LITMIR.BIZ

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Wow. I hadn’t even really considered that aspect of what Butters had done. Romance and romantic conflict hadn’t exactly been high on my list lately. Andi had nothing to worry about on that front … but I guess she didn’t have way too much awareness of people’s emotions to tip her off to that fact. Now I could put a name to some of the worry in her. She wasn’t jealous, exactly, but she was certainly aware of the fact that I was a young woman a lot of men found attractive, and that Waldo was a man.

      And she loved him. I could feel that, too.

      “Think about him,” Andi said quietly. “Please. Just … try to take care of him the way he takes care of you. Call ahead. If you’d just walked in covered with blood next Saturday night, he would have had something very awkward to explain to his parents.”

      I most likely would have sensed the unfamiliar presences inside the apartment before I got close enough to touch the door. But there was no point in telling Andi that. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t really understand the kind of life I lived. Certainly, she didn’t deserve to die for it, no matter what the opinion of my inner Sith.

      I had to make my choices with my head. My heart was too broken to be trusted.

      “I’ll try,” I said.

      “Okay,” Andi said.

      For a second, the fingers of my right hand quivered, and I found the ugly part of me about to hurl power at the other woman, blind her, deafen her, drown her in vertigo. Lea had shown me how. But I reeled the urge to attack back under control. “Andi,” I said instead.

      “Yes?”

      “Don’t hit me again unless you intend to kill me.”

      I didn’t mean it as a threat, exactly. It was just that I tended to react with my instincts when things started getting violent. The psychic turbulence of that kind of conflict didn’t make me fall over screaming in pain anymore, but it did make it really hard to think clearly over the furious roaring of ugly me. If Andi hit me like that again … well. I wasn’t completely sure how I would react.

      I’m not Mad Hatter insane. I’m pretty sure. But studying survival under someone like Auntie Lea leaves you ready to protect yourself, not to play well with others.

      Threat or not, Andi had seen her share of conflict, and she didn’t back down. “If I don’t think you need a good smack in the face, I won’t give you one.”

      Waldo and Justine had gone out to pick up some dinner, and got back about ten minutes later. We all sat down to eat while I reported on the situation.

      “Svartalfheim,” Justine breathed. “That’s … that’s not good.”

      “Those are the Norse guys, right?” Butters asked.

      I filled them in between bites of orange chicken, relaying what I had learned from the Leanansidhe. There was a little silence after I did.

      “So …” Andi said after a moment. “The plan is to … boink him free?”

      I gave her a look.

      “I’m just asking,” Andi said in a mild voice.

      “They’d never sell,” Justine said, her voice low, tight. “Not tonight.”

      I eyed her. “Why not?”

      “They concluded an alliance today,” she said. “There’s a celebration tonight. Lara was invited.”

      “What alliance?” I asked.

      “A nonaggression pact,” Justine said, “with the Fomor.”

      I felt my eyes widen.

      The Fomor situation just kept getting worse and worse. Chicago was far from the most preyed-upon city in the world, and they had still made the streets a nightmare for those of even modest magical talent. I didn’t have access to the kind of information I had when I was working with Harry and the White Council, but I’d heard things through the Paranet and other sources. The Fomor were kind of an all-star team of bad guys, the survivors and outcasts and villains of a dozen different pantheons that had gone down a long time ago. They’d banded together under the banner of a group of beings known as the Fomor, and had been laying quiet for a long time—for thousands of years, in fact.

      Now they were on the move—and even powerful interests like Svartalfheim, the nation of the svartalves, were getting out of the way.

      Wow, I was so not wizard enough to deal with this.

      “Lara must have sent Thomas in for something,” Justine said. “To steal information, to disrupt the alliance somehow. Something. Trespassing would be bad enough. If he was captured spying on them …”

      “They’ll have a demonstration,” I said quietly. “They’ll make an example.”

      “Couldn’t the White Court get him out?” Waldo asked.

      “If the White Court seeks the return of one of their own, it would be like admitting they sent an agent in to screw around with Svartalfheim,” I said. “Lara can’t do that without serious repercussions. She’ll deny that Thomas’s intrusion had anything to do with her.”

      Justine rose and paced the room, her body tight. “We have to go. We have to do something. I’ll pay the price; I’ll pay it ten times. We have to do something!”

      I took a few more bites of orange chicken, frowning and thinking.

      “Molly!” Justine said.

      I looked at the chicken. I liked the way the orange sauce contrasted with the deep green of the broccoli and the soft white contours of the rice. The three colors made a pleasant complement. It was … beautiful, really.

      “They covet beauty like a dragon covets gold,” I murmured.

      Butters seemed to clue in to the fact that I was onto something. He leaned back in his chair and ate steadily from a box of noodles, his chopsticks precise. He didn’t need to look to use them.

      Andi picked up on it a second later and tilted her head to one side. “Molly?” she asked.

      “They’re having a party tonight,” I said. “Right, Justine?”

      “Yes.”

      Andi nodded impatiently. “What are we going to do?”

      “We,” I said, “are going shopping.”

      I’m kind of a tomboy. Not because I don’t like being a girl or anything, because for the most part I think it’s pretty sweet. But I like the outdoors, and physical activities, and learning stuff and reading things and building things. I’ve never really gotten very deep into the girly parts of being a girl. Andi was a little bit better at it than me. The fact that her mother hadn’t brought her up the way mine had probably accounted for it. In my house, makeup was for going to church and for women with easy morals.

      I know, I know: the mind boggles at the contradiction. I had issues way before I got involved with magic, believe me.

      I wasn’t sure how to accomplish what we needed in time to get to the party, but once I explained what we needed, I found out that when it came to being a girly girl, Justine had her shit wired tight.

      Within minutes a town car picked us up and whisked us away to a private salon in the Loop, where Justine produced a completely unmarked, plain white credit card. About twenty staff members—wardrobe advisors, hairdressers, makeup artists, tailors, and accessory technicians—leapt into action and got us kitted out for the mission in a little more than an hour.

      I couldn’t really get away from the mirror this time. I tried to look at the young woman in it objectively, as if she was someone else, and not the one who had helped kill the man she loved and who had then failed him again by being unable to prevent even his ghost from being destroyed in its determination to protect others. That bitch deserved to be run over by a train or something.

      The girl

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