He looked me up and down critically. “What the hell happened? You get in a fight with a street sweeper?”

“Octokongs,” I said. “And a turtleneck with a machine gun.”

“Right calf,” Karrin said, bringing Valmont in out of the cold and locking the door behind her. “He’s been shot.”

“And you’re letting him walk around on it?” Butters demanded.

Karrin gave him a look that would have curdled milk. “Next time I’ll stick him in my purse.”

He sighed and said, “Look, Harry, I know you don’t feel the pain, but you are not invincible. Pain’s there for a damned reason.” He waved a hand at one of the kitchen chairs and said, “Sit, sit.”

The kitchen was a tiny one. I sat. Butters was a medical doctor, though he spent most of his time cutting up corpses as an Illinois medical examiner, and since the hospitals tended to get a little twitchy when you walked in with gunshot wounds, he’d taken care of such injuries on the down low for me before.

Butters unwrapped my leg, muttered under his breath, and said, “Let’s get him on the table. Help me extend it.”

“Yeah,” Karrin said.

They fussed about extending her kitchen table for a minute, and then she nudged me and said, “Come on, Harry, I’m not lifting you up there.”

That said, she still got her shoulder beneath my arm and helped me up, and then helped me lift my legs onto the table. It seemed a lot harder than it should have been to get myself into place.

“Butters,” I said, “you going to slash up my tux?”

“Just hold still,” he said, picking up a pair of safety scissors out of his bag of medical tools.

“Awesome,” I said, smiling. “I’m just going to close my eyes for a minute.”

“Karrin, would you hang out with Andi, please. It’s bad enough that I’m working on him like this. I don’t need my elbows being crowded, too.”

“Right,” she said. “We’ll be in the living room.”

“Okay, Harry,” Butters said. “Let me get to work.”

“How you and Andi doing?” I asked him. “Still good?”

He didn’t react to my mention of his girlfriend. “Try not to move.”

I did that. The earring pulsed, waves of sleepy cold coming out a little faster than they had that morning. Butters prodded at the bullet wound with something, and I noted that it probably would have hurt like hell without the presence of Winter in my weary body. I opened my eyes long enough to see him swabbing out the injury with a plastic tool coated with what must have been some kind of antibiotic.

He was running it all the way through the hole in my leg.

I shuddered and closed my eyes again.

Day one ofworking with the Knights of the Blackened Denarius and I’d already been shot and ripped up by a pair of hideous abominations—and that had been doing something relatively simple and safe, by the standards of the rest of the operation.

I had this sinking feeling that day two was going to be worse.

Thirteen

Open your eyes, you fool. She’s right in front of . . .

I jerked my head up off the table, blinking. There had been a voice in my ear, as clear as day, speaking in a fearful, angry tone. “What?”

Time had gone by. Butters stood at the sink, cleaning his gear. He paused and looked over his shoulder at me, scowling, and said with perfect authority, “Lay. Down.”

I did. The earring felt like a chip of ice, so cold that I was about to start shivering. “Did you say something?” I asked him.

“No,” he said, frowning. “You were pretty out of it, man. I was letting you rest.”

“Someone else in here?”

“No, Harry,” he said.

“I could have sworn . . .”

He looked at me expectantly, raising one eyebrow. “Sworn what?”

I shook my head. “Beginning of a dream, maybe.”

“Sure,” Butters said.

“Am I going to make it, doc?”

He snorted. “Barring infection, you should be fine. No, wait—you should be in a hospital on an IV and then in a bed for a week. But knowing you, you’re probably going to keep doing whatever stupidly dangerous thing you’re doing. You probably won’t bleed to death while you’re doing it, now.”

I lifted my head enough to examine myself. My clothes were gone, except for my pants, and they’d lost most of the right leg. Take that, Nicodemus’s heist budget. I had several cuts bandaged. I had fresh stitches in two of the cuts, plus at both ends of the hole in my leg, maybe a dozen altogether, and . . .

“Is that Super Glue holding these cuts closed?”

“Super Glue and sutures, and if I could figure out a way to duct-tape them all shut, I’d do that, too.”

“I’ll take the roll with me, just in case,” I said. “Can I get dressed, then?”

He sighed. “Try not to move too fast, okay? And be careful standing up. I don’t think the blood loss was too serious, but you might be a little dizzy for a while.”

I got up, slowly, and found my duffel bag. I pulled a set of fresh clothes out, ditched the rest of the tux, and tugged them on.

“So what are you doing?” Butters asked as I did. “Karrin’s been more tight-lipped than usual.”

“It’s better if I don’t say, for now,” I said. “But before I do anything else, I need to pay off a debt.”