“Thank you,” Karrin said.

Butters’s voice was weary. “Yeah,” he sighed. “Sure. Karrin . . . can I tell you something?”

“What?”

“This thing he’s got going with Mab,” Butters said. “I know that everyone thinks it’s turned him into some kind of superhero. But I don’t think that’s right.”

“I’ve seen him move,” she said. “I’ve seen how strong he is.”

“So have I,” Butters said. “Look . . . the human body is a pretty amazing machine. It really is. It can do really amazing things—much more so than most people think, because it’s also built to protect itself.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“Inhibitors,” Butters said. “Every person walking around is about three times stronger than they think they are. I mean, your average housewife is actually about as strong as a fairly serious weight lifter, when it comes to pure mechanics. Adrenaline can amp that even more.”

I could hear the frown in Karrin’s voice. “You’re talking about when mothers lift cars off their kid, that kind of thing.”

“Exactly that kind of thing,” Butters said. “But the body can’t function that way all the time, or it will tear itself apart. That’s what inhibitors are built for—to keep you from injuring yourself.”

“What does that have to do with Dresden?”

“I think that what this Winter Knight gig has done for him is nothing more than switching off those inhibitors,” Butters said. “He hasn’t added all that much muscle mass. It’s the only thing that makes sense. The body is capable of those moments of startling strength, but they’re meant to be something that you pull out of the hat once or twice in a lifetime—and with no inhibitors and no ability to feel pain, Dresden’s running around doing them all the time. And there’s no real way he can know it.”

Karrin was silent for several seconds, digesting that. Then she said, “Bottom line?”

“The more he leans on this ‘gift,’” Butters said, and I could picture him making air quotes, “the more he tears himself to shreds. His body heals remarkably, but he’s still human. He’s got limits, somewhere, and if he keeps this up, he’s going to find them.”

“What do you think will happen?”

Butters made a thoughtful sound. “Think about . . . a football player or boxer who has it hard and breaks down in his early thirties, because he’s just taken too damned much punishment. That’s Dresden, if he keeps this up.”

“I’m sure that once we explain that to him, he’ll retire to a job as a librarian,” Karrin said.

Butters snorted.“It’s possible that other things in his system are being affected the same way,” he said. “Testosterone production, for example, any number of other hormones, which might be influencing his perception and judgment. I’m not sure he’s actually got any more real power at all. I think it just feels that way to him.”

“This is fact or theory?”

“An informed theory,” he said. “Bob helped me develop it.”

Son of a bitch. I kept quiet and thought about that one for a minute.

Could that be true? Or at least, more true than it wasn’t?

It would be consistent with the other deal I’d worked out with a faerie—my godmother, Lea, had made a bargain to give me the power to defeat my old mentor, Justin DuMorne. Then she’d tortured me for a while, assuring me that it would give me strength. It did, though mostly, in retrospect, because I had believed it had.

Had I been magic-feathered by a faerie again?

And yet . . . at the end of the day, I could lift a freaking car.

Sure you can, Harry. But at what price?

No wonder the Winter Knights stayed in the job until they died. If Butters was right, they would have been plunged into the crippling agony of their battered bodies the moment the mantle was taken from them.

Sort of the same way I had just been rendered into agonized Jell-O when the Genoskwa had shoved a nail into me.

“I worry,” Butters said quietly, “that he’s changing. That he doesn’t know it.”

“Look who’s talking,” Karrin said. “Batman.”

“That was one time,” Butters said.

Karrin didn’t say anything.

“All right.” Butters relented. “A few times. But it wasn’t enough to keep those kids from being carried off.”

“You pulled some of them out, Waldo,” Karrin said. “Believe me, that’s a win. Most of the time, you can’t even do that much. But you’re missing my point.”

“What point?”

“Ever since you’ve had the skull, you’ve been changing, too,” Karrin said. “You work hand in hand with a supernatural being that can scare the crap out of me. You can do things you couldn’t do before. You know things you didn’t know before. Your personality has changed.”

There was a pause. “It has?”

“You’re more serious,” she said. “More . . . intense, I suppose.”

“Yeah. Now that I know more about what’s really happening out there. It’s not something influencing me.”

“Unless it is and you just don’t know it,” Karrin said. “I’ve got the same evidence on you that you have on Dresden.”