She looked . . . disturbed. Don’t get me wrong—a girl who goes around biting the tongues out of men’s mouths is disturbed one way or another, but the Denarian killer looked genuinely troubled, or distressed, or something.

Karrin caught me looking at her and sighed. “We can’t afford another damsel, Dresden.”

“I wasn’t thinking that,” I said.

“Sure you weren’t.”

“Actually,” I said, “I was thinking she looked vulnerable. Might be a good time to confront her about how Harvey died.”

Karrin clucked her tongue thoughtfully. “I’ll be at the table.”

“Yeah.”

She descended the stairs, and I ambled out along the catwalk to stand beside Deirdre.

She looked up at me as I approached, her eyes flat. But then her gaze shifted back to the room below.

“And then I said”—Binder snickered, evidently coming to the punch line—“why did you wear it, then?”

Hannah Ascher burst out in a short, hearty belly laugh, and was joined, more quietly, by Anna Valmont. Even Grey smiled, at least a little. The expression looked somehow alien on his oddly unremarkable features.

Deirdre stared down at them all, her expression dispassionate, like a scientist observing bacteria. Her eyes flickered toward me for a second as I approached, her body tensing slightly.

Being a genius interrogator, I asked her, “So. Why’d you kill Harvey?”

She looked at me for a few seconds, then turned her eyes back to the room below, to watch Karrin come to the table. There was a moment of silence from everyone as they took in her armament. Then Grey rose, suddenly dapper, and offered to help her with the rocket launcher like it was a coat. Karrin let him, giving him an edged smile that she directed past him, to the shadows where the Genoskwa lurked.

“I didn’t kill the accountant,” she said quietly. “Nicodemus said not to.”

That surprised me a little. If she wanted to hide herself from me, she didn’t need to go to the effort of lying. All she had to do was stay silent.

“He said that to all of us,” I said. “Maybe he said something else to you privately.”

“He didn’t,” she said. “My mother killed him with a spell she calls the Sanguine Scalpel.”

“The cuts looked a lot like the ones you would inflict,” I said.

“A cut throat is a cut throat, wizard.”

Tough to argue with that one. “And you chased her.”

“I went to say . . . to talk to her, yes.”

“What did she have to say?”

“Personal things,” Deirdre replied.

I narrowed my eyes.

Something wasn’t jiving here. Deirdre was demonstrating absolutely no emotion about her mother, which in my experience is the next best thing to impossible foralmost anyone. Hell, even Maeve had carried enormous mother issues around with her. If Tessa was really trying to beat Nicodemus and Deirdre to the Holy Grail, there should have been something there. Frustration, irritation, fear, anger, resignation, something.

Not this distant, cool clarity.

Tessa wasn’t after any Grail.

But what else could motivate her?

Deirdre looked up from below and studied me calmly. “He knows that you mean to betray him, you know.”

“Makes us even,” I said.

“No, it doesn’t,” she said, in that same distant voice. “Not even close. I’ve seen him disassemble men and women more formidable than you, dozens of times. You don’t have a chance of tricking him, out-planning him, or beating him.” She stated it as a simple fact. “Mab knows it, too.”

“Then why would she send me?”

“She’s disposing of you without angering your allies at her. Surely you can’t be so deluded that you don’t see that.”

A slow chill went through me at the words.

That . . . could make a great deal of sense, actually. If Mab had decided not to use me after all, then my presence was no longer needed—but enough people thought well of me that they could prove extremely trying for her, should they set out to seek revenge.

Of course, that wasn’t how Mab played the game. When she set something up, she did it so that no matter what happened, she would run the table in the end. Mab probably intended me to do exactly what she’d told me she sent me to do. But what she hadn’t said was that she’d set it up so that it wouldn’t hurt her too badly if I failed. If I was too incompetent to work her will, she would regard me as a liability, to be dispensed with—preferably without angering my allies. Nicodemus would get the vengeance-level blame for my death if I failed, and Mab would be free and clear to choose a new Knight.

I felt my jaw tightening and loosening. Well. I couldn’t really have expected anything else. Mab struck me as the kind of mother who taught her children to swim by throwing them into the lake. My entire career with her would be shaped the same way—sink or swim.

“We’ll see,” I said.

She smiled, very slightly, and turned back to regard the table below. Grey was sitting with Karrin, speaking quietly, a smile on his face. She had her narrow-eyed expression on hers, but a smile also lurked somewhere inside it. He was being amusing.

Jerk.

“Is there anything else you’d like to ask me?” Deirdre asked.

“Yeah,” I said quietly. “Why?”

“Why what?”

I gestured around. “Why this? Why do you do what you do? Why bite out the tongues and murder hirelings and whatnot? What makes a person do something like this?”