I watched her quietly. She moved with the kind of precision you see only in someone who is so versed at what they are doing that they are already thinking of the steps coming twenty minutes in the future. I thought she took her knife to the carrots a little more violently than she needed to. She started preparing another meal somewhere in the middle of making the stew, this one chicken and rice and other healthy things I rarely saw in three dimensions.

I fidgeted for a bit, until I stood up, washed my hands in the sink, and started cutting vegetables.

Charity frowned at me for a moment. She didn't say anything. But she got a few more veggies out and put them down next to me, then collected what had been cut so far and pitched them into the Crock-Pot. A couple of minutes later she sighed, opened a can of Coke, and put it on the counter next to me.

"I worry about him," she said.

I nodded, and focused on cucumbers.

"I don't even know when he'll be home tonight."

"Good thing you have a Crock-Pot," I said.

"I don't know what I would do without him. What the children would do. I'd feel so lost."

What the hell. An ounce of well-intentioned but irrational reassurance didn't cost anything. I took a sip of the Coke. "He'll be all right. He can handle himself. And he has Shiro and Sanya with him."

"He's been hurt three times, you know."

"Three?" I asked.

"Three. With you. Every time."

"So it's my fault." My turn to chop vegetables like teenagers in a slasher movie. "I see."

I couldn't see her face but her voice was, more than anything else, tired. "It isn't about blame. Or whose fault it is. All that matters is that when you're around, my husband, my children's father, gets hurt."

The knife slipped and I cut off a neat little slice of skin on my index finger. "Ow," I snarled. I slapped the cold water on in the sink and put my finger under it. You can't tell, with cuts like that, how bad they're going to be until you see how much you're leaking. Charity passed me a paper towel, and I examined the cut for a minute before wrapping the towel around it. It wasn't bad, though it hurt like hell. I watched my blood stain the paper towel for a minute and then I asked, "Why didn't you get rid of me, then?"

I looked up to see Charity frowning at me. There were dark circles under her eyes that I hadn't noticed before. "What do you mean?"

"Just now," I said. "When Shiro asked you if Michael would help me. You could have said no."

"But he would have helped you in an instant. You know that."

"Shiro didn't."

Her expression became confused. "I don't understand."

"You could have lied."

Her face registered comprehension, and some fire came back into her eyes. "I don't like you, Mister Dresden. I certainly don't care enough for you to abandon beliefs I hold dear, to use you as an excuse to cheapen myself, or to betray what my husband stands for." She stepped to a cabinet and got out a small, neat medical kit. Without another word, she took my hand and the paper towel and opened the kit.

"So you're taking care of me?" I asked.

"I don't expect you to understand. Whether or not I can personally stand you, it has no bearing on what choices I make. Michael is your friend. He would risk his life for you. It would break his heart if you came to grief, and I will not allow that to happen."

She fell silent and doctored the cut with the same brisk, confident motions she'd used for cooking. I hear that they make disinfectants that don't hurt these days.

But Charity used iodine.

Chapter Sixteen

Shiro came out of the office and showed me an address written on a piece of paper. "We meet them tonight at eight."

"After sundown," I noted. "I know the place. I'll pick you up here?"

"Yes. I will need a little time to prepare."

"Me too. Around seven." I told them good-bye and headed for the door. Charity didn't answer me but Shiro did. I got into my car. More kids came pelting into the house as I did, two boys and a girl. The smaller of the two boys stopped to peer at my car, but Charity appeared in the door and chivvied him inside. She frowned at me until I coaxed the Blue Beetle to life and pulled out.

Driving home left me with too much time to think. This duel with Ortega was something I had no way to prepare for. Ortega was a warlord of the Red Court. He'd probably fought duels before. Which meant that he'd killed people before. Hell, maybe even wizards. I'd squared off against various toughs but that had been free-for-all fighting. I had been able to find ways to cheat, by and large. In a one-on-one duel, I wasn't going to be able to fall back on cleverness, to take advantage of whatever I could find in my environment.

This was going to be a straight fight, and if Ortega was better than me, he'd kill me. Simple as that. The fear was simple, too. Simple and undeniable.

I swallowed, and my knuckles turned white. I tried to relax my fingers but they wouldn't. They were too afraid to let go of the wheel. Stupid fingers.

I got back to my apartment, pried my fingers off the steering wheel, and found my door halfway open. I ducked to one side, in case someone had a gun pointed up the narrow stairway down to my apartment door, and drew out my blasting rod.

"Harry?" called a quiet, female voice from my apartment. "Harry, is that you?"

I lowered the blasting rod. "Murph?"

"Get inside," Murphy said. I looked down the stairway and saw her appear in the doorway, her face pale. "Hurry."

I came down the stairs warily, feeling out my wards as I did. They were intact, and I relaxed a little. I had given Murphy a personalized talisman that would let her through my defenses, and it would only have worked for her.

I slipped into my apartment. Murphy shut the door behind me and locked it. She'd started a fire in the fireplace and had one of my old kerosene lamps lit. I went to the fireplace and warmed up my hands, watching Murphy in silence. She stood with her back and shoulders rigid for a moment, before she came over to stand beside me, facing the fire. Her lips were held into a tense, neutral line. "We should talk."

"People keep saying that to me," I muttered.

"You promised me you'd call me in when you had something."

"Whoa, there, hang on. Who said I had anything?"

"There is a corpse on a pleasure ship in Burnham Harbor and several eyewitnesses who describe a tall, dark-haired man leaving the scene and getting into a multicolored Volkswagen Beetle."

"Wait a second-"

"There's been a murder, Dresden. I don't care how sacred client confidentiality is to you. People are dying."

Frustration made me clench my teeth. "I was going to tell you about it. It's been a really busy day."

"Too busy to talk to the police about a murder you may have witnessed?" Murphy said. "That is considered aiding and abetting a first-degree murder in some places. Like courts of law."

"This again," I muttered. My fingers clenched into fists. "I remember how this one goes. You slug me in the jaw and arrest me."

"I damn well should."

"Hell's bells, Murph!"

"Relax." She sighed. "If that was what I had in mind you'd be in the car already."

My anger evaporated. "Oh." After a moment, I asked, "Then why are you here?"

Murphy scowled. "I'm on vacation."

"You're what?"

Murphy's jaw twitched. Her words sounded a little odd, since she kept her teeth ground together while she talked. "I've been taken off the case. And when I protested I was told that I could either be on vacation or collecting unemployment."

Holy crap. The muckety-mucks at CPD had ordered Murphy off a case? But why?

Murphy answered the question I hadn't asked yet. "Because when Butters looked at the victim from the harbor, he determined that the weapon used to kill her and the one used on that victim you saw last night were the same."