little kid in a training bra. She’d grown up tall, five-ten or a little more. She had dark blond hair, although she had changed its color about fifty times since I’d met her. At the moment, it was in its natural shade and cut short, hanging in an even sheet to her chin. She was wearing minimal makeup. The girl was built like a particularly well- proportioned statue, but she wasn’t flaunting it in this outfit—khaki pants, a cream-colored shirt, and a chocolate brown jacket.
The last time I’d seen Molly, she’d been a starved-looking thing, dressed in rags and twitching at every sound and motion, like a feral cat—which was hardly surprising, given that she’d been fighting a covert war against a group called the Fomor while dodging the cops and the Wardens of the White Council. She was still lean and a little hyperalert, her eyes trying to watch the whole world at once, but that sense of overly coiled spring tension was much reduced.
She looked good. Noticing that made things stir under the surface, things that shouldn’t have been, and I abruptly looked away.
“Uh,” she said. “Harry?”
“You look better than the last time I saw you, kiddo,” I said.
She grinned, briefly. “Right back atcha.”
I snorted. “It’d be hard to look worse. For either of us, I guess.”
She glanced at me. “Yeah. I’m a lot better. I’m still not . . .” She shrugged. “I’m not exactly Little Miss Stability. At least, not yet. But I’m working on it.”
“Sometimes I think that’s where most of us are,” I said. “Fighting off the crazy as best we can. Trying to become something better than we were. It’s that second bit that’s important.”
She smiled, and didn’t say anything else. Within a few moments, she had turned the Caddy into a private parking lot.
“I don’t have any money for parking,” I said.
“Don’t need it.” She paused and rolled down the cracked window to wave at an attendant operating the gate. He glanced up from his book, smiled at her, and pushed a button. The gate opened, and Molly pulled the Caddy into the lot. She drove down the length of it, and pulled the car carefully into a covered parking spot. “Okay. Come on.”
We got out of the car, and Molly led me to a doorway leading into an adjacent apartment building. She opened the door with a key, but instead of moving to the elevators, she guided me to another doorway to one side of the entrance. She unlocked that one too, and went down two flights of stairs to a final door. I could sense magical defenses on the doors and the stairs without even making an effort to open myself up to it. That was a serious bunch of security spells. Molly opened the second door and said, “Please come in.” She smiled at Toot. “And your crew with you, of course.”
“Thanks,” I said, and followed her inside.
Molly had an apartment.
She had an apartment big enough for Hugh Hefner’s birthday party.
The living room was the size of a basketball court, and it had eleven-foot ceilings. There was a little bar separating the kitchen from the rest of the open space. She had a fireplace with what looked like a handmade living room set around it in one corner of the room, and a second section of comfy chairs and a desk tucked into a nook lined with built-in bookshelves. She had a weight bench, too, along with an elliptical machine, both of them expensive European setups. The floors were hardwood, broken up by occasional carpets that probably cost more than the floor space they covered. A couple of doors led off from the main room. They were oak. Granite countertops. A six-burner gas stove. Recessed lighting.
“Hell’s bells,” I said. “Uh. Nice place.”
Molly shrugged out of her jacket and tossed it onto the back of a couch. “You like?” She walked into the kitchen, opened a cabinet door, and pulled out a first-aid kit.
“I like,” I said. “Uh. How?”
“The svartalves built it for me,” she said.
Svartalves. They were some serious customers in the supernatural scene. Peerless artisans, a very private and independent folk—and they tolerated absolutely no nonsense. No one wants to get on the bad side of a svartalf. They weren’t exactly known for their generosity, either. “You working for them?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “This is mine. I bought it from them.”
I blinked again. “With what?”
“Honor,” she said. She muttered something and flicked a hand at a chandelier hanging over the table in the little dining area. It began to glow with a pure white light as bright as any collection of incandescent bulbs. “Bring him over here, and we’ll see if we can’t help him.”
I did so, transferring Toot from the skull to the table as gently as possible. Molly leaned down over him, peering. “Right through the breastplate? What hit you, Toot-toot?”
“A big fat jerk!” Toot replied, wincing. “He had a real sword, too. You know how hard it is to convince any of you big people to make us a sword we can actually use?”
“I saw his gear,” I said. “I totally liked yours better, Major General. Way cooler and more stylish than that stupid black-knight look.”
Toot gave me a brief, fierce grin. “Thank you, my lord!”
Toot got out of his ruined armor with effort, and with Molly’s cautious, steady-fingered help I managed to clean the wound and bandage it. It looked ugly, and Toot was anything but happy during the process, but he was clearly uncomfortable and weary, rather than being badly hurt. Once the wound was taken care of, Toot promptly flopped onto the table and went to sleep.
Molly smiled, got a clean towel out of a cabinet, and draped it over the little guy. Toot seized it and curled up beneath it with a sigh.
“All right,” Molly said, picking up the first-aid kit. She beckoned me to follow her to the kitchen. “Your turn. Off with the shirt.”
“Not until you buy me dinner,” I said.
For a second, she froze, and I wondered whether that had come out like the joke it had sounded like in my mind. Then she recovered. Molly arched her eyebrow in a look that was disturbingly like that of her mother (a woman around with whom a wise man will not mess) and folded her arms.
“Fine,” I said, rolling my eyes. I shrugged my way out of the ruined tux.
“Jesus,” Molly said softly, looking at me. She leaned around me, frowning at my back. “You look like a passion play.”
“Doesn’t feel so bad,” I said.
“It might if one of these cuts gets infected,” Molly said. “Just . . . just stand there and hold still. Man.” She went to the cabinet and came back with a big brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide and a couple of kitchen towels. I watched her walking back and forth. “We’ll start with your back. Lean on the counter.”
I did, resting my elbows on the granite, still watching her. Molly fumbled with the supplies for a second, then bit her lower lip and began to move with purpose. She started dribbling peroxide onto the cuts on my back in little bursts of cold liquid that might have made me jump before I’d spent so much time in Arctis Tor. It burned a little, and then fizzed enthusiastically.
“So, not one question?” I asked her.
“Hmmm?” She didn’t look up from her work.
“I come back from the dead, I sort of expected . . . I don’t know. A little shock. And about a million questions.”
“I knew you were alive,” Molly said.
“Yeah, I sort of figured. How?” She didn’t answer, and after a moment I realized the likely answer. “My godmother.”
“She takes her Yoda-ing seriously.”
“I remember,” I said, keeping my tone neutral. “How long have you known?”
“Several weeks,” Molly said. “There are so many cuts here, I don’t think I have enough Band-Aids. We’ll have to wrap it, I guess.”
“I’ll just put a clean shirt over them,” I said. “Look, it isn’t a big deal. Little marks like that are going to be gone in a day or two.”
