“It’s funny,” Karrin said. “He vanishes whenever Andi shows up for some reason.”

I remembered a scene of perfect havoc in the living room of my old apartment, and it made me smile. “Maybe she’s not a cat person,” I said.

“Drink your juice,” she said. I did. She filled up the glass and watched me drink it down again before she was satisfied.

“Okay,” she said. “Valmont’s already gone to bed. Go sleep. We’re getting an early start tomorrow, and you need to be sharp.”

This wasn’t my first rodeo, and Karrin had a point. You don’t survive situations like this by shorting yourself on vital rest for no reason. Besides, I’d already dealt with enough for one evening. Let the day’s trouble be enough for the day.

I headed back toward Karrin’s bedroom and paused as I entered the living room.

There were guns on the coffee table. Like, a lot of them, broken out on cloths, being cleaned, leaned against a nearby chair, where a large equipment bag waited to receive them. Karrin’s favorite little Belgian carbine was there, along with what looked like a couple of space guns. “New toys?” I asked.

“I’m a girl, Harry,” she said, rather smugly. “I accessorize.”

“Is that a bazooka?”

“No,” she said. “That is an AT4 rocket launcher. Way better than a bazooka.”

“In case we have to hunt dinosaurs?” I asked.

“The right tool for the right job,” she answered.

“Can I play with it?”

“No. Now go to bed.”

She settled down on the couch and started reassembling one of her handguns. I hesitated for a moment. Did I have the right to drag her into the kind of conflict I was about to start?

I bottled that thought real quick, with a follow-up question: Did I have the capability to stop her from being involved, at this point?

Karrin looked up at me and smiled, putting the weapon together as swiftly and as automatically as other people tie their shoes. “See you in the morning, Harry.”

I nodded. The best way to get her through this was to focus and get it done. She wouldn’t leave my side, even if I wanted her to. So stop dithering around, Harry, get your head in the game, and lay Nicodemus and company out so hard that they never have the chance to hurt her.

“Yep,” I said. “See you in the morning.”

Fourteen

Whatever it was about the mantle of Winter I held that sustained me during action, it didn’t seem to have nearly as much interest in looking after me once I was safe somewhere.

I had too many stitches to hop into Karrin’s shower, but I bathed myself as best I could with a washcloth and a sink full of warm water and a little soap, and then fell down in the bed. I’d been there for maybe ten seconds before the distant weariness becameacute, and the low burn and dull ache of dozens of cuts and bruises swelled up to occupy my full attention.

I was too tired to care. I thought about getting up and getting some aspirin or something for maybe a minute and a half, and then sleep snuck up on me and sucker punched me unconscious.

I dreamed.

It was one of those fever dreams, noisy and bright and disjointed. I don’t remember many of the details—just that I could never keep up with what was happening, and I felt as though as soon as my eyes would focus on something, everything would change, and as soon as I caught up to the action that was happening in the dream, it would roar off in a different direction, leaving me struggling to reorient myself, trying to keep up the pace with my feet dragging in the mud. The whole while, I was conscious of several other Harry Dresdens in the dream, all of them operating a little ways off from me, doing their own confusion dance in parallel to mine, and we occasionally paused to wave at one another and exchange polite complaints.

Toward the end of it, I found myself driving along some random section of road in my old multicolored Volkswagen Bug, the Blue Beetle, scowling ahead through heavy rain. My apprentice, Molly, sat next to me.

Molly was in her midtwenties and gorgeous, though she still looked a little too lean to my eyes. Her hair, which had seemed to be colored at random ever since she was a teenager, was now long and white-blond. She wore old designer jeans, a blue T-shirt with a faded recycling symbol on it, and sandals.

“I hate dreams like this,” I said. “There’s no plot—just random weird things happening. I get enough of that when I’m awake.”

She looked at me as if startled and blinked several times. “Harry?”

“Obviously,” I said. “It’s my dream.”

“No,” she said, “it kind of isn’t. How are you doing this?”

I took my hands off the steering wheel long enough to waggle my fingers and say, in a dramatic voice, “Wizard.”

Molly burst out into a warm laugh. “Oh, good Lord, it’s an accident, isn’t it? Are you finally off the island, then? How’s your head?”

At that, I blinked. “Wait. Molly?”

“Me,” she said, smiling, and leaned across the car. She snaked an arm around my neck for a second and leaned her head against my shoulder in a quick hug. There was a sense of warmth to the touch that went beyond the normal sense of a dream, a sense of another’s presence that was too absolute to question. “Wow, it’s good to hear from you, boss.”

“Wow,” I said. “How is this happening?”

“Good question,” she said. “I’ve been attacked in my dreams, like, fifty times since the New Year. I thought I had my defenses locked up pretty tight.”