Cold Days

be a great big boom.”

“I’m a missile, huh?”

“Her big, dumb bunker buster,” he said cheerily. “Of course, you know the thing about missiles, Harry.”

“Yeah,” I said, as I put the Caddy back in gear again. “They’re expendable.”

“Buck up, little camper. At least you had a hot redhead jump your bones tonight. Not the right bone, but you can’t have everything.”

I snorted. “Thanks, Bob.”

“Andi totally got the drop on you. Where was your tiny secret service team?”

“I forgot to invite them past the threshold,” I said. “Besides, I think she’d hit me before anyone could have shouted a lookout anyway.”

“You ever think about replacing them with some real bodyguard goons, Harry? I know a thing that knows a thing.”

“Screw that. Toot and his gang aren’t exactly gangstas, but I trust them. That means more.”

“That means you’re a sucker!” Bob said. “Did The X-Files teach you nothing? Trust no one.”

I grunted. “Cat Sith gave me almost the same advice.”

“Ack,” Bob said. “That guy. He still got the attitude?”

“I feel safe in assuming that he does.”

“I don’t like him, but he’s no dummy,” Bob said. “At least he gives good advice.”

“Mathematically, maybe,” I said. “But trust isn’t one of those things that lends itself well to math.”

“Sure it does,” Bob said. “You trust somebody, they betray you, you get a negative value. You never trust, they can never disappoint you, you break even.”

I laughed. “Or you trust, it’s vindicated, and you’re better off.”

“Shah,” Bob said. “Like that happens.”

“Life’s about more than breaking even,” I said.

Bob snorted. “Which is why the first thing you did, when you got back to town, was call all of your friends and immediately tell them you needed their help, and trust them to help you.”

I scowled out at the road.

“It wasn’t like the first thing you did was abuse one of your friends and inflict property damage on his house and steal a powerful magical counselor whose loyalties are transferrable to whoever happens to be holding an old skull—presumably so that you’d have a lackey who would agree with whatever you said instead of give you a hard time about it. And the only beings you’re allowing to help you are a bunch of tiny faeries who worship the ground you walk on because you buy them pizza.” Bob made a skeptical sound. “I can see how important trust is to you, boss.”

“That’s why I got you, clearly,” I said. “Because I wanted a yes-man and you’re so good for that.”

“Hey, I’m just a mirror, boss. Not my fault you’re ambivalent.”

“I’m not ambivalent.”

“You know better, but you’re being a moron about it anyway,” Bob said. “If that ain’t ambivalence, maybe Mab’s getting to you. Because it’s a little crazy.” He sniffed. “Besides, if you weren’t of two minds about it, I wouldn’t be giving you this kind of crap, now, would I?”

I was going to say something sarcastic, but the red glare of a stoplight suddenly appeared about ten feet in front of the old Caddy’s nose. I stared at the light for a fraction of a second, and then mashed the brakes down. I had an instant to see that it wasn’t a traffic signal, but Toot-toot, his aura glaring brilliant scarlet, frantically waving his arms at me. As the Caddy lumbered forward, I saw him take a couple of steps forward, running up the windshield, and up out of sight above me.

As the heavy old piece of Detroit iron began to slide on the asphalt, I saw an object tumble out of the air in front of me and hit the street, turning over and over. I had another instant to recognize a plain black nylon duffel bag.

And then the world went white and a hammer the size of the Chrysler Building slammed me back against the old Caddy’s seat.

Chapter Twelve

The bomb might have been fifty feet away when it exploded.

Mab’s therapy had paid off. On raw instinct, I’d already begun to form a defensive shield in front of me when everything went boom. I hadn’t had time to build much of a shield, but what little I could do probably kept me conscious.

Explosions are unbelievably loud. If you haven’t been near one, there’s no way to convey the sheer violence of it. It doesn’t really register as a sound, the way a gunshot will. There’s just this single, terrible power in the air, a sudden hammer blow of disorienting pressure, as if you’ve been hit by a truck made of pillow-top mattresses.

Your hearing goes. There’s a familiar, high-pitched tone, only no one is telling you that this is a test of the Emergency Broadcast System. There’s dust and smoke everywhere, and you can’t see. Your muscles don’t all work right. You tell them to move and it’s iffy. Maybe they do; maybe they don’t. It’s hard to tell which way is down. Not that you don’t know it rationally, somewhere in your head—but your body just seems to forget its natural awareness of gravity.

Even if something sharp and fast doesn’t go flying through some of your favorite organs, a nearby explosion leaves you half-blind, deaf, and drunkenly impaired.

Vulnerable.

One moment the Caddy was screeching and sliding toward that black duffel bag. The next, I was staring at a cloud of dust and the dim image of a brick wall at the end of the Caddy’s nose. The windshield had been splintered into a webwork of cracks that made it hard to see. My chest hurt like hell.

I picked fitfully at it, my fingers clumsy, and thought to myself that the car Sith had provided must have had armored glass, or there would be windshield mixed in with my intestines. Lights danced and darted in my vision. My eyes wouldn’t focus enough to track them. Smells were incredibly sharp. The air was acrid, thick with smoke, laced with the scents of things it is unhealthy to burn. I smelled gasoline nearby. There were wires hanging down from something in the corner of my vision, outside the car, spitting white sparks.

None of it seemed normal, but I couldn’t quite remember the right word to describe it.

Danger.

Right. That was it. Danger. I was in danger.

A moving target is harder to hit.

I pushed open the passenger door and stumbled out of the car, choking on dust. Another car wreck? Man, Mike was going to charge me a small fortune to fix the Blue Beetle this time. Did I have the money in the bank? I couldn’t remember whether I’d deposited my last stipend check from the Wardens.

No, wait. The car I’d just gotten out of wasn’t the Blue Beetle, my trusty old Volkswagen Bug that had died in the line of duty. It was the creepy Herman Munster hot rod my boss had gotten m—

My brain finished rebooting, and things snapped back into focus; someone had just tried to bomb me back into the Stone Age.

I shook my head, gagging on dust, then dragged the Redcap’s hat down off my head and over my mouth as a dust mask. The Caddy was up on the curb and had hit a building. The building had gotten the worst of it. One of the Caddy’s headlights was out, its front fender crumpled a bit, and the passenger door had been thrown open, but otherwise the car was fine. Maybe ten or twelve square feet of brick wall had fallen out, some of it onto the hood, some of it onto the sidewalk. I looked around. It was hard to see through the dust. There were a lot of busted-up walls. Several small fires. A streetlight had come swinging down from the line that supported it—that was where the sparking cables came from.

Lights still darted and flickered randomly, and I blinked, trying to clear the stars away. But stars in the vision