I saw his gear,” I said. “I totally liked yours better, Major General. Way cooler and more stylish than that stupid black-knight look.”
Toot gave me a brief, fierce grin. “Thank you, my lord!”
Toot got out of his ruined armor with effort, and with Molly’s cautious, steady-fingered help I managed to clean the wound and bandage it. It looked ugly, and Toot was anything but happy during the process, but he was clearly uncomfortable and weary, rather than being badly hurt. Once the wound was taken care of, Toot promptly flopped onto the table and went to sleep.
Molly smiled, got a clean towel out of a cabinet, and draped it over the little guy. Toot seized it and curled up beneath it with a sigh.
“All right,” Molly said, picking up the first-aid kit. She beckoned me to follow her to the kitchen. “Your turn. Off with the shirt.”
“Not until you buy me dinner,” I said.
For a second, she froze, and I wondered whether that had come out like the joke it had sounded like in my mind. Then she recovered. Molly arched her eyebrow in a look that was disturbingly like that of her mother (a woman around with whom a wise man will not mess) and folded her arms.
“Fine,” I said, rolling my eyes. I shrugged my way out of the ruined tux.
“Jesus,” Molly said softly, looking at me. She leaned around me, frowning at my back. “You look like a passion play.”
“Doesn’t feel so bad,” I said.
“It might if one of these cuts gets infected,” Molly said. “Just . . . just stand there and hold still. Man.” She went to the cabinet and came back with a big brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a couple of kitchen towels. I watched her walking back and forth. “We’ll start with your back. Lean on the counter.”
I did, resting my elbows on the granite, still watching her. Molly fumbled with the supplies for a second, then bit her lower lip and began to move with purpose. She started dribbling peroxide onto the cuts on my back in little bursts of cold liquid that might have made me jump before I’d spent so much time in Arctis Tor. It burned a little, and then fizzed enthusiastically.
“So, not one question?” I asked her.
“Hmmm?” She didn’t look up from her work.
“I come back from the dead, I sort of expected . . . I don’t know. A little shock. And about a million questions.”
“I knew you were alive,” Molly said.
“Yeah, I sort of figured. How?” She didn’t answer, and after a moment I realized the likely answer. “My godmother.”
“She takes her Yoda-ing seriously.”
“I remember,” I said, keeping my tone neutral. “How long have you known?”
“Several weeks,” Molly said. “There are so many cuts here, I don’t think I have enough Band-Aids. We’ll have to wrap it, I guess.”
“I’ll just put a clean shirt over them,” I said. “Look, it isn’t a big deal. Little marks like that are going to be gone in a day or two.”
“Little . . . Winter Knight stuff?”
“Pretty much,” I said. “Mab . . . kinda gave me the tour during my recovery.”
“What happened?” she asked.
I found my eyes wandering to Bob’s skull. Telling Molly what was going on would mean that she was involved. It would draw her into the conflict. I didn’t want to expose her to that kind of danger—not again.
Of course, it probably wasn’t my sole decision. And besides, Molly had intervened in an assassination that had been really close to succeeding. Whoever was behind the swarm of piranha pixies had probably seen it. Molly was already in the fight. If I started keeping things from her now, it would only hinder her chances of surviving it.
I didn’t want her involved, but she’d earned the right to make that choice for herself.
So I gave it to her, straight, succinct, and with zero editing except for the bit about Halloween. It felt sort of strange. I hardly ever tell anyone that much truth. The truth is dangerous. She listened, her large eyes steadily focused on a point around my chin.
When I finished, all she said was, “Turn around.”
I did, and she started working on the cuts on my chest, arms, and face. Again, cleaning the wounds was a little uncomfortable, but nothing more. I watched her tending me. I couldn’t read her expression. She didn’t look up at my eyes while she worked, and she kept her manner brisk and steady, very businesslike.
“Molly,” I said, as she finished.
She paused, still not looking up at me.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I had to ask you to help me . . . do what I did. I’m sorry that I didn’t make you stay home from Chichén Itzá. I never should have exposed you to that. You weren’t ready.”
“No kidding,” Molly said quietly. “But . . . I wasn’t really taking no for an answer at the time, either. Neither of us made smart choices that night.”
“Maybe. But only one of us is the mentor,” I said. “I’m supposed to be the one who knows what’s going on.”
Molly shook her head several times, a jerky motion. “Harry—it’s over. Okay? It’s done. It’s the past. Let it stay there.”
“Sure you want that?”
“I am.”
“Okay.” I picked up a paper towel and dabbed at a few runnels of peroxide bubbling their way down my stomach. “Well. Now all I need is a clean shirt.”
Molly pointed at one of the oak doors. “In there. There are two dressers and a closet. Nothing fancy, but I’m pretty sure it will all fit you.”
I blinked several times. “Um. What?”
She snorted and rolled her eyes. “Harry . . . duh. I knew you were alive. That meant you’d be coming back. Lea told me to keep it to myself, so I got a place ready for you.” She took a quick step back into the kitchen, opened a drawer, and came back with a small brass key. “Here, this will get you past the locks, and past the svartalves’ wards and past my defenses.”
I took the key, frowning. “Um . . .”
“I’m not asking you to shack up with me, Harry,” Molly said, her tone dry. “It’s just . . . until you get b
ack on your feet. Or . . . or just as long as you’re in town and need a place to stay.”
“Did you think I couldn’t take care of it myself?”
“Of course not,” Molly said. “But . . . you know. I guess I think that maybe you shouldn’t have to?” She looked up at me uncertainly. “You were there when I needed you. I figured it was my turn now.”
I looked away before I got all emotional. The kid had gotten this place together, made some kind of alliance with a very suspicious and cautious supernatural nation, furnished a room for me, and picked me up a wardrobe? In just a few weeks? When she’d been living in rags on the street all the time for the better part of a year before that?
“I’m impressed, grasshopper,” I said. “Seriously.”
“This isn’t the impressive part,” she said. “But I don’t think we have time to get into that right now, given what you’ve got going.”
“Let’s survive Halloween,” I said, “and then maybe we can sit and have a nice talk. Molly, you shouldn’t have done this for me.”
“Ego much?” she asked, the ghost of her old, irreverent self lurking in her eyes. “I got this place for me, Harry. I lived my whole life in one home. Living on the street wasn’t . . . wasn’t a good place for me to put myself back together. I needed someplace . . . someplace . . .” She frowned.
“Yours?” I suggested.
“Stable,” she said. “Quiet. And mine. Not that you aren’t welcome here. While you need it.”
“I suppose you didn’t get those clothes for my sake, either.”
“Maybe I started dating basketball teams,” Molly said, her eyes actually sparkling for a moment. “You don’t know.”
“Sure I do,” I said.
She started putting the kit away. “Think of the clothes as . . . as a birthday present.” She looked up at me for a second and gave me a hesitant smile. “It’s really good to see you, Harry. Happy birthday.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I’d give you a hug, but I’d bleach and bloodstain your clothes at the same time.”
