great kindness by being gentle.”
I met the Sidhe’s impassive gaze for a moment before I looked away. “You might be right.”
“I am very old, child. It is a safe assumption in most circumstances.” She sniffed and leaned down to pat my hand in a rather peremptory gesture. “Now, then. Listen to the nice statue. And
Something in my godmother’s words managed to land on the ghost of a functioning brain cell somewhere, and a flash of inspiration hit me. “That’s it!” I blurted. “That’s how to handle the Corpsetaker.”
Lea tilted her head, her eyes intent, and then smiled a knowing smile. “Ahhh. If you can do it.”
I swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Interesting,” she murmured. “If you can control them. They are a power potentially deadly even to the one who wields it. Explosive. Dangerous. And very typical of you. Excellent.” Then she moved the fingers of her right hand through a series of little gestures and was gone.
That left me alone in my grave with my thoughts.
I leaned against the wall again, but I didn’t settle down on the ground. Instead I thought about Molly and how screwed up she was.
That was my fault, in a lot of ways.
First thing to jump out at me: I never should have let Molly go to Chichén Itzá.
I had led her into the fight of my life against the Red Court, to save my daughter. But I shouldn’t have exposed Molly to that. She was a sensitive, a wizard whose magical senses were naturally attuned to the finest, lightest, most delicate workings of the Art. Or, to put it in more Harryfriendly terms, she had great big, honking Dumbo ears that were extremely sensitive to loud noises.
Magic is life. Some forms of death—like murder, the abrupt and violent termination of a life that was not otherwise ending—were the equivalent of enormous, screeching feedback to her senses. And I had dragged her into a freaking concert hall of it at Chichén Itzá. Murderpalooza. Not to mention setting off the biggest, most violent magical curse to be unleashed in the past century—hell, I wasn’t exactly a sensitive guy, magically speaking, but even I had a blank spot in my memory over the minutes right after that arcane explosion.
It’s got to be bad for me to shut it out. For Molly, it had to have been a whole lot worse. And, oh yes, she had been shot and nearly killed to go with everything else. I had watched her collapse from blood loss.
Mistake. It had been a big damned mistake. At the time, I had been so focused on getting Maggie out that I’d let Molly persuade me that she deserved to be on the team. I never would have let her do that if I’d been thinking straight. I would have told her to stay at home, hold the fort, or maybe stay in the car. That was what I’d always done when I was on my way to a slugfest. Exposure to that kind of noise could quite effectively shatter her sanity.
And maybe it had.
Even if her mental house was still on a good foundation, you didn’t need monsters or magic to get damaged by a brush with death. Soldiers coming home from wars had known that for centuries. Post-traumatic stress disorder from life-threatening injuries had screwed up the lives of a lot of people—people who
And who had been there to catch her? The freaking Leanansidhe, deputy of Her Wickedness, with her Nietzsche and Darwin Were Sentimental Pansies outlook on life.
Stars and stones. When Molly insisted on going, why didn’t I just tell her, “Of course you can come, grasshopper. I’ve always wanted to create a mentally mutilated monster of my very own.”
Man. It wasn’t the legacy I’d wanted to leave behind me. I mean, I hadn’t ever thought much about leaving a legacy, truth be told, but an apprentice with a crippled heart and mind who was probably going to get hunted down by her own people was definitely never in the plan.
“Oh, kid,” I breathed to no one. “Molly. I’m so sorry.”
It turns out ghosts can cry.
“Over here,” said a familiar voice. It was later, but not much later. Sometime after noon, maybe? It was hard to tell from the grave.
“You’ve never even been here before,” answered another. “I was at the funeral. How the hell would you know where his grave was?”
I heard Fitz let out a sigh front-loaded with so much drama that only a teenager could have managed it without hurting himself. “Is it the gaping hole in the ground over there, with the big pentacle on the headstone?”
There was a brief, miffed pause, and Butters answered, “Okay. Maybe it is.”
Footsteps crunched through wet, melting snow. Fitz and Butters appeared at the edge of my grave and peered down.
“Well?” Butters asked. “Is he there?”
“How the hell should I know?” Fitz replied. “I don’t see dead people. I hear them. And I don’t hear anything.”
“Hey, Fitz,” I said.
The kid jumped. He was wearing his newly laundered clothes and had added one of Forthill’s old coats over the top of everything. “Christ. Yeah, he’s there.”
“Oh, fantastic,” Butters said. “Hi, Harry. Here, man. Help me down.”
“Help you down? It’s, like, five feet to the bottom, if that. Just jump down.”
“Jump into an open grave? What kind of idiot are you?” Butters replied. “I might as well put on a red shirt and volunteer for the away team. There’s snow and ice and slippery mud down there. That’s like asking for an ironically broken neck.”
“Are all doctors whiny girls like you?” Fitz asked.
“Hey. This whiny girl is still alive because he doesn’t do stupid crap.”
Fitz snorted. “So I help you down, my foot slips, we both fall in and die.”
Butters lifted an eyebrow and grunted. “Huh. True.”
I pinched at the bridge of my nose. “Oh, Hell’s bells, guys. Either get a room or stop flirting and get down here.”
“Ha-ha,” Fitz said toward me crossly. “He just called us gay.”
Butters blinked. “For not jumping into a hole we might not be able to climb out of? That’s kind of insensitive.”
“Not for that, for . . .” Fitz let out a sigh of vintage teenage impatience. “Christ, just give me your hand, okay? I’ll swing you down.”
Butters fussed for a moment more, making sure that Fitz had a solid place to plant his feet, and then he swung down into my grave. He was wearing his winter gear again and carrying the gym bag. Once he was down, he made sure he was out of direct sunlight and started opening the bag.
“What’s up?” I asked Fitz.
“Trouble,” Fitz said.
“We need your help, Harry,” Butters said.
“Hey, wait,” I said, scowling. “How did Butters find you, Fitz?”
“He asked,” Fitz said to Butters.
The little ME nodded. “Harry, I got from Murphy that you were apparently going into social work. It wasn’t hard to figure out who you’d ask for help, so I went over to the church to talk to Forthill about the situation—except he wasn’t there.”
Fitz bit his lip. “Look, Dresden. The father and I talked. And he decided he was going to go talk to Aristedes on my behalf.”
I blinked and pushed away from the grave wall.
“I tried to tell him,” Fitz said. “He wouldn’t listen. He was . . . I think he was angry. But he said he was going to resolve this before it came to some kind of bloodshed.”
Hell’s bells. I’d known Aristedes’ type in the past. If it suited him, he’d kill Forthill without an instant’s
