I didn’t, but Murphy needed to know. I laid it out for her in sentences of three and four words. By the time I’d finished, she had set her mug on the coffee table and was listening to me intently.

“Jesus and Mary, Mother of God,” she breathed. “Harry.”

“Yeah.”

“That . . . that bitch.”

I shook my head. “Pointing fingers does nothing for Maggie. We’ll do that later.”

She grimaced, as if swallowing something bitter. Then she nodded. “You’re right.”

“Thank you.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Martin and Susan are seeing what they can get off the disk,” I said. “They’ll contact me as soon as they know something. Meantime, I’ll get a couple hours horizontal, then start hitting my contacts. Go to the Council and ask them for help.”

“That bunch of heartless, gutless, spineless old pricks,” she said.

I found myself smiling, a little, at my coffee.

“Are they going to give it to you?” Murphy asked.

“Maybe. It’s complicated,” I said. “Are you going to get CPD to help me?”

Her eyes darkened. “Maybe. It’s complicated.”

I spread my hands in a “there you are” gesture, and she nodded. She rose and paced over to the sink to put her cup down. “What can I do to help?”

“Be nice if the police didn’t lock me up for a while. They’ll realize that the explosives were around my office eventually.”

She shook her head. “No promises. I’ll do what I can.”

“Thank you.”

“I want in,” she said. “You’re both too involved in this. You’ll need someone with perspective.”

I started to snap back something nasty, but shut my stupid mouth because she was probably right. I put my own coffee cup in the sink to give me an excuse not to talk while I tried to cool down. Then I said, “I would have asked you anyway, Murph. I need a good gun hand.”

Tiny Murphy might be, but she’d survived more scrapes with the supernatural than any other vanilla mortal I’d ever met. She’d keep her head in a crisis, even if the crisis included winged demons, howling ghouls, slavering vampires, and human sacrifice. She’d keep anyone—by which I meant Martin—from stabbing me in the back. She’d keep her gun up and firing, too. I’d seen her do it.

“Harry . . .” she began.

I waved a hand. “Won’t ask you to break any of Chicago’s laws. Or U.S. laws. But I doubt we’re going to be in town for this one.”

She absorbed that for a moment, folded her arms, and looked at the fire. Mouse watched her silently from where he sat near the couch.

She said, “I’m your friend, Harry.”

“Never had a doubt.”

“You’re going to take Maggie back.”

My jaw ached. “Damn right I am.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m in.”

I bowed my head, my eyes abruptly burning, the emotion clashing with the storm in my belly.

“Th—” I began. My voice broke. I tried again. “Thank you, Karrin.”

I felt her hand take mine for a moment, warm and steady.

“We will get her back,” she said, very quietly. “We will, Harry. I’m in.”

Chapter 6

I didn’t sleep long, but I did it well. When my old Mickey Mouse windup alarm clock went off at seven, I had to fight my way up from a deep place on the far side of dreamland. I felt like I could use another eighteen or twenty hours.

It was another instance of my emotions getting the better of me. Using soulfire on pure, instinctive reflex was a mistake—potentially a fatal one. The extramortal well of power that soulfire offered was formidable in ways I understood only imperfectly. I don’t know if it made my spells any more effective against the Red Court—though I had a hunch that it sure as H-E-double-hockey-sticks did—but I was dead certain that it had drawn upon my own life energy to do it. If I pulled on it too much, well. No more life energy kinda means no more life. And if that energy was indeed the same force that is commonly known as a soul, it might mean oblivion.

Depending on what actually happened when you got to the far side, I guess. I have no idea. And no mortal or immortal creature I had ever met had sounded like he knew for sure, either.

I did know that powerful emotions were an excellent source of additional energy for working magic, sort of a turbocharger. Throw a destructive spell in the grip of a vast fury, and you’d get a lot more bang for your effort than if you did it while relaxed on a practice field. The danger, of course, was that you could never really be sure how much effect such an emotion would have on a spell—which meant that you ran a much higher risk of losing control of the energy. Guys operating on my level can kill others or themselves at the slightest mistake.

Maybe the soulfire came from a similar place as the emotions. Maybe you couldn’t have one without at least a little bit of the other. Maybe they were all mixed together, like protein powder and skim milk in a health smoothie.

Didn’t matter, really. Less than sixty seconds of action the night before left me exhausted. If I didn’t get a handle on the soulfire, I could literally kill myself with it.

“Get it together, Harry,” I growled to myself.

I shambled out of bed and out into the living room to find that my apprentice, Molly, had come in while I was sleeping and was profaning breakfast in my tiny kitchen.

She wore a simple outfit—jeans and a black T-shirt that read, in very small white letters, IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’D BETTER HAVE BOUGHT ME DINNER. Her golden hair was longer—she’d been letting it grow—and hung down to her shoulder blades in back. She’d colored it near the tips with green that darkened to blue as it went down.

I’m not sure if Molly was “bangin’,” or “slammin’,” or “hawt,” since the cultural catchphrase cycles every couple of minutes. But if you picked a word meant to be a term of praise and adoration for the beauty of a young woman, it was probably applicable. For me, the effect was somewhat spoiled, because I’d known her since she was a skinny kid somewhere between the ages of training wheels and training bra, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t have an academic appreciation for her looks. When she paid any attention, men fell all over her.

Mouse sat alertly at her feet. The big dog was very good about not taking food off the table or from the stove or the counter or on top of the refrigerator, but he had drawn a line on the linoleum: If any bits fell to the floor, and he could get to them first, they were his. His brown eyes tracked Molly’s hands steadily. From the cheerful wag of his tail, she had probably already dropped things several times. She was a soft touch where the pooch was concerned.

“Morning, boss,” she chirped.

I glowered at her, but shambled out to the kitchen. She dumped freshly scrambled eggs onto a plate next to bacon, toast, and some mixed bits of fruit, and pressed a large glass of OJ into my hand.

“Coffee,” I said.

“You’re quitting this week. Remember? We had a deal: I make breakfast and you quit morning coffee.”

I scowled at her through the coffeeless haze. I dimly remembered some such agreement. Molly had grown up being interested in staying healthy, and had gotten more so of late. She was careful about what she ate, and had decided to pass that joy on to me.

“I hate morning people,” I said, and grabbed my breakfast. I stalked over to the couch and said, “Don’t feed Mouse anything. Not good for him.”

Mouse didn’t twitch an ear. He just sat there watching Molly and grinning.

I drank orange juice, which I found a completely inadequate beginning to my day. The bacon turned out to be made of turkey, and the edges were burned. I ate it anyway, along with toast that was not quite done enough. The grasshopper had talents, but cooking was not among them. “Things are up,” I said.

She stood at the sink, scrubbing a pan, and looked up at me interestedly. “Oh? What?”