Читать книгу Dangerous Women - Джордж Р. Р. Мартин - Страница 16

I miss my boss.

It’s been most of a year since I helped him die, and ever since then I’ve been the only professional wizard in the city of Chicago.

Well, okay. I’m not, like, officially a wizard. I’m still sort of an apprentice. And no one really pays me, unless you count the wallets and valuables I lift from bodies sometimes, so I guess I’m more amateur than professional. And I don’t have a PI license like my boss did, or an ad in the phone book.

But I’m all there is. I’m not as strong as he was, and I’m not as good as he was. I’m just going to have to be enough.

So anyway, there I was, washing the blood off in Waldo Butters’ shower.

I did a lot of living outdoors these days, which didn’t seem nearly as horrible during the summer and early autumn as it had during the arctic chill of the previous superwinter. It was like sleeping on a tropical beach by comparison. Still, I missed things like regular access to plumbing, and Waldo let me clean up whenever I needed to. I had the shower heat turned all the way up, and it was heaven. It was kind of a scourgey, scoury heaven, but heaven nonetheless.

The floor of the shower turned red for a few seconds, then faded to pink for a while as I sluiced the blood off. It wasn’t mine. A gang of Fomor servitors had been carrying a fifteen-year-old boy down an alley toward Lake Michigan. If they’d gotten him there, he’d have been facing a fate worse than death. I intervened, but that bastard Listen cut his throat rather than give him up. I tried to save him while Listen and his buddies ran. I failed. And I’d been right there with him, feeling everything he did, feeling his confusion and pain and terror as he died.

Harry wouldn’t have felt that. Harry would have saved the day. He would have smashed the Fomor goons around like bowling pins, picked the kid up like some kind of serial-movie action hero, and taken him to safety.

I missed my boss.

I used a lot of soap. I probably cried. I had begun ignoring tears months ago, and at times I honestly didn’t know when they were falling. Once I was clean—physically, anyway—I just stood there soaking up the heat, letting the water course all over me. The scar on my leg where I’d been shot was still wrinkled, but the color had changed from purple and red to angry pink. Butters said it would be gone in a couple of years. I was walking normally again, unless I pushed myself too hard. But yikes, my legs and various pieces needed to get reacquainted with a razor, even with medium-blond hair.

I was going to ignore them, but … grooming is important for keeping one’s spirits up. A well-kept body for a well-kept mind and all that. I wasn’t a fool. I knew I wasn’t exactly flying level lately. My morale needed all the boost it could get. I leaned out of the shower and swiped Andi’s pink plastic razor. I’d pay Waldo’s werewolf girlfriend back for it later.

I wrapped up about the same time as the hot water ran out, got out of the shower, and toweled off. My things were in a pile by the door—some garage-sale Birkenstocks, an old nylon hiker’s backpack, and my bloodied clothes. Another set gone. And the sandals had left partial tracks in blood at the scene, so I’d have to get rid of them, too. I was going to have to hit another thrift store at this rate. Normally, that would have cheered me up, but shopping just wasn’t what it used to be.

I was carefully going over the tub and floor for fallen hairs and so on when someone knocked. I didn’t stop scanning the floor. In my line of work, people can and will do awful things to you with discarded bits of your body. Not cleaning up after yourself is like asking for someone to boil your blood from twenty blocks away. No, thank you.

“Yes?” I called.

“Hey, Molly,” Waldo said. “There’s, uh … there’s someone here to talk to you.”

We’d prearranged a lot of things. If he’d used the word “feeling” at any point in his sentence, I would have known there was trouble outside the door. Not using it meant that there wasn’t—or that he couldn’t see it. I slipped on my bracelets and my ring and set both of my wands down where I could snatch them up instantly. Only then did I start putting clothes on.

“Who?” I called.

He was working hard not to sound nervous around me. I appreciated the effort. It was sweet. “Says her name is Justine. Says you know her.”

I did know Justine. She was a thrall of the vampires of the White Court. Or at least a personal assistant to one and the girlfriend of another. Harry always thought well of her, though he was a big goofy idiot when it came to women who might show the potential to become damsels in distress.

“But if he was here,” I muttered to myself, “he’d help her.”

I didn’t wipe the steam off the mirror before I left the bathroom. I didn’t want to look at anything in there.

Justine was a handful of years older than me, but her hair had turned pure white. She was a knockout, one of those girls all the boys assume are too pretty to approach. She had on jeans and a button-down shirt several sizes too large for her. The shirt was Thomas’s, I was certain. Her body language was poised, very neutral. Justine was as good at hiding her emotions as anyone I’d ever seen, but I could sense leashed tension and quiet fear beneath the calm surface.

I’m a wizard, or damned close to it, and I work with the mind. People don’t really get to hide things from me.

If Justine was afraid, it was because she feared for Thomas. If she’d come to me for help, it was because she couldn’t get help from the White Court. We could have had a polite conversation that led up to that revelation, but I had less and less patience for the amenities lately, so I cut to the chase.

“Hello, Justine. Why should I help you with Thomas when his own family won’t?”

Justine’s eyes bugged out. So did Waldo’s.

I was getting used to that reaction.

“How did you know?” Justine asked quietly.

When you’re into magic, people always assume anything you do must be connected to it. Harry always thought that was funny. To him, magic was just one more set of tools that the mind could use to solve problems. The mind was the more important part of that pairing. “Does that matter?”

She frowned and looked away from me. She shook her head. “He’s missing. I know he left on some kind of errand for Lara, but she says she doesn’t know anything about it. She’s lying.”

“She’s a vampire. And you didn’t answer my first question.” The words came out a little harsher and harder than they’d sounded in my head. I tried to relax a little. I folded my arms and leaned against a wall. “Why should I help you?”

It’s not like I wasn’t planning to help her. But I knew a secret about Harry and Thomas few others did. I had to know if Justine knew the secret, too, or if I’d have to keep it hidden around her.

Justine met my eyes with hers for a moment. The look was penetrating. “If you can’t go to family for help,” she said, “who can you turn to?”

I averted my eyes before it could turn into an actual soulgaze, but her words and the cumulative impression of her posture, her presence, her self, answered the question for me.

She knew.

Thomas and Harry were half brothers. She’d have gone to Harry for help if he was alive. I was the only thing vaguely like an heir to his power around these parts, and she hoped I would be willing to step into his shoes. His huge, stompy, terrifying shoes.

“You go to friends,” I said quietly. “I’ll need something of Thomas’s. Hair or fingernail clippings would be …”

She produced a zip-closed plastic bag from the breast pocket of the shirt and offered it to me without a word. I went over and picked it up. It had a number of dark hairs in it.

“You’re sure they’re his?”

Justine gestured toward her own snow-white mane. “It’s not like they’re easy to confuse.”

I looked up to find Butters watching me silently from the other side of the room. He was a beaky little guy, wiry and quick. His hair had been electrocuted and then frozen that way. His eyes were steady and worried. He cut up corpses for the government, professionally, but he was one of the more savvy people in town when it came to the supernatural.

“What?” I asked him.

He considered his words before he spoke—less because he was afraid of me than because he cared about not hurting my feelings. That was the reverse of most people these days. “Is this something you should get involved in, Molly?”

What he really wanted to ask me was if I was sane. If I was going to help or just make things a lot worse.

“I don’t know,” I said honestly. I looked at Justine and said, “Wait here.”

Then I got my stuff, took the hairs, and left.

The first thing Harry Dresden ever taught me about magic was a tracking spell.

“It’s a simple principle, kid,” he told me. “We’re creating a link between two similar things out of energy. Then we make the energy give us an indicator of some kind, so that we can tell which way it’s flowing.”

“What are we going to find?” I asked.

He held up a rather thick grey hair and nodded back toward his dog, Mouse. He should have been named Moose. The giant, shaggy temple dog was pony-sized. “Mouse,” Harry said, “go get lost and we’ll see if we can find you.”

The big dog yawned and padded agreeably toward the door. Harry let him out and then came over to sit down next to me. We were in his living room. A couple of nights before, I had thrown myself at him. Naked. And he’d dumped a pitcher of ice water over my head. I was still mortified—but he was probably right. It was the right thing for him to do. He always did the right thing, even if it meant he lost out. I still wanted to be with him so much, but maybe the time wasn’t right yet.

That was okay. I could be patient. And I still got to be with him in a different way almost every day.

“All right,” I said when he sat back down. “What do I do?”

In the years since that day, the spell had become routine. I’d used it to find lost people, secret places, missing socks, and generally to poke my nose where it probably didn’t belong. Harry would have said that went with the territory of being a wizard. Harry was right.

I stopped in the alley outside Butters’s apartment and sketched a circle on the concrete with a small piece of pink chalk. I closed the circle with a tiny effort of will, drew out one of the hairs from the plastic bag, and held it up. I focused the energy of the spell, bringing its different elements together in my head. When we’d started, Harry had let me use four different objects, teaching me how to attach ideas to them, to represent the different pieces of the spell, but that kind of thing wasn’t necessary. Magic all happens inside the head of the wizard. You can use props to make things simpler, and in truly complex spells they make the difference between impossible and merely almost impossible. For this one, though, I didn’t need the props anymore.

I gathered the different pieces of the spell in my head, linked them together, infused them with a moderate effort of will, and then with a murmured word released that energy down into the hair in my fingers. Then I popped the hair into my mouth, broke the chalk circle with a brush of my foot, and rose.

Harry always used an object as the indicator for his tracking spells—his amulet, a compass, or some kind of pendulum. I hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings, but that kind of thing really wasn’t necessary, either. I could feel the magic coursing through the hair, making my lips tingle gently. I got out a cheap little plastic compass and a ten-foot length of chalk line. I set it up and snapped it to mark out magnetic north.

Then I took the free end of the line and turned slowly, until the tingling sensation was centered on my lips. Lips are extremely sensitive parts of the body, generally, and I’ve found that they give you the best tactile feedback for this sort of thing. Once I knew which direction Thomas was, I oriented the chalk line that way, made sure it was tight, and snapped it again, resulting in an extremely elongated V shape, like the tip of a giant needle. I measured the distance at the base of the V.

Then I turned ninety degrees, walked five hundred paces, and repeated the process.

Promise me you won’t tell my high school math teacher about it, but after that I sat down and applied trigonometry to real life.

The math wasn’t hard. I had the two angles measured against magnetic north. I had the distance between them in units of Molly-paces. Molly-paces aren’t terribly scientific, but for purposes of this particular application, they were practical enough to calculate the distance to Thomas.

Using such simple tools, I couldn’t get a measurement precise enough to know which door to kick down, but I now knew that he was relatively nearby—within four or five miles, as opposed to being at the North Pole or something. I move around the city a lot, because a moving target is a lot harder to hit. I probably covered three or four times that on an average day.

I’d have to get a lot closer before I could pinpoint his location any more precisely than that. So I turned my lips toward the tingle and started walking.

Thomas was in a small office building on a big lot.

The building was three stories, not huge, though it sat amidst several much larger structures. The lot it stood upon was big enough to hold something a lot bigger. Instead, most of it was landscaped into a manicured lawn and garden, complete with water features and a very small, very modest wrought-iron fence. The building itself showed a lot of stone and marble in its design, and it had more class in its cornices than the towers nearby had in their whole structures. It was gorgeous and understated at the same time; on that block, it looked like a single, small, perfect diamond being displayed amidst giant jars of rhinestones.

There were no signs outside it. There was no obvious way in, beyond a set of gates guarded by competent-looking men in dark suits. Expensive dark suits. If the guards could afford to wear those to work, it meant that whoever owned that building had money. Serious money.

I circled the building to be sure, and felt the tingling energy of the tracking spell confirming Thomas’s location; but even though I’d been careful to stay on the far side of the street, someone inside noticed me. I could feel one guard’s eyes tracking me, even behind his sunglasses. Maybe I should have done the initial approach under a veil—but Harry had always been against using magic except when it was truly necessary, and it was way too easy to start using it for every little thing if you let yourself.

In some ways, I’m better at the “how” of magic than Harry was. But I’ve come to learn that I might never be as smart as him when it came to the “why.”

I went into a nearby Starbucks and got myself a cup of liquid life and started thinking about how to get in. My tongue was telling me all about what great judgment I had when I sensed the presence of supernatural power rapidly coming nearer.

I didn’t panic. Panic gets you killed. Instead I turned smoothly on one heel and slipped into a short hallway leading to a small restroom. I went inside, shut the door behind me, and drew my wands from my hip pocket. I checked the energy level on my bracelets. Both of them were ready to go. My rings were all full up, too, which was about as ideal as things could get.

So I ordered my thoughts, made a small effort of will, whispered a word, and vanished.

Veils were complex magic, but I had a knack for them. Becoming truly and completely invisible was a real pain in the neck: passing light completely through you was a literal stone-cold bitch, because it left you freezing cold and blind as a bat to boot. Becoming unseen, though, was a different proposition entirely. A good veil would reduce your visibility to little more than a few flickers in the air, to a few vague shadows where they shouldn’t be, but it did more than that. It created a sense of ordinariness in the air around you, an aura of boring unremarkability that you usually only felt in a job you didn’t like, around three thirty in the afternoon. Once you combined that suggestion with a greatly reduced visible profile, remaining unnoticed was at least as easy as breathing.

As I vanished into that veil, I also called up an image, another combination of illusion and suggestion. This one was simple: me, as I’d appeared in the mirror a moment before, clean and seemingly perky and toting a fresh cup of creamy goodness. The sensation that went with it was just a kind of heavy dose of me: the sound of my steps and movement, the scent of Butters’s shampoo, the aroma of my cup of coffee. I tied the image to one of the rings on my fingers and left it there, drawing from the energy I’d stored in a moonstone. Then I turned around, with my image layered over my actual body like a suit made of light, and walked out of the coffee shop.

Once outside, the evasion was a simple maneuver, the way all the good ones are. My image turned left and I turned right.

To anyone watching, a young woman had just come out of the store and gone sauntering down the street with her coffee. She was obviously enjoying her day. I’d put a little extra bounce and sway into the image’s movements, to make her that much more noticeable (and therefore a better distraction). She’d go on walking down that street for a mile or more before she simply vanished.

Meanwhile, the real me moved silently into an alleyway and watched.

My image hadn’t gone a hundred yards before a man in a black turtleneck sweater stepped out of an alley and began following it—a servitor of the Fomor. Those jerks were everywhere these days, like roaches, only more disgusting and harder to kill.

Only … that was just too easy. One servitor wouldn’t have set my instinct alarms to jingling. They were strong, fast, and tough, sure, but no more so than any number of creatures. They didn’t possess mounds of magical power; if they had, the Fomor would never have let them leave in the first place.

Something else was out there. Something that had wanted me to be distracted, watching the apparent servitor follow the apparent Molly. And if something knew me well enough to set up this sort of diversion to ensnare my attention, then it knew me well enough to find me, even beneath my veil. There were a really limited number of people who could do that.

I slipped a hand into my nylon backpack and drew out my knife, the M9 bayonet my brother had brought home from Afghanistan. I drew the heavy blade out, closed my eyes, and turned quickly with the knife in one hand and my coffee in the other. I flicked the lid off the coffee with my thumb and slewed the liquid into a wide arc at about chest level.

I heard a gasp and oriented on it, opened my eyes, and stepped toward the source of the sound, driving the knife into the air before me at slightly higher than the level of my own heart.

The steel of the blade suddenly erupted with a coruscation of light as it pierced a veil that hung in the air only inches away from me. I stepped forward rapidly through the veil, pushing the point of the knife before me toward the suddenly revealed form behind the veil. She was a woman, taller than me, dressed in ragged (coffee-stained) clothes, but with her long, fiery autumn hair unbound and wind tossed. She twisted to one side, off balance, until her shoulders touched the brick wall of the alley.

I did not relent, driving the blade toward her throat—until at the last second, one pale, slender hand snapped up and grasped my wrist, quick as a serpent but stronger and colder. My face wound up only a few inches from hers as I put the heel of one hand against the knife and leaned against it slightly—enough to push against her strength, but not enough to throw me off balance if she made a quick move. She was lean and lovely, even in the rags, with wide, oblique green eyes and perfect bone structure that could only be found in half a dozen supermodels—and in every single one of the Sidhe.

“Hello, Auntie,” I said in a level voice. “It isn’t nice to sneak up behind me. Especially lately.”

She held my weight off of her with one arm, though it wasn’t easy for her. There was a quality of strain to her melodic voice. “Child,” she breathed. “You anticipated my approach. Had I not stopped thee, thou wouldst have driven cold iron into my flesh, causing me agonies untold. Thou wouldst have spilled my life’s blood upon the ground.” Her eyes widened. “Thou wouldst have killed me.”

“I wouldst,” I agreed pleasantly.

Her mouth spread into a wide smile, and her teeth were daintily pointed. “I have taught thee well.”

Then she twisted with a lithe and fluid grace, away from the blade and to her feet a good long step away from me. I watched her and lowered the knife—but I didn’t put it away. “I don’t have time for lessons right now, Auntie Lea.”

“I am not here to teach thee, child.”

“I don’t have time for games, either.”

“Nor did I come to play with thee,” the Leanansidhe said, “but to give thee warning: thou art not safe here.”

I quirked an eyebrow at her. “Wow. Gosh.”

She tilted her head at me in reproof, and her mouth thinned. Her eyes moved past me to look down the alley, and she shot a quick glance behind her. Her expression changed. She didn’t quite lose the smug superiority that always colored her features, but she toned it down a good deal, and she lowered her voice. “Thou makest jests, child, but thou art in grave peril—as am I. We should not linger here.” She shifted her eyes to mine. “If thou dost wish to brace this foe, if thou wouldst recover my Godson’s brother, there are things I must tell thee.”

I narrowed my eyes. Harry’s Faerie Godmother had taken over as my mentor when Harry died, but she wasn’t exactly one of the good faeries. In fact, she was the second in command to Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness, and she was a bloodthirsty, dangerous being who divided her enemies into two categories: those who were dead, and those in which she had not yet taken pleasure. I hadn’t known that she knew about Harry and Thomas—but it didn’t shock me.

Lea was a murderous, cruel creature—but as far as I knew, she had never lied to me. Technically.

“Come,” said the Leanansidhe. She turned and walked briskly toward the far end of the alley, gathering a seeming and a veil around her as she went, to hide herself from notice.

I glanced back toward the building where Thomas was being held, ground my teeth, and followed her, merging my veil with hers as we left.

We walked Chicago’s streets unseen by thousands of eyes. The people we passed all took a few extra steps to avoid us, without really thinking about it. It’s important to lay out an avoidance suggestion like that when you’re in a crowd. Being unseen is kind of pointless if dozens of people keep bumping into you.

“Tell me, child,” Lea said, shifting abruptly out of her archaic dialect. She did that sometimes, when we were alone. “What do you know of svartalves?”

“A little,” I said. “They’re from northern Europe, originally. They’re small and they live underground. They’re the best magical craftsmen on earth; Harry bought things from them whenever he could afford it, but they weren’t cheap.”

“How dry,” the faerie sorceress said. “You sound like a book, child. Books frequently bear little resemblance to life.” Her intense green eyes glittered as she turned to watch a young woman with an infant walk by us. “What do you know of them?”

“They’re dangerous,” I said quietly. “Very dangerous. The old Norse gods used to go to them for weapons and armor and they didn’t try to fight them. Harry said he was glad he never had to fight a svartalf. They’re also honorable. They signed the Unseelie Accords and they uphold them. They have a reputation for being savage about protecting their own. They aren’t human, they aren’t kind, and only a fool crosses them.”

“Better,” the Leanansidhe said. Then she added, in an offhand tone, “Fool.”

I glanced back toward the building I’d found. “That’s their property?”

“Their fortress,” Lea replied, “the center of their mortal affairs, here at the great crossroads. What else do you recall of them?”

I shook my head. “Um. One of the Norse goddesses got jacked for her jewelry—”

“Freya,” Lea said.

“And the thief—”

“Loki.”

“Yeah, him. He pawned it with the svartalves or something, and there was a big to-do about getting it back.”

“One wonders how it is possible to be so vague and so accurate at the same time,” Lea said.

I smirked.

Lea frowned at me. “You knew the story perfectly well. You were … tweaking my nose, I believe is the saying.”

“I had a good teacher in snark class,” I said. “Freya went to get her necklace back, and the svartalves were willing to do it—but only if she agreed to kiss each and every one of them.”

Lea threw her head back and laughed. “Child,” she said, a wicked edge to her voice, “remember that many of the old tales were translated and transcribed by rather prudish scholars.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“That the svartalves most certainly did not agree to give up one of the most valuable jewels in the universe for a society-wide trip to first base.”

I blinked a couple of times and felt my cheeks heat up. “You mean she had to …”

“Precisely.”

“All of them?”

“Indeed.”

“Wow,” I said. “I like to accessorize as much as the next girl, but that’s over the line. Way over. I mean, you can’t even see the line from there.”

“Perhaps,” Lea said. “I suppose it depends upon how badly one needs to recover something from the svartalves.”

“Uh. You’re saying I need to pull a train to get Thomas out of there? ’Cause … that just isn’t going to happen.”

Lea showed her teeth in another smile. “Morality is amusing.”

“Would you do it?”

Lea looked offended. “For the sake of another? Certainly not. Have you any idea of the obligation that would incur?”

“Um. Not exactly.”

“This is not my choice to make. You must ask yourself this question: Is your untroubled conscience more valuable to you than the vampire’s life?”

“No. But there’s got to be another way.”

Lea seemed to consider that for a moment. “Svartalves love beauty. They covet it the way a dragon lusts for gold. You are young, lovely, and … I believe the phrase is ‘smoking hot.’ The exchange of your favors for the vampire, a straightforward transaction, is almost certain to succeed, assuming he still lives.”

“We’ll call that one plan B,” I said. “Or maybe plan X. Or plan XXX. Why not just break in and burgle him out?”

“Child,” the Leanansidhe chided me. “The svartalves are quite skilled in the Art, and this is one of their strongholds. I could not attempt such a thing and leave with my life.” Lea tilted her head to one side and gave me one of those alien looks that made my skin crawl. “Do you wish to recover Thomas or not?”

“I wish to explore my options,” I said.

The faerie sorceress shrugged. “Then I advise you to do so as rapidly as possible. If he yet lives, Thomas Raith might count the remainder of his life in hours.”

I opened the door to Waldo’s apartment, shut and locked it behind me, and said, “Found him.”

As I turned toward the room, someone slapped me hard across the face.

This wasn’t a “Hey, wake up” kind of slap. It was an openhanded blow, one that would have really hurt if it was delivered with a closed fist. I staggered to one side, stunned.

Waldo’s girlfriend, Andi, folded her arms and stared at me through narrowed eyes for a moment. She was a girl of medium height, but she was a werewolf and she was built like a pinup model who was thinking about going into professional wrestling. “Hi, Molly,” she said.

“Hi,” I said. “And … ow.”

She held up a pink plastic razor. “Let’s have a talk about boundaries.”

Something ugly way down deep inside me somewhere unsheathed its claws and tensed up. That was the part of me that wanted to catch up to Listen and do things involving railroad spikes and drains in the floor. Everyone has that inside them, somewhere. It takes fairly horrible things to awaken that kind of savagery, but it’s in all of us. It’s the part of us that causes senseless atrocities, that makes war hell.

No one wants to talk about it or think about it, but I couldn’t afford that kind of willing ignorance. I hadn’t always been this way, but after a year fighting the Fomor and the dark underside of Chicago’s supernatural scene, I was somebody else. That part of me was awake and active and constantly pushing my emotions into conflict with my rationality.

I told that part of me to shut up and sit its ass down.

“Okay,” I said. “But later. I’m kind of busy.”

I started to brush past her into the room, but she stopped me short by placing a hand against my sternum and shoved me back against the door. It didn’t look like she was trying but I hit the wood firmly.

“Now’s good,” she said.

In my imagination, I clenched my fists and counted to five in an enraged scream. I was sure Harry had never had to deal with this kind of nonsense. I didn’t have time to lose, but I didn’t want to start something violent with Andi, either. I’d catch all kinds of hell if I threw down. I allowed myself the pleasure of gritting my teeth, took a deep breath, and nodded. “Okay. What’s on your mind, Andi?”

I didn’t add the words “you bitch” but I thought them really loud. I should probably be a nicer person.

“This is not your apartment,” Andi said. “You don’t get to roll in and out of here whenever you damned well please, no matter the hour, no matter what’s going on. Have you even stopped to think about what you’re doing to Butters?”

“I’m not doing anything to Butters,” I said. “I’m just borrowing the shower.”

Andi’s voice sharpened. “You came here today covered in blood. I don’t know what happened, but you know what? I don’t care. All I care about is what kind of trouble you might draw down onto other people.”

“There was no trouble,” I said. “Look, I’ll buy you a new razor.”

“This isn’t about property or money, Christ,” Andi said. “This is about respect. Butters is there for you whenever you need help, and you barely do so much as to thank him for it. What if you’d been followed here? Do you have any idea how much trouble he could get into for helping you out?”

“I wasn’t followed,” I said.

“Today,” Andi said. “But what about next time? You have power. You can fight. I don’t have what you do, but even I can fight. Butters can’t. Whose shower are you going to use if it’s his blood all over you?”

I folded my arms and looked carefully away from Andi. In some part of my brain I knew that she had a point, but that reasoning was coming in a distant second to my sudden urge to slap her.

“Look, Molly,” she said, her voice becoming more gentle. “I know things haven’t been easy for you lately. Ever since Harry died. When his ghost showed up. I know it wasn’t fun.”

I just looked at her without speaking. Not easy or fun. That was one way to describe it.

“There’s something I think you need to hear.”

“What’s that?”

Andi leaned forward slightly and sharpened her words. “Get over it.”

The apartment was very quiet for a moment, and the inside of me wasn’t. That ugly part of me started getting louder and louder. I closed my eyes.

“People die, Molly,” Andi continued. “They leave. And life goes on. Harry may have been the first friend you lost, but he won’t be the last. I get that you’re hurting. I get that you’re trying to step into some really big shoes. But that doesn’t give you the right to abuse people’s better natures. A lot of people are hurting lately, if you didn’t notice.”

If I didn’t notice. God, I would absolutely kill to be able not to notice people’s pain. Not to live it beside them. Not to sense its echoes hours or days later. The ugly part of me, the black part of my heart, wanted to open a psychic channel to Andi and show her the kind of thing I went through on a regular basis. Let her see how she would like my life. And we’d see if she was so righteous afterward. It would be wrong, but …

I took a slow breath. No. Harry told me once that you can always tell when you’re about to rationalize your way to a bad decision. It’s when you start using phrases such as “It would be wrong, but …” His advice was to leave the conjunction out of the sentence: “It would be wrong.” Period.

So I didn’t do anything rash. I didn’t let the rising tumult inside me come out. I spoke softly. “What is it you’d like me to do, exactly?”

Andi huffed out a little breath and waved a vague hand. “Just … get your head out of your ass, girl. I am not being unreasonable here, given that my boyfriend gave you a key to his freaking apartment.”

I blinked once at that. Wow. I hadn’t even really considered that aspect of what Butters had done. Romance and romantic conflict hadn’t exactly been high on my list lately. Andi had nothing to worry about on that front … but I guess she didn’t have way too much awareness of people’s emotions to tip her off to that fact. Now I could put a name to some of the worry in her. She wasn’t jealous, exactly, but she was certainly aware of the fact that I was a young woman a lot of men found attractive, and that Waldo was a man.

And she loved him. I could feel that, too.

“Think about him,” Andi said quietly. “Please. Just … try to take care of him the way he takes care of you. Call ahead. If you’d just walked in covered with blood next Saturday night, he would have had something very awkward to explain to his parents.”

I most likely would have sensed the unfamiliar presences inside the apartment before I got close enough to touch the door. But there was no point in telling Andi that. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t really understand the kind of life I lived. Certainly, she didn’t deserve to die for it, no matter what the opinion of my inner Sith.

I had to make my choices with my head. My heart was too broken to be trusted.

“I’ll try,” I said.

“Okay,” Andi said.

For a second, the fingers of my right hand quivered, and I found the ugly part of me about to hurl power at the other woman, blind her, deafen her, drown her in vertigo. Lea had shown me how. But I reeled the urge to attack back under control. “Andi,” I said instead.

“Yes?”

“Don’t hit me again unless you intend to kill me.”

I didn’t mean it as a threat, exactly. It was just that I tended to react with my instincts when things started getting violent. The psychic turbulence of that kind of conflict didn’t make me fall over screaming in pain anymore, but it did make it really hard to think clearly over the furious roaring of ugly me. If Andi hit me like that again … well. I wasn’t completely sure how I would react.

I’m not Mad Hatter insane. I’m pretty sure. But studying survival under someone like Auntie Lea leaves you ready to protect yourself, not to play well with others.

Threat or not, Andi had seen her share of conflict, and she didn’t back down. “If I don’t think you need a good smack in the face, I won’t give you one.”

Waldo and Justine had gone out to pick up some dinner, and got back about ten minutes later. We all sat down to eat while I reported on the situation.

“Svartalfheim,” Justine breathed. “That’s … that’s not good.”

“Those are the Norse guys, right?” Butters asked.

I filled them in between bites of orange chicken, relaying what I had learned from the Leanansidhe. There was a little silence after I did.

“So …” Andi said after a moment. “The plan is to … boink him free?”

I gave her a look.

“I’m just asking,” Andi said in a mild voice.

“They’d never sell,” Justine said, her voice low, tight. “Not tonight.”

I eyed her. “Why not?”

“They concluded an alliance today,” she said. “There’s a celebration tonight. Lara was invited.”

“What alliance?” I asked.

“A nonaggression pact,” Justine said, “with the Fomor.”

I felt my eyes widen.

The Fomor situation just kept getting worse and worse. Chicago was far from the most preyed-upon city in the world, and they had still made the streets a nightmare for those of even modest magical talent. I didn’t have access to the kind of information I had when I was working with Harry and the White Council, but I’d heard things through the Paranet and other sources. The Fomor were kind of an all-star team of bad guys, the survivors and outcasts and villains of a dozen different pantheons that had gone down a long time ago. They’d banded together under the banner of a group of beings known as the Fomor, and had been laying quiet for a long time—for thousands of years, in fact.

Now they were on the move—and even powerful interests like Svartalfheim, the nation of the svartalves, were getting out of the way.

Wow, I was so not wizard enough to deal with this.

“Lara must have sent Thomas in for something,” Justine said. “To steal information, to disrupt the alliance somehow. Something. Trespassing would be bad enough. If he was captured spying on them …”

“They’ll have a demonstration,” I said quietly. “They’ll make an example.”

“Couldn’t the White Court get him out?” Waldo asked.

“If the White Court seeks the return of one of their own, it would be like admitting they sent an agent in to screw around with Svartalfheim,” I said. “Lara can’t do that without serious repercussions. She’ll deny that Thomas’s intrusion had anything to do with her.”

Justine rose and paced the room, her body tight. “We have to go. We have to do something. I’ll pay the price; I’ll pay it ten times. We have to do something!”

I took a few more bites of orange chicken, frowning and thinking.

“Molly!” Justine said.

I looked at the chicken. I liked the way the orange sauce contrasted with the deep green of the broccoli and the soft white contours of the rice. The three colors made a pleasant complement. It was … beautiful, really.

“They covet beauty like a dragon covets gold,” I murmured.

Butters seemed to clue in to the fact that I was onto something. He leaned back in his chair and ate steadily from a box of noodles, his chopsticks precise. He didn’t need to look to use them.

Andi picked up on it a second later and tilted her head to one side. “Molly?” she asked.

“They’re having a party tonight,” I said. “Right, Justine?”

“Yes.”

Andi nodded impatiently. “What are we going to do?”

“We,” I said, “are going shopping.”

I’m kind of a tomboy. Not because I don’t like being a girl or anything, because for the most part I think it’s pretty sweet. But I like the outdoors, and physical activities, and learning stuff and reading things and building things. I’ve never really gotten very deep into the girly parts of being a girl. Andi was a little bit better at it than me. The fact that her mother hadn’t brought her up the way mine had probably accounted for it. In my house, makeup was for going to church and for women with easy morals.

I know, I know: the mind boggles at the contradiction. I had issues way before I got involved with magic, believe me.

I wasn’t sure how to accomplish what we needed in time to get to the party, but once I explained what we needed, I found out that when it came to being a girly girl, Justine had her shit wired tight.

Within minutes a town car picked us up and whisked us away to a private salon in the Loop, where Justine produced a completely unmarked, plain white credit card. About twenty staff members—wardrobe advisors, hairdressers, makeup artists, tailors, and accessory technicians—leapt into action and got us kitted out for the mission in a little more than an hour.

I couldn’t really get away from the mirror this time. I tried to look at the young woman in it objectively, as if she was someone else, and not the one who had helped kill the man she loved and who had then failed him again by being unable to prevent even his ghost from being destroyed in its determination to protect others. That bitch deserved to be run over by a train or something.

The girl in the mirror was tall and had naturally blond hair that had been rapidly swirled up off of her neck and suspended with gleaming black chopsticks. She looked lean, probably too much so, but had a little too much muscle tone to be a meth addict. The little black dress she wore would turn heads. She looked a little tired, even with the expertly applied makeup. She was pretty—if you didn’t know her, and if you didn’t look too hard at what was going on in her blue eyes.

A white stretch limo pulled up to get us, and I managed to dodder out to it without falling all over myself.

“Oh my God,” Andi said when we got in. The redhead stuck her feet out and wiggled them. “I love these shoes! If I have to wolf out and eat somebody’s face, I am going to cry to leave these behind.”

Justine smiled at her but then looked out the window, her lovely face distant, worried. “They’re just shoes.”

“Shoes that make my legs and my butt look awesome!” Andi said.

“Shoes that hurt,” I said. My wounded leg might have healed up, but moving around in these spiky torture devices was a new motion, and a steady ache was spreading up through my leg toward my hip. The last thing I needed was for my leg to cramp up and drop me to the ground, the way it had kept doing when I first started walking on it again. Any shoes with heels that high should come with their own safety net. Or a parachute.

We’d gone with similar outfits: stylish little black dresses, black chokers, and black pumps that proclaimed us hopeful that we wouldn’t spend much time on our feet. Each of us had a little Italian leather clutch, too. I’d put most of my magical gear in mine. All of us had our hair up in styles that varied only slightly. There were forged Renaissance paintings which had not had as much artist’s attention as our faces.

“It just takes practice wearing them,” Justine said. “Are you sure this is going to work?”

“Of course it is,” I said calmly. “You’ve been to clubs, Justine. The three of us together would skip the line to any place in town. We’re a matched set of hotness.”

“Like the Robert Palmer girls,” Andi said drily.

“I was going to go with Charlie’s Angels,” I said. “Oh, speaking of”—I opened the clutch and drew out a quartz crystal the size of my thumb—“Bosley, can you hear me?”

A second later, the crystal vibrated in my fingers and we heard Waldo’s faint voice coming from it. “Loud and clear, Angels. You think these will work once you get inside?”

“Depends on how paranoid they are,” I said. “If they’re paranoid, they’ll have defenses in place to cut off any magical communications. If they’re murderously paranoid, they’ll have defenses in place that let us talk so that they can listen in, and then they’ll kill us.”

“Fun,” Butters said. “Okay, I’ve got the Paranet chat room up. For what it’s worth, the hivemind is online.”

“What have you found out?” Andi asked.

“They’ll look human,” Waldo replied. “Their real forms are … well, there’s some discussion, but the basic consensus is that they look like aliens.”

“Ripley or Roswell?” I asked.

“Roswell. More or less. They can wear flesh forms, though, kind of like the Red Court vampires did. So be aware that they’ll be disguised.”

“Got it,” I said. “Anything else?”

“Not much,” he said. “There’s just too much lore floating around to pick out anything for sure. They might be allergic to salt. They might be supernaturally OCD and flip out if you wear your clothes inside out. They might turn to stone in sunlight.”

I growled. “It was worth a shot. Okay. Keep the discussion going, and I’ll get back to you if I can.”

“Got it,” he said. “Marci just got here. I’ll bring the laptop with me and we’ll be waiting for you on the east side of the building when you’re ready to go. How do you look, Andi-licious?”

“Fabulous,” Andi said confidently. “The hemlines on these dresses stop about an inch short of slutty nymphomaniac.”

“Someone take a picture,” he said cheerfully, but I could hear the worry in his voice. “I’ll see you soon.”

“Don’t take any chances,” I said. “See you soon.”

I put the crystal away and tried to ignore the butterflies in my stomach.

“This isn’t going to work,” Justine murmured.

“It is going to work,” I told her, keeping my tone confident. “We’ll breeze right in. The Rack will be with us.”

Justine glanced at me with an arched eyebrow. “The Rack?”

“The Rack is more than just boobs, Justine,” I told her soberly. “It’s an energy field created by all living boobs. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”

Andi started giggling. “You’re insane.”

“But functionally so,” I said, and adjusted myself to round out a little better. “Just let go your conscious self and act on instinct.”

Justine stared blankly at me for a second. Then her face lightened and she let out a little laugh. “The Rack will be with us?”

I couldn’t stop myself from cracking a smile. “Always.”

The limo joined a line of similar vehicles dropping people off at the entrance to the svartalf stronghold. A valet opened our door, and I swung my legs out and tried to leave the car without flashing everyone in sight. Andi and Justine followed me out, and I started walking confidently toward the entrance with the other two flanking me. Our heels clicked in near unison, and I suddenly felt every eye in sight swivel toward us. A cloud of thought and emotion rolled out in response to our presence—pleasure, mostly, along with a mixed slurry of desire, outright lust, jealousy, anxiety, and surprise. It hurt to feel all of that scraping against the inside of my head, but it was necessary. I didn’t sense any outright hostility or imminent violence, and the instant of warning I might get between sensing an attacker’s intention and the moment of attack might save our lives.

A security guard at the door watched us intently as we approached, and I could feel the uncomplicated sexual attraction churning through him. He kept it off his face and out of his voice and body, though. “Good evening, ladies,” he said. “May I see your invitations?”

I arched an eyebrow at him, gave him what I hoped was a seductive smile, and tried to arch my back a little more. Deploying the Rack had worked before. “You don’t need to see our invitation.”

“Um,” he said. “Miss … I kind of do.”

Andi stepped up beside me and gave him a sex-kitten smile that made me hate her a little, just for a second. “No you don’t.”

“Uh,” he said, “yeah. Still do.”

Justine stepped up on my other side. She looked more sweet than sexy, but only barely. “I’m sure it was just an oversight, sir. Couldn’t you ask your supervisor if we might come to the reception?”

He stared at us for a long moment, clearly hesitant. Then one hand slowly went to the radio at his side and he lifted it to his mouth. A moment later a slight, small man in a silk suit appeared from inside the building. He took a long look at us.

The interest I’d felt from the guard was fairly normal. It had just been a spark, the instinct-level response of any male to a desirable female.

What came off of the new guy was … it was more like a road flare. It burned a thousand times hotter and brighter, and it kept on burning. I’d sensed lust and desire in others before. This went so much deeper and wider than mere lust that I didn’t think there was a word for it. It was … a vast and inhuman yearning, blended with a fierce and jealous love, and seasoned with sexual attraction and desire. It was like standing near a tiny sun, and I suddenly understood exactly what Auntie Lea had been trying to tell me.

Fire is hot. Water is wet. And svartalves are suckers for pretty girls. They could no more change their nature than they could the course of the stars.

“Ladies,” the new guy said, smiling at us. It was a charming smile, but there was something distant and disquieting in his face all the same. “Please, wait just a moment for me to alert my other staff. We would be honored if you would join us.”

He turned and went inside.

Justine gave me a sidelong look.

“The Rack can have a powerful influence over the weak-minded,” I said.

“I’d feel better if he hadn’t left on a Darth Vader line,” Andi breathed. “He smelled odd. Was he …?”

“Yeah,” I whispered back. “One of them.”

The man in the silk suit reappeared, still smiling, and opened the door for us. “Ladies,” he said, “I am Mister Etri. Please, come inside.”

I had never in my life seen a place more opulent than the inside of the svartalves’ stronghold. Not in magazines, not in the movies. Not even on Cribs.

There were tons of granite and marble. There were sections of wall that had been inlaid with precious and semiprecious stones. Lighting fixtures were crafted of what looked like solid gold, and the light switches looked like they’d been carved from fine ivory. Security guards were stationed every twenty or thirty feet, standing at rigid attention like those guys outside Buckingham Palace, only without the big hats. Light came from everywhere and from nowhere, making all shadows thin and wispy things without becoming too bright for the eyes. Music drifted on the air, some old classical thing that was all strings and no drumbeat.

Etri led us down a couple of hallways to a vast cathedral of a ballroom. It was absolutely palatial in there—in fact, I was pretty sure that the room shouldn’t have fit in the building we’d just entered—and it was filled with expensive-looking people in expensive-looking clothing.

We paused in the entry while Etri stopped to speak to yet another security guy. I took the moment it offered to sweep my gaze over the room. The place wasn’t close to full, but there were a lot of people there. I recognized a couple of celebrities, people you’d know if I told you their names. There were a number of the Sidhe in attendance, their usual awe-inspiring physical perfection muted to mere exotic beauty. I spotted Gentleman Johnnie Marcone, the head of Chicago’s outfit in attendance, with his gorilla Hendricks and his personal attack witch, Gard, floating around near him. There were any number of people who I was sure weren’t people; I could sense the blurring of perception in the air around them as if they were cut off from me by a thin curtain of falling water.

But I didn’t see Thomas.

“Molly,” Justine whispered, barely audible. “Is he …?”

The tracking spell I’d focused on my lips was still functioning, a faint tingle telling me that Thomas was nearby, deeper into the interior of the building. “He’s alive,” I said. “He’s here.”

Justine shuddered and took a deep breath. She blinked slowly, once, her face showing nothing as she did. I felt the surge of simultaneous relief and terror in her presence, though, a sudden blast of emotion that cried out for her to scream or fight or burst into tears. She did none of that, and I turned my eyes away from her in order to give her the illusion that I hadn’t noticed her near meltdown.

In the center of the ballroom, there was a small, raised platform of stone, with a few stairs leading up onto it. Upon the platform was a podium of the same material. Resting on the podium was a thick folio of papers and a neat row of fountain pens. There was something solemn and ceremonial about the way it was set up.

Justine was looking at it, too. “That must be it.”

“The treaty?”

She nodded. “The svartalves are very methodical about business. They’ll conclude the treaty precisely at midnight. They always do.”

Andi tapped a finger thoughtfully on her hip. “What if something happened to their treaty first? I mean, if someone spilled a bunch of wine on it or something. That would be attention getting, I bet—maybe give a couple of us a chance to sneak further in.”

I shook my head. “No. We’re guests here. Do you understand?”

“Uh. Not really.”

“The svartalves are old-school,” I said. “Really old-school. If we break the peace when they’ve invited us into their territory, we’re violating our guest right and offering them disrespect as our hosts—right out in the open, in front of the entire supernatural community. They’ll react … badly.”

Andi frowned and said, “Then what’s our next move?”

Why do people keep asking me that? Is this what all wizard types go through? I’d probably asked Harry that question a hundred times, but I never realized how hard it was to hear it coming toward you. But Harry always knew what to do next. All I could do was improvise desperately and hope for the best.

“Justine,” I said, “do you know any of the players here?”

As Lara Raith’s personal assistant, Justine came in contact with a lot of people and not-quite-people. Lara had so many fingers in so many pies that I could barely make a joke about it, and Justine saw, heard, and thought a lot more than anyone gave her credit for. The white-haired girl scanned the room, her dark eyes flicking from face to face. “Several.”

“All right. I want you to circulate and see what you can find out,” I said. “Keep an eye out. If you see them sending the brute squad after us, get on the crystal and warn us.”

“Okay,” Justine whispered. “Careful.”

Etri returned and smiled again, though his eyes remained oddly, unsettlingly without expression. He flicked one hand and a man in a tux floated over to us with a tray of drinks. We helped ourselves, and Etri did, too. He lifted his glass to us and said, “Ladies, be welcome. To beauty.”

We echoed him and we all sipped. I barely let my lips touch the liquid. It was champagne, really good stuff. It fizzed and I could barely taste the alcohol. I wasn’t worried about poison. Etri had quite diffidently allowed us to choose our glasses before taking one of his own.

I was actually more worried about the fact that I’d stopped to consider potential poisoning, and to watch Etri’s actions carefully as he served us. Is it paranoid to worry about things like that? It seemed reasonable to me at the time.

Man, maybe I’m more messed up than I thought I was.

“Please, enjoy the reception,” Etri said. “I’m afraid I must insist on a dance with each of you lovely young ladies when time and duty shall allow. Who shall be first?”

Justine gave him a Rack-infused smile and lifted her hand. If you twisted my arm, I’d tell you that Justine was definitely the prettiest girl in our little trio, and Etri evidently agreed. His eyes turned warm for an instant before he took Justine’s hand and led her out onto the dance floor. They vanished into the moving crowd.

“I couldn’t do this ballroom stuff anyway,” Andi said. “Not nearly enough booty bouncing. Next move time?”

“Next move time,” I said. “Come on.”

I turned to follow the tingle in my lips and the two of us made our way to the back side of the ballroom, where doors led deeper into the facility. There were no guards on the doors, but as we got closer, Andi’s steps started to slow. She glanced over to one side, where there was a refreshments table, and I saw her begin to turn toward it.

I caught her arm and said, “Hold it. Where are you going?”

“Um,” she said, frowning. “Over there?”

I extended my senses and felt the subtle weaving of magic in the air around the doorway, cobweb fine. It was a kind of veil, designed to direct the attention of anyone approaching it away from the doorway and toward anything else in the room. It made the refreshment table look yummier. If Andi had spotted a guy, he would have looked a lot cuter than he actually was.

I’d been having a powerful faerie sorceress throwing veils and glamours at me for almost a year, building up my mental defenses, and a few months ago I’d gone twelve rounds in the psychic boxing ring with a heavyweight champion necromancer. I hadn’t even noticed the gentle magical weaving hitting my mental shields.

“It’s an enchantment,” I told her. “Don’t let it sway you.”

“What?” she asked. “I don’t feel anything. I’m just hungry.”

“You wouldn’t feel it,” I said. “That’s how it works. Take my hand and close your eyes. Trust me.”

“If I had a nickel for every time a bad evening started with a line like that,” she muttered. But she put her hand in mine and closed her eyes.

I walked her toward the doorway and felt her growing more tense as we went—but then we passed through it and she let out her breath explosively, blinking her eyes open. “Wow. That felt … like nothing at all.”

“It’s how you recognize quality enchantment,” I said. “If you don’t know it’s got you, you can’t fight it off.” The hallway we stood in looked much like any in any office building. I tried the nearest door and found it locked. So were the next couple, but the last was an empty conference room, and I slipped inside.

I fumbled the crystal out of my little clutch and said, “Bosley, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear, Angels,” came Waldo’s voice. Neither of us used real names. The crystals were probably secure, but a year with Lea’s nasty trickery as a daily feature of life had taught me not to make many assumptions.

“Were you able to come up with those floor plans?”

“About ninety seconds ago. The building’s owners filed everything with the city in triplicate, including electronic copies, which I am now looking at, courtesy of the hivemind.”

“Advantage, nerds,” I said. “Tell them they did good, Boz.”

“Will do,” Waldo said. “These people you’re visiting are thorough, Angels. Be careful.”

“When am I not careful?” I said.

Andi had taken up a guard position against the wall next to the door, where she could grab anyone who opened it. “Seriously?”

I couldn’t help but smile a little. “I think our lost lamb is in the wing of the building to the west of the reception hall. What’s there?”

“Um … offices, it looks like. Second floor, more offices. Third floor, more offi—hello there.”

“What’d you find?”

“A vault,” Waldo said. “Reinforced steel. Huge.”

“Hah,” I said. “A reinforced-steel vault? Twenty bucks says it’s a dungeon. We start there.”

“Whatever it is, it’s in the basement. There should be a stairway leading down to it at the end of the hallway leading out of the reception hall.”

“Bingo,” I said. “Stay tuned, Bosley.”

“Will do. Your chariot awaits.”

I put the crystal away and began putting on my rings. I got them all together, then began to pick up my wands, and realized that I couldn’t carry them in each hand while also carrying the little clutch. “I knew I should have gone for a messenger bag,” I muttered.

“With that dress?” Andi asked. “Are you kidding?”

“True.” I took the crystal out and tucked it into my décolletage, palmed one of the little wands in each hand, and nodded to Andi. “If it’s a vault or a dungeon, there will be guards. I’m going to make it hard for them to see us, but we might have to move fast.”

Andi looked down at her shoes and sighed mournfully. Then she stepped out of them and peeled the little black dress off. She hadn’t been wearing anything underneath. She closed her eyes for a second and then her form just seemed to blur and melt. Werewolves don’t do dramatic, painful transformations except right at first, I’ve been told. This looked as natural as a living being turning in a circle and sitting down. One moment Andi was there, and the next there was a great russet-furred wolf sitting where she’d been.

It was highly cool magic. I was going to have to figure out how that was done, one of these days.

“Don’t draw blood unless it’s absolutely necessary,” I said, stepping out of my own torturous shoes. “I’m going to try to make this quick and painless. If there’s any rough stuff, not killing anyone will go a long way with the svartalves.”

Andi yawned at me.

“Ready?” I asked.

Andi bobbed her lupine head in a sharp, decisive nod. I drew the concealing magic of my top-of-the-line veil around us, and the light suddenly went dim, the colors leaching out of the world. We would be almost impossible to see. And anyone who came within fifty or sixty feet of us would develop a sudden desire for a bit of introspection, questioning their path in life so deeply that there was practically no chance we’d be detected as long as we were quiet.

With Andi walking right beside me, we stole out into the hallway. We found the stairwell Waldo had told us about, and I opened the door to it slowly. I didn’t go first. You can’t do much better than having a werewolf as your guide, and I’d worked with Andi and her friends often enough in the past year to make our movements routine.

Andi went through first, moving in total silence, her ears perked, her nose twitching. Wolves have incredible senses of smell. Hearing, too. If anyone was around, Andi would sense them. After a tense quarter of a minute, she gave me the signal that it was all clear by sitting down. I eased up next to her and extended my senses, feeling for any more magical defenses or enchantments. There were half a dozen on the first section of the stairwell—simple things, the sorcerous equivalent of trip wires.

Fortunately, Auntie Lea had shown me how to circumvent enchantments such as these. I made an effort of will and modified our veil, and then I nodded to Andi and we started slowly down the stairs. We slipped through the invisible fields of magic without disturbing them, and crept down to the basement.

I checked the door at the bottom of the stairs and found it unlocked.

“This seems way too easy,” I muttered. “If it’s a prison, shouldn’t this be locked?”

Andi let out a low growl, and I could sense her agreement and suspicion.

My mouth still tingled, much more strongly now. Thomas was close. “Guess there’s not a lot of choice here.” I opened the door, slowly and quietly.

The door didn’t open onto some kind of dungeon. It didn’t open up to show us a vault, either. Instead, Andi and I found ourselves staring at a long hallway every bit as opulent as those above, with large and ornate doors spaced generously along it. Each door had a simple number on it, wrought in what looked like pure silver. Very subdued lighting was spaced strategically along its length, leaving it comfortably dim without being dark.

Andi’s low growl turned into a confused little sound and she tilted her head to one side.

“Yeah,” I said, perplexed. “It looks like … a hotel. There’s even a sign showing fire escape routes on the wall.”

Andi gave her head a little shake, and I sensed enough of her emotions to understand her meaning. What the hell?

“I know,” I said. “Is this … living quarters for the svartalves? Guest accommodations?”

Andi glanced up at me and flicked her ears. Why are you asking me? I can’t even talk.

“I know you can’t. Just thinking out loud.”

Andi blinked, her ears snapping toward me, and she gave me a sidelong glance. You heard me?

“I didn’t so much hear you as just … understand you.”

She leaned very slightly away from me. Just when I thought you couldn’t get any more weird and disturbing.

I gave her a maliciously wide smile, and the crazy eyes I used to use to scare my kid brothers and sisters.

Andi snorted and then began testing the air with her nose. I watched her closely. Her hackles rose up and I saw her crouch down. There are things here. Too many scents to sort out. Something familiar, and not in a good way.

“Thomas is close. Come on.” We started forward, and I kept my face turned directly toward the tingling signature of my tracking spell. It began to bear to the right, and as we got to the door to room 6, the tingle suddenly swung to the very corner of my mouth, until I turned to face the doorway directly. “Here, in six.”

Andi looked up and down the hall, her eyes restless, her ears trying to swivel in every direction. I don’t like this.

“Too easy,” I whispered. “This is way too easy.” I reached out toward the doorknob and stopped. My head told me this situation was all wrong. So did my instincts. If Thomas was a prisoner being held by Svartalfheim, then where were the cages, the chains, the locks, the bars, the guards? And if he wasn’t being held against his will … what was he doing here?

When you find yourself in a situation that doesn’t make any sense, it’s usually for one reason: you have bad information. You can get bad information in several ways. Sometimes you’re just plain wrong about what you learn. More often, and more dangerously, your information is bad because you made a faulty assumption.

Worst of all is when someone deliberately feeds it to you—and, like a sucker, you trust her and take it without hesitation.

“Auntie,” I breathed. “She tricked me.” Lea hadn’t sent me into the building to rescue Thomas—or at least not only for that. It was no freaking coincidence that she’d taught me how to specifically circumvent the magical security the svartalves were using, either. She’d had another purpose in bringing me here, on this night.

I replayed our conversation in my mind and snarled. Nothing she told me was a lie, and all of it had been tailored to make me reach the wrong conclusion—that Thomas had to be rescued and that I was the only one who would do it. I didn’t know why the Leanansidhe thought I needed to be where I was, but she sure as hell had made sure I would get there.

“That conniving, doublespeaking, treacherous bitch. When I catch up with her, I’m going to—”

Andi let out a sudden, very low growl, and I shut up in the nick of time.

The door from the upstairs opened, and that bastard Listen and several turtlenecks started walking down the hall toward us.

Listen was a lean and fit-looking man of middling height. His hair was cropped military short, his skin was pale, and his dark eyes looked hard and intelligent. The werewolves and I had tried to bring him down half a dozen different times, but he always managed to either escape or turn the tables and make us run for our lives.

Vicious bad guys are bad enough. Vicious, resourceful, ruthless, professional, smart bad guys are way worse. Listen was one of the latter and I hated his fishy guts.

He and his lackeys were dressed in the standard uniform of the Fomors’ servitors: black slacks, black shoes, and a black turtleneck sweater. The high neck of the sweater covered up the gills on both sides of their necks, so that they could pass as mortals. They weren’t, or at least they weren’t anymore. The Fomor had changed them, making them stronger, faster, and all but immune to pain. I’d never managed to set up a successful ambush before, and now one had fallen right into my lap. I absolutely ached to avenge the blood I’d washed from my body early that very day.

But the servitors had weird minds, and they kept getting weirder. It was damned difficult to get into their heads the way I would need to do, and if that first attack failed in close quarters like these, that crew would tear Andi and me apart.

So I ground my teeth. I put my hand on Andi’s neck and squeezed slightly as I crouched down beside her, focusing on the veil. I had to damp down on the introspection suggestion: Listen had nearly killed me a few months before, when he noticed a similar enchantment altering the course of his thoughts. That had been damned scary, but I’d worked on it since then. I closed my eyes and spun the lightest, finest cobwebs of suggestion that my gifts could manage while simultaneously drawing the veil even tighter around us. The light in the hallway shrunk to almost nothing, and the air just over my skin became noticeably cooler.

They came closer, Listen clearly in the lead, walking with swift and silent purpose. The son of a bitch passed within two feet of me. I could have reached out and touched him with my hand.

None of them stopped.

They went down the hall to room 8, and Listen pushed a key into a door. He opened it and he and his buddies began to enter the room.

This was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. For all the horror the Fomor had brought to the world since the extinction of the Red Court, we still didn’t know why they did what they did. We didn’t know what they wanted, or how they thought their current actions would get it for them.

So I moved in all the silence the past year had taught me the hard way, and stalked up to the line of servitors passing into the chamber. After a startled second, Andi joined me, just as quietly. We just barely slipped through the door before it shut.

No one looked back at us as we passed into a palatial suite, furnished as lavishly as the rest of the building. In addition to the half dozen turtlenecks in Listen’s party, another five were standing around the room in a guard position, backs straight, their arms clasped behind them.

“Where is he?” Listen asked a guard standing beside a door. The guard was the biggest turtleneck there, with a neck like a fireplug.

“Inside,” the guard said.

“It is nearly time,” Listen said. “Inform him.”

“He left orders that he was not to be disturbed.”

Listen seemed to consider that for a moment. Then he said, “A lack of punctuality will invalidate the treaty and make our mission impossible. Inform him.”

The guard scowled. “The lord left orders that—”

Listen’s upper body surged in a sudden motion, so fast that I could only see it as motion. The big guard let out a sudden hiss and a grunt, and blood abruptly fountained from his throat. He staggered a step, turned to Listen, and raised a hand.

Then he shuddered and collapsed to the floor, blood pumping rapidly from a huge and jagged wound in his neck.

Listen dropped a chunk of meat the size of a baseball from his bare, bloody fingers, and bent over to wipe them clean on the dead turtleneck’s sweater. The blood didn’t show against the black. He straightened up again and then knocked on the door.

“My lord. It is nearly midnight.”

He did it again exactly sixty seconds later.

And he repeated it three more times before a slurred voice answered, “I left orders that I was not to be disturbed.”

“Forgive me, my lord, but the time is upon us. If we do not act, our efforts are for nothing.”

“It is not for you to presume what orders may or may not be ignored,” said the voice. “Execute the fool who allowed my sleep to be disturbed.”

“It is already done, my lord.”

There was a somewhat mollified grunt from the far side of the door, and a moment later it opened, and for the first time I saw one of the lords of the Fomor.

He was a tall, extremely gaunt being, yet somehow not thin. His hands and feet were too large, and his stomach bulged as if it contained a basketball. His jowls were oversized as well, his jaws swollen as if he had the mumps. His lips were too wide, too thick, and too rubbery looking. His hair look too flattened, too limp, like strands of seaweed just washed up onto shore, and on the whole he looked like some kind of gangling, poisonous frog. He was dressed only in a blanket draped across his shoulders. Ew.

There were three women in the room behind him, naked and scattered and dead. Each had livid purple bruises around her throat and glassy, staring eyes.

The turtlenecks all dropped to the floor in supplication as the Fomor entered, though Listen only genuflected upon one knee.

“He is here?” asked the Fomor.

“Yes, my lord,” Listen said, “along with both of his bodyguards.”

The Fomor croaked out a little laugh and rubbed his splay-fingered hands together. “Mortal upstart. Calling himself a Baron. He will pay for what he did to my brother.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“No one is allowed to murder my family but me.”

“Of course, my lord.”

“Bring me the shell.”

Listen bowed and nodded to three of the other turtlenecks. They hurried to another door and then emerged, carrying between them an oyster shell that must have weighed half a ton. The thing was monstrous and covered in a crust of coral or barnacles or whatever those things are that grow on the hulls of ships. It was probably seven feet across. The turtlenecks put it down on the floor in the middle of the room.

The Fomor crossed to the shell, touched it with one hand, and murmured a word. Instantly, light blossomed all across its surface, curling and twisting in patterns or maybe letters which I had never seen before. The Fomor stood over it for a time, one hand outstretched, bulbous eyes narrowed, saying something in a hissing, bubbling tongue.

I didn’t know what he was doing, but he was moving a lot of energy around, whatever it was. I could feel it filling the air of the chamber, making it seem tighter and somehow harder to breathe.

“My lord?” asked Listen abruptly. “What are you doing?”

“Making a present for our new allies, of course,” the Fomor said. “I can hardly annihilate the svartalves along with everyone else. Not yet.”

“This is not according to the plans of the Empress.”

“The Empress,” spat the Fomor, “told me that I ought not harm our new allies. She said nothing of the puling scum attending their festivities.”

“The svartalves value their honor dearly,” Listen said. “You will shame them if their guests come to harm whilst under their hospitality, my lord. It could defeat the point of the alliance.”

The Fomor spat. A glob of yellowy, mucus-like substance splattered the floor near Listen’s feet. It hissed and crackled against the marble floor. “Once the treaty is signed, it is done. My gift will be given to them in the moments after: I will spare their miserable lives. And if the rest of the scum turn against the svartalves, they will have no choice but to turn to us for our strength.” He smirked. “Fear not, Listen. I am not so foolish as to destroy one of the Empress’ special pets, even in an accident. You and your fellows will survive.”

I suddenly recognized the tenor of energy building up in the giant shell on the floor and my heart just about stopped.

Holy crap.

Lord Froggy had himself a bomb.

Like, right there.

“My life belongs to my masters, to spend as they will, my lord,” Listen said. “Have you any other instruction?”

“Seize whatever treasure you might from the dead before we depart.”

Listen bowed his head. “How efficacious do you anticipate your gift to be?”

“The one I made for the Red Court in the Congo was deadly enough,” Lord Froggy said, a smug tone in his voice.

My heart pounded even harder. During its war with the White Council, the Red Court had used some kind of nerve gas on a hospital tending wounded wizards. The weapon had killed tens of thousands of people in a city far smaller and less crowded than Chicago.

My bare feet felt tiny and cold.

Lord Froggy grunted and fluttered his fingers, and the bomb-shell vanished, hidden by a veil as good as anything I could do. The Fomor lord abruptly lowered his hand, smiling. “Bring my robes.”

The turtlenecks hurriedly dressed Lord Froggy in what might have been the tackiest robe in the history of robekind. Multiple colors wavered over it in patterns like the ripples on water, but seemed random, clashing with one another. It was beaded with pearls, some of them the size of big supermarket gumballs. They put a crown-like circlet on his head after that, and then Lord Froggy and company headed out the door.

I crouched as far to the side as I could, almost under the minibar, with Andi huddling right beside me, holding my veil in tight. Lord Froggy blew right by me, with the turtlenecks walking in two columns behind him, their movements precise and uniform—until one of the last pair stopped, his hand holding the door open.

It was Listen.

His eyes swept the room slowly, and he frowned.

“What is it?” asked the other turtleneck.

“Do you smell something?” Listen asked.

“Like what?”

“Perfume.”

Oh, crap.

I closed my eyes and focused on my suggestion frantically, adding threads of anxiety to it, trying to keep it too fine for Listen to pick up on.

After a moment, the other turtleneck said, “I’ve never really liked perfume. We should not be so far from the lord.”

Listen hesitated a moment more before he nodded and began to leave.

“Molly!” said Justine’s voice quite clearly from the crystal tucked into my dress. “Miss Gard freaked out about two minutes ago and all but carried Marcone out of here. Security is mobilizing.”

Sometimes I think my life is all about bad timing.

Listen whirled around toward us at once, but Andi was faster. She bounded from the floor into a ten-foot leap and slammed against the doorway, hammering it closed with the full weight of her body. In a flickering instant, she was a naked human girl again, straining against the door as she reached up and manually snapped its locks closed.

I fished the crystal out of my dress and said, “There’s a bomb on the premises, down in the guest wing. I repeat, a bomb in the guest wing, in the Fomor Ambassador’s quarters. Find Etri or one of the other svartalves and tell them that the Fomor is planning to murder the svartalves’ guests.”

“Oh my God,” Justine said.

“Holy crap!” chimed in Butters.

Something heavy and moving fast slammed into the door from the other side, and it jumped in its frame. Andi was actually knocked back off of it a few inches, and she reset herself, pressing her shoulder against it to reinforce it. “Molly!”

This was another one of those situations in which panic can get you killed. So while I wanted to scream and run around in circles, what I did was close my eyes for a moment as I released the veil and take a slow, deep breath, ordering my thoughts.

First: if Froggy and the turtlenecks managed to get back into the room, they’d kill us. There were already at least four dead bodies in the suite. Why not add two more? And, all things considered, they’d probably be able to do it. So, priority one was to keep them out of the room, at least until the svartalves sorted things out.

Second: the bomb. If that thing went off, and it was some kind of nerve agent like the Red Court used in Africa, the casualties could be in the hundreds of thousands, and would include Andi and Thomas and Justine—plus Butters and Marci, waiting outside in the car. The bomb had to be disarmed or moved to somewhere safe. Oh, and it would probably need to be not invisible for either of those things to happen.

And three: rescue Thomas. Can’t forget the mission, regardless of how complicated things got.

The door boomed again.

“Molly!” Andi screamed, her fear making her voice vibrant, piercing.

“Dammit,” I growled. “What would Harry do?”

If Harry was here, he would just hold the stupid door shut. His magic talents had been, like, superhero strong when it came to being able to deliver massive amounts of energy. I’m fairly sure he could have stopped a speeding locomotive. Or at least a speeding semitrailer. But my talents just didn’t run to the physical.

Harry had once told me that when you had one problem, you had a problem—but when you had several problems, you might also have several solutions.

I stood up and dropped my wands into my hands, gripping them hard. I faced the doorway and said, “Get ready.”

Andi flashed me a glance. “For what?”

“To open the door,” I said. “Then shut it behind me.”

“What?”

“Close your eyes. Go on three,” I said, and bent my knees slightly. “One!”

The door rattled again.

“Two!”

“Are you insane?” Andi demanded.

“Three!” I screamed, and sprinted for the door, lifting both wands.

Andi squeezed her eyes shut and swung the door open, and I deployed the One Woman Rave.

Channeling the strength of my will, light and sound burst from the ends of the two wands. Not light like from a flashlight—more like the light of a small nuclear explosion. The sound wasn’t loud like a scream, or a small explosion, or even the howl of a passing train. It was like standing on the deck of one of those old World War II battleships when they fired their big guns—a force that could stun a full-grown man and knock him on his ass.

I charged ahead with a wall of sound and furious light leading the way, and burst into the hall among the scattered forms of the startled, dazed turtlenecks.

And then I started playing nasty.

A few seconds later, the scattered turtlenecks were all on their feet again, though they looked a little disoriented and were blinking their eyes. Down the hallway, one of the turtlenecks was helping Lord Froggy to his feet, his lank hair disheveled, his robes in disarray. His ugly face was contorted in fury. “What is happening here, Listen?” he demanded. He was screaming at the top of his lungs. I doubt his ears were working very well.

“My lord,” Listen said, “I believe this is more of the work of the Ragged Lady.”

“What!? Speak up, fool!”

Listen’s cheek twitched once. Then he repeated himself in a shout.

Froggy made a hissing sound. “Meddling bitch,” he snarled. “Break down that door and bring me her heart.”

“Yes, my lord,” Listen said, and the turtlenecks grouped up around the door to room 8 again.

They didn’t use any tools. They didn’t need any. They just started kicking the door, three of them at a time, working in unison, driving the heels of their shoes at the wood. In three kicks, cracks began to form and the door groaned. In five, it broke and swung in loosely on its hinges.

“Kill her!” snarled Lord Froggy, pacing closer to the broken door. “Kill her!”

All but two of the turtlenecks poured into the room.

From behind my renewed veil, I figured the timing was about right to discontinue my illusion just as the door bounced back after they’d rushed through it. The silver numeral 8 hanging on the door blurred and melted back into a silver numeral 6.

Lord Froggy’s eyes widened in sudden, startled realization.

One of the turtlenecks flew back out the door to room 6 and smashed into the wall on the far side. He hit like a rag doll and flopped off it to the ground. There was a body-shaped outline in cracked marble and flecks of fresh blood left on the wall behind him.

And from the other side of the broken door, Thomas Raith, vampire, said, “It’s Listen, right? Wow. Did you clowns ever pick the wrong room.”

“We made a mistake,” Listen said.

“Yes. Yes, you did.”

And things started going crunch and thump in the room beyond.

Lord Froggy hissed and swiveled his bulgy head around on his gangly neck. “Ragged bitch,” he hissed. “I know you are here.”

This time, I knew exactly what Harry would do. I lifted my sonic wand and sent my voice down to the far end of the hall, behind him. “Hi there, Froggy. Is it as hard as it looks, holding up villain clichés, or does it come naturally to you?”

“You dare mock me?” the Fomor snarled. He threw a spiraling corkscrew of deep green energy down the hall, and it hissed and left burn marks upon everything it touched, ending at the doors. When it hit them, there was a snarling, crackling sound, and the green light spread across their surface in the pattern of a fisherman’s net.

“Hard to do anything else to a guy with a face like yours,” I said, this time from directly beside him. “Did you kill those girls, or did they volunteer once they saw you with your shirt off?”

The Fomor snarled and swatted at the air beside him. Then his eyes narrowed, and he started muttering and weaving his spatulate fingers in complicated patterns. I could feel the energy coming off of him at once, and knew exactly what he was trying to do—unravel my veil. But I’d been playing that game with Auntie Lea for months.

Lord Froggy hadn’t.

As his questing threads of magic spread out, I sent out whispers of my own power to barely brush them, guiding them one by one out and around the area covered by my veil. I couldn’t afford to let him find me. Not like that, anyway. He wasn’t thinking, and if I didn’t get him to, it was entirely possible that he’d be too stupid to fool.

I couldn’t have him giving up and leaving, either, so when I was sure I’d compromised his seeking spell I used the sonic wand again, this time directly above his head. “This kind of thing really isn’t for amateurs. Are you sure you shouldn’t sit this one out and let Listen give it a shot?”

Lord Froggy tilted his head up and then narrowed his eyes. He lifted a hand, spat a hissing word, and fire leapt up from his fingers to engulf the ceiling above him.

It took about two seconds for the fire alarm to go off, and another two before the sprinkler system kicked in. But I was back at the door to room 8 when the falling water began to dissolve my veil. Magic is a kind of energy, and follows its own laws. One of those laws is that water tends to ground out active magical constructs, and my veil started melting away like it was made of cotton candy.

“Hah!” spat the Fomor, spotting me. I saw him send a bolt of viridian light at me. I threw myself facedown to the floor and it passed over me, splashing against the door. I whipped over onto my back, just in time to raise a shield against a second bolt and a third. My physical shields aren’t great, but the Fomor’s spell was pure energy, and that made it easier for me to handle. I deflected the bolts left and right, and they blasted chunks of marble the size of bricks out of the walls when they struck.

Lord Froggy’s eyes flared even larger and more furious that he’d missed. “Mortal cow!”

Okay, now. That stung. I mean, maybe it’s a little shallow, and maybe it’s a little petty, and maybe it shows a lack of character of some kind that Froggy’s insult to my appearance got under my skin more effectively than attempted murder.

“Cow?” I snarled as water from the sprinkler system started soaking me. “I rock this dress!”

I dropped one of my wands and thrust my palm out at him, sending out an invisible bolt of pure memory, narrowed and focused with magic, like light passing through a magnifying glass. Sometimes you don’t really remember traumatic injuries, and my memory of getting shot in the leg was pretty blurry. It hadn’t hurt so much when I actually got shot and I’d had a few things occupying my attention. Mostly, I’d just felt surprised and then numb—but when they were tending the wound in the helicopter, later, now that was pain. They’d dug the bullet out with forceps, cleaned the site with something that burned like Hell itself, and when they’d put the pressure bandage on it and tightened the straps, it hurt so bad that I’d thought I was going to die.

That’s what I gave to Lord Froggy, with every bit of strength I could muster.

He wove a shield against the attack, but I guess he wasn’t used to handling something so intangible as a memory. Even with the falling water weakening it, I felt the strike smash through his defense and sink home, and Froggy let out a sudden, high-pitched shriek. He staggered and fell heavily against the wall, clutching at his leg.

“Kill her!” he said, his voice two octaves higher than it had been a moment before. “Kill her, kill her, kill her!”

The remaining pair of turtlenecks in the hallway plunged toward me. A wave of fatigue from my recent efforts, especially that last one, almost held me pinned to the floor—but I scrambled to my feet, lurched to the door to room 8, and pounded against it with one fist. “Andi! Andi, it’s Molly! Andi, let me—”

The door jerked open and I fell into the room. I snapped my legs up into a fetal curl, and Andi slammed the door shut behind me and hit the locks.

“What the hell, Molly?” she demanded. Andi was soaking wet, along with everything else in the room—including the Fomor’s bomb.

I got up and scrambled toward it. “I couldn’t take apart the veil over the bomb from the outside,” I panted. “We didn’t have time to build up a fire, and I can’t call up enough of my own to set off the alarms. I had to get Froggy to do it for me.”

The door shuddered under more blows from the turtlenecks.

“Hold them off,” I told her. “I’ll disarm the bomb.”

“Can you do that?” Andi asked.

“Piece of cake,” I lied.

“Okay,” Andi said. She grimaced. “I’m going to smell like wet dog all night.”

She turned to face the door in a ready position as I reached the giant shell. I forced the battering enemies at the door out of my thoughts and focused my complete attention on the shell before me. Then I extended my senses toward it and began feeling out the energy moving through it.

There was a lot of energy involved in this thing, power stored up inside and ready to explode. A thin coating of enchantment lined the shell’s exterior, kind of the magical equivalent of a control panel. The water was eroding it slowly, but not fast enough to start melting the core enchantment and dispersing the stored energy. But if I didn’t move fast, the water would destroy the surface enchantment and make it impossible for anyone to disarm the bomb.

I closed my eyes and put one hand out over the shell like Froggy had done. I could feel the energy of the shell reaching up to my fingers, ready to respond, and I began pouring my own energy down into it, trying to feel it out. It was a straightforward spell, nothing complicated, but I didn’t know what anything did—it was like having a remote control for the TV, if someone had forgotten to label any of the buttons. I couldn’t just start pushing them randomly.

On the other hand, I couldn’t not do it, either.

It would have to be an educated guess.

On a TV remote, the power button is almost always a little apart from the others, or else somehow centered. That’s what I was looking for—to turn the bomb off. I started eliminating all the portions of the spell that seemed too complex or too small, narrowing my choices bit by bit. It came down to two. If I guessed wrong …

I burst out into a nervous giggle. “Hey, Andi. Blue wire or red wire?”

A turtleneck’s foot smashed a hole in the door, and Andi whipped her head around to give me an incredulous look. “Are you fucking kidding me?” she shouted. “Blue, you always cut the blue!”

Half of the door broke down and crashed to the floor. Andi blurred into her wolf form and surged forward, ripping at the first turtleneck as he tried to come in.

I turned my attention back to the bomb and picked the second option. I focused my will on it. It took me a couple of tries, because I was freaking terrified, and pants-wetting fear is generally not conducive to lucidity.

“Hey, God,” I whispered. “I know I haven’t been around much lately, but if you could do me a solid here, it would be really awesome for a lot of people. Please let me be right.”

I cut the blue wire.

Nothing happened.

I felt a heavy, almost paralytic surge of relief—and then Lord Froggy hopped over the two turtlenecks struggling with Andi and smashed into me.

I went down hard on the marble floor, and Froggy rode me down, pinning me beneath his too-gaunt body. He wrapped the fingers of one hand all the way around my neck with room enough for them to overlap his thumb, and squeezed. He was hideously strong. My breath stopped instantly and my head began to pound, and my vision to darken.

“Little bitch,” he hissed. He started punching me with his other hand. The blows landed on my left cheekbone. They should have hurt, but I think something was wrong with my brain. I registered the impact but everything else was swallowed by the growing darkness. I could feel myself struggling, but I didn’t get anywhere. Froggy was way, way stronger than he looked. My eyes weren’t focusing very well, but I found myself staring down a dark tunnel toward one of the dead girls on the bedroom floor, and the dark purple band of bruising around her throat.

Then the floor a few feet away rippled, and an odd-looking grey creature popped up out of it.

The svartalf was maybe four-six and entirely naked. His skin was a mottled shade of grey, and his eyes were huge and entirely black. His head was a little larger than most people’s and he was bald, though his eyebrows were silvery-white. He did look kind of Roswellian, only instead of being super-skinny he was built like a professional boxer, lean and strong—and he carried a short, simple sword in his hand.

“Fomor,” said the svartalf calmly. I recognized Mister Etri’s voice. “One should not strike ladies.”

Froggy started to say something, but then Etri’s sword went snicker-snack, and the hand that was choking the life out of me was severed cleanly from the Fomor’s wrist. Froggy screamed and fell away from me, spitting words and trying to summon power as he scrambled away on three limbs.

“You have violated guest right,” Etri continued calmly. He made a gesture and the marble beneath Lord Froggy turned suddenly liquid. Froggy sank about three inches, and then the floor hardened around him again. The Fomor screamed.

“You have attacked a guest under the hospitality and protection of Svartalfheim,” he said, his tone of voice never changing. The sword swept out again and struck the nose from Froggy’s face, spewing ichor everywhere and drawing even more howling. Etri stood over the fallen Fomor and looked down at him with absolutely no expression on his face. “Have you anything to say on your own behalf?”

“No!” Froggy screamed. “You cannot do this! I have harmed none of your people!”

There was a pulse of rage from Etri so hot that I thought the falling water would burst into steam when it struck him. “Harmed us?” he said quietly. He glanced at the shell and then back at Froggy with pure contempt. “You would have used our alliance as a pretext to murder innocent thousands, making us your accomplices.” He crouched down to put his face inches from Froggy’s, and said in a calm, quiet, pitiless voice, “You have stained the honor of Svartalfheim.”

“I will make payment!” Froggy gabbled. “You will be compensated for your pains!”

“There is but one price for your actions, Fomor. And there are no negotiations.”

“No,” Froggy protested. “No. NO!”

Etri turned away from him and surveyed the room. Andi was still in wolf form. One of the turtlenecks was bleeding out onto the marble floor, the sprinklers spreading the blood into a huge pool. The other was crouched in a corner with his arms curled around his head, covered in bleeding wounds. Andi faced him, panting, blood dripping from her reddened fangs, a steady growl bubbling in her chest.

Etri turned to me and offered me his hand. I thanked him and let him pull me up to a sitting position. My throat hurt. My head hurt. My face hurt. It’s killing me, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. C’mere, you.

You know you’ve been punched loopy when you’re doing a one-person Three Stooges routine in your internal monologue.

“I apologize,” Etri said, “for interfering in your struggle. Please do not presume that I did so because I thought you unable to protect yourself.”

My voice came out in a croak. “It’s your house, and your honor that was at stake. You had the right.”

The answer seemed to please him and he inclined his head slightly. “I further apologize for not handling this matter myself. It was not your responsibility to discover or take action against this scum’s behavior.”

“It was presumptuous of me,” I said. “But there was little time to act.”

“Your ally alerted us to the danger. You did nothing improper. Svartalfheim thanks you for your assistance in this matter. You are owed a favor.”

I was about to tell him that no such thing was necessary, but I stopped myself. Etri wasn’t uttering social pleasantries. This wasn’t a friendly exchange. It was an audit, an accounting. I just inclined my head to him. “Thank you, Mister Etri.”

“Of course, Miss Carpenter.”

Svartalves in security uniforms, mixed with mortal security guards, came into the room. Etri went to them and quietly gave instructions. The Fomor and his servitors were trussed up and taken from the room.

“What will happen to them?” I asked Etri.

“We will make an example of the Fomor,” Etri said.

“What of your treaty?” I asked.

“It was never signed,” he said. “Mostly because of you, Miss Carpenter. While Svartalfheim does not pay debts which were never incurred, we appreciate your role in this matter. It will be considered in the future.”

“The Fomor don’t deserve an honorable ally.”

“It would seem not,” he said.

“What about the turtlenecks?” I asked.

“What of them?”

“Will you … deal with them?”

Etri just looked at me. “Why would we?”

“They were sort of in on it,” I said.

“They were property,” said the svartalf. “If a man strikes you with a hammer, it is the man who is punished. There is no reason to destroy the hammer. We care nothing for them.”

“What about them?” I asked, and nodded toward the dead girls in the Fomor’s chamber. “Do you care what happened to them?”

Etri looked at them and sighed. “Beautiful things ought not be destroyed,” he said. “But they were not our guests. We owe no one for their end and will not answer for it.”

“There is a vampire in your custody,” I said, “is there not?”

Etri regarded me for a moment and then said, “Yes.”

“You owe me a favor. I wish to secure his release.”

He arched an eyebrow. Then he bowed slightly and said, “Come with me.”

I followed Etri out of the suite and across the hall to room 6. Though the door was shattered, Etri stopped outside of it respectfully and knocked. A moment later, a female voice said, “You may enter.”

We went in. It was a suite much like the Fomor’s, only with way more throw pillows and plush furniture. It was a wreck. The floor was literally covered with shattered furniture, broken décor, and broken turtlenecks. Svartalf security was already binding them and carrying them from the room.

Listen walked out on his own power, his hands behind his back, one of his eyes swollen halfway shut. He gave me a steady look as he went by, and said nothing.

Bastard.

Etri turned toward the curtained door to the suite’s bedroom and spoke. “The mortal apprentice who warned us has earned a favor. She asks for the release of the vampire.”

“Impossible,” answered the female voice. “That account has been settled.”

Etri turned to me and shrugged. “I am sorry.”

“Wait,” I said. “May I speak to him?”

“In a moment.”

We waited. Thomas appeared from the doorway to the bedroom dressed in a black terry-cloth bathrobe. He’d just gotten out of the shower. Thomas was maybe half an inch under six feet tall, and there wasn’t an inch of his body that didn’t scream sex symbol. His eyes were a shade of deep crystalline blue, and his dark hair hung to his wide shoulders. My body did what it always did around him, and started screaming at me to make babies. I ignored it. Mostly.

“Molly,” he said. “Are you all right?”

“Nothing a bucket of aspirin won’t help,” I said. “Um. Are you okay?”

He blinked. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I thought … you know. You’d been captured as a spy.”

“Well, sure,” he said.

“I thought they would, uh. Make an example of you?”

He blinked again. “Why would they do that?”

The door to the bedroom opened again, and a female svartalf appeared. She looked a lot like Etri—tiny and beautiful, though she had long silver hair instead of a cueball. She was wearing what might have been Thomas’s shirt, and it hung down almost to her ankles. She had a decidedly … smug look about her. Behind her, I saw several other sets of wide, dark eyes peer out of the shadowy bedchamber.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh. You, uh. You made a deal.”

Thomas smirked. “It’s a tough, dirty job …”

“And one that is not yet finished,” said the female svartalf. “You are ours until dawn.”

Thomas looked from me to the bedroom and back and spread his hands. “You know how it is, Molly. Duty calls.”

“Um,” I said. “What do you want me to tell Justine?”

Again he gave me a look of near incomprehension. “The truth. What else?”

“Oh, thank goodness,” Justine said as we were walking out. “I was afraid they’d have starved him.”

I blinked. “Your boyfriend is banging a roomful of elfgirls and you’re happy about it?”

Justine tilted her head back and laughed. “When you’re in love with an incubus, it changes your viewpoint a little, I think. It isn’t as though this is something new. I know how he feels about me, and he needs to feed to be healthy. So what’s the harm?” She smirked. “And besides. He’s always ready for more.”

“You’re a very weird person, Justine.”

Andi snorted, and nudged me with her shoulder in a friendly way. She’d recovered her dress and the shoes she liked. “Look who’s talking.”

After everyone was safe home, I walked from Waldo’s apartment to the nearest parking garage. I found a dark corner, sat down, and waited. Lea shimmered into being about two hours later and sat down beside me.

“You tricked me,” I said. “You sent me in there blind.”

“Indeed. Just as Lara did her brother—except that my agent succeeded where hers failed.”

“But why? Why send us in there?”

“The treaty with the Fomor could not be allowed to conclude,” she said. “If one nation agreed to neutrality with them, a dozen more would follow. The Fomor would be able to divide the others and contend with them one by one. The situation was delicate. The presence of active agents was intended to disrupt its equilibrium—to show the Fomor’s true nature in a test of fire.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me that?” I asked.

“Because you would neither have trusted nor believed me, obviously,” she said.

I frowned at her. “You should have told me anyway.”

“Do not be ridiculous, child.” Lea sniffed. “There was no time to humor your doubts and suspicions and theories and endless questions. Better to give you a simple prize upon which to focus—Thomas.”

“How did you know I would find the bomb?”

She arched an eyebrow. “Bomb?” She shook her head. “I did not know what was happening in any specific sense. But the Fomor are betrayers. Ever have they been, ever will they be. The only question is what form their treachery will take. The svartalves had to be shown.”

“How did you know I would discover it?”

“I did not,” she said. “But I know your mentor. When it comes to meddling, to unearthing awkward truths, he has taught you exceedingly well.” She smiled. “You have also learned his aptitude for taking orderly situations and reducing them to elemental chaos.”

“Meaning what?” I demanded.

Her smile was maddeningly smug. “Meaning that I was confident that whatever happened, it would not include the smooth completion of the treaty.”

“But you could have done everything I did.”

“No, child,” Lea said. “The svartalves would never have asked me to be their guest at the reception. They love neatness and order. They would have known my purposes were not orderly ones.”

“And they didn’t know that about me?”

“They cannot judge others except by their actions,” Lea said. “Hence their treaty with the Fomor, who had not yet crossed their paths. My actions have shown me to be someone who must be treated with caution. You had … a clean record with them. And you are smoking hot. All is well, your city saved, and now a group of wealthy, skilled, and influential beings owes you a favor.” She paused for a moment and then leaned toward me slightly. “Perhaps some expression of gratitude is in order.”

“From me, to you?” I asked. “For that?”

“I think your evening turned out quite well,” Lea said her eyebrows raised. “Goodness, but you are a difficult child. How he manages to endure your insolence I will never know. You probably think you have earned some sort of reward from me.” She rose and turned to go.

“Wait!” I said suddenly.

She paused.

I think my heart had stopped beating. I started shaking, everywhere. “You said that you know Harry. Not knew him. Know. Present tense.”

“Did I?”

“You said you don’t know how he manages to put up with me. Manages. Present tense.”

“Did I?”

“Auntie,” I asked her, and I could barely whisper. “Auntie … is Harry … is he alive?”

Lea turned to me very slowly, and her eyes glinted with green, wicked knowledge. “I did not say that he was alive, child. And neither should you. Not yet.”

I bowed my head and started crying. Or laughing. Or both. I couldn’t tell. Lea didn’t wait around for it. Emotional displays made her uncomfortable.

Harry. Alive.

I hadn’t killed him.

Best reward ever.

“Thank you, Auntie,” I whispered. “Thank you.”