“Children frequently are,” Michael said.

I chewed on my lip some more. “What if . . . Michael, she was there. She was in the temple when . . .” I looked up. “What if she remembers what I did?”

“She doesn’t remember any of it,” Michael said.

“Now,” I said. “Stuff like that . . . it has a way of popping up again.”

“If it does,” he said, “don’t you think she deserves to know the truth? All of it? When she’s ready?”

I looked away. “The things I do . . . I don’t want any of it to splash on her.”

“I didn’t want it to touch my children, either,” Michael said. “Mostly, it didn’t. And I don’t regret my choices. I did everything in my power to protect them. I’m content with that.”

“My boss has a few differences in policy compared to yours.”

“Heh. True, that.”

“I need to get moving,” I said. “Seriously. I’m on the clock.”

“We aren’t done talking about Maggie,” he replied firmly. “But we’ll take it up soon.”

“Why?” I asked. “She’s safe here. Is she . . . She’s happy?”

“Mostly,” he said amiably. “She’s your daughter, Harry. She needs you. But not, I think, nearly as much as you need her.”

“I don’t know how you can say that to me,” I said, “after Molly.”

He tilted his head. “What about Molly?”

“You . . . you know about Molly, right?” I asked.

He blinked at me. “She’s been doing great lately. I saw her last weekend. Did she lose her apartment or something?”

I looked back at him in dismay, realizing.

He didn’t know.

Michael didn’t know that his daughter had become the Winter Lady. She hadn’t told him.

“Harry,” he said, worried, “is she all right?”

Oh, Hell’s freaking bells. She hadn’t told her parents?

That was so Molly. Unimpressed by a legion of wicked faeries—terrified to tell her parents about her new career.

But it was her choice. And I didn’t have the right to unmake it for her.

“She’s fine,” I blurted. “She’s fine. I mean, I meant, uh . . .”

“Oh,” Michael said, a look of understanding coming over his face. “Oh, right. Well, that’s . . . that’s fine. Behind us now, and it all worked out.”

I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but it was getting me out of making a major problem for Molly. I rolled with it. “Right,” I said. “Anyway. Thank you, again. For too much.”

“If it’s ever too much,” he said, “I’ll thump you politely on the head.”

“You’ll have to, for itto get through,” I said.

“I know.” He rose, and offered me his hand.

I shook it.

“Michael,” I asked, “do you ever . . . miss it?”

His smile lines deepened. “The fight?” He shrugged. “I’m very, very happy to have the time to spend with my wife and children.”

I narrowed my eyes. “That . . . wasn’t exactly an answer.”

He winked at me. Then he walked me to the door, leaning on his cane.

By the time I got to the car, the icy ache in my arm had dulled down to a buzzing sensation. I was recovering. I’d get some anti-inflammatories into me before I got back, to help with the swelling. No, I couldn’t feel the pain, but that didn’t mean that it wouldn’t be smart to do whatever I could to take the pressure off the mantle, to save my strength for when it counted. I needed to pick up some other things too, thinking along the same lines.

Whatever Nicodemus had planned, it would go down in the next twenty-four hours, and I was going to be ready for it.

Twenty-one

I rolled back up to the slaughterhouse just before the rented town car’s transmission gave out on me altogether.

It sort of cheered me up, actually. I hadn’t wrecked a car with my wizardliness in a long time. And it just couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy’s rental vehicle. For a moment, I felt a sudden, sharp pining for my old Volkswagen, which made about as much sense as anything else I’d been doing that day. The Blue Beetle had been uncomfortable and cramped and it had smelled a bit odd, not to mention that it was put together from the cannibalized scraps of a bunch of other late-sixties VWs—and I must have looked absolutely ridiculous crouched behind its wheel. But it had been my car, and while it hadn’t run like a race car, it did run, most of the time.

Suck it, rental town car. The built-in talking GPS computer hadn’t lasted two blocks.

“Jordan!” I boomed as I came in. I tossed a paper bag with a couple of cheeseburgers in it at the Denarian squire. “Chow down, buddy. They’re hot, so don’t let the cheese burn your ton— Oh, right. Sorry.”

Jordan scowled at me and fumbled with the bag and his shotgun until he managed to balance the two. I clapped him on the shoulder in a genial fashion and rolled on by. I pointed at the guard at the next post and said, “You don’t get cheeseburgers. You didn’t say nice things to me like Jordan did.”

The guard glowered at me in silence, of course. It was an act. No one could resist my bluff and manly charisma. In his heart of hearts, he wanted to be friends with me. I just knew it.

As I descended to the floor of the slaughterhouse, Karrin looked up from a long worktable absolutely covered in guns. She tracked my entrance, her expression touched with both wariness and . . . a certain amount of incredulity.