"Thank you," I said, and meant it.
His expression grew more sober. "And if you should fall to temptation. If you should embrace the Fallen or become ensnared by its will..." He touched the hilt of the great sword, and his face became bedrock granite, Old Testament determination that made Morgan's fanaticism look like a wisp of steam. "If you change. I will also be there."
Fear hit me in a cold wave.
Holy crap.
I swallowed, and my hands shook on the Beetle's steering wheel. There wasn't any attempt at menace in Michael's voice, or his face. He was simply stating a fact.
The mark on my palm burned, and for the first time I gave serious consideration to the notion that maybe I was overconfident of my ability to deal with Lasciel. What if Michael was right? What if I screwed something up and wound up like that poor bastard Rasmussen? A demonically supercharged serial killer?
"If that happens," I told him, and my voice was a dry whisper, "I want you to."
I could see in his eyes that he didn't like the thought any more than I did-but he was fundamentally incapable of being anything less than perfectly honest with me. He was my friend, and he was worried. If he had to do harm to me, it would rip him apart.
Maybe the words had been his own subconscious way of begging me to get rid of the coin. He could never stand aside and do nothing while bad things happened, even if meant that he had to kill his friend.
I could respect that. I understood it, because I couldn't do it, either. I couldn't stand aside, abandon my magic, and cut myself loose of the responsibility to use it for good.
Not even if it killed me.
Life can be confusing. Good God, and how. Sometimes it seems like the older I get, the more confused I become. That seems ass-backwards. I thought I was supposed to be getting wiser. Instead, I just keep getting hit over the head with my relative insignificance in the greater scheme of the universe. Confusing, life.
But it beats the hell out of the alternative.
I went back to my place. I let the kid sleep until we got there, and then touched her shoulder with one hand. She jerked awake at once, blinking in weary confusion.
"Where are we?" she asked.
"My place," I said. "We need to talk."
She blinked her eyes several more times and then nodded. "Why?"
"Because you need to understand something. Come on."
We got out of the car. I led her down the steps to my door and said, "Come stand next to me." She did. I took her left hand and told her, "Spread your fingers and close your eyes." She did that too. I held her left palm up about two inches from the door. "Now, focus. See what you can feel."
Her face scrunched up. "Um," she said, shifting her weight back and forth restlessly. "There's...pressure? Um, or maybe a buzzing. Like high-power lines."
"Close enough," I said, and released her wrist. "What you're sensing are some of the energies that I used to ward my apartment. If you try to come in without disabling them, you'll take a jolt of electricity that wouldn't leave much more of you than a smudge on the ground."
She blinked at me, then twitched and pulled her hand sharply away.
"I'll give you an amulet that will let you get through, until I'm sure you can disable them, go in, and start them up again. But for tonight, just don't try to open the door. In or out. Okay?"
"Okay," she said quietly.
We went in. My cleaning service had come through. Molly had left a bag with clothes and sundries spread over half of one of my apartment's couches. Now the bag was neatly closed, and suspiciously nonbulgy. I'm sure the cleaning service had folded and organized the bag so that everything fit in without strain.
Molly looked around, blinking. "How does your maid get in?"
"I don't know what you mean," I said, because you can't talk about faerie housekeepers or they go away. I pointed at the couch next to her bag and said, "Sit."
She did, though I could tell that my peremptory tone did not thrill her.
I sat down in a chair across from the couch. As I did, Mister drifted in from the bedroom and promptly wound himself around one of Molly's legs, purring a greeting.
"Okay, kid," I said. "We survived. I only had some very limited plans to cover this contingency."
She blinked at me. "What?"
"I didn't think I'd pull this off. I mean, raiding a faerie capital? Standing up to the Senior Council? All those movie monsters? Your mom? Hell, I'm shocked I survived at all, much less got you out of it."
"B-but..." She frowned. "You never seemed like...I mean, you just went through it all like you had everything under control. You seemed so sure what was going to happen."
"Rule number one of the wizarding business," I said. "Never let them see you sweat. People expect us to know things. It can be a big advantage. Don't screw it up by looking like you're as confused as everyone else. Bad for the image."
She smiled at me a little. "I see," she said. She reached down to stroke Mister and mused, "I must look horrible."
"Been a rough day," I said. "Look. We'll need to talk about where you're going to live. I take it that you had already decided to break things off with Nelson. I kind of picked up that vibe when we bailed him out."
She nodded.
"Well. Inappropriate to stay with him, then. To say nothing of the fact that he's going to need time to recover."
"I can't stay at home," she said quietly. "After all that's happened...and my mom will never understand about the magic. She thinks it's all bad, every bit of it. And if I'm there, it's just going to confuse and frighten all the little Jawas, Mom and me arguing all the time."
I grunted and said, "You'll have to stay somewhere. We'll work that out soonest."
"All right," she said.
"Next thing you need to know," I said. "As of now, you get no slack. You aren't allowed any mistakes. You don't get to say 'oops.' The first time you screw up and slip deeper into bad habits, it kills both of us. I'm going to be tough on you sometimes, Molly. I have to be. It's as much for my survival as yours. Got it?"
"Yes," she said.
I grunted, got up, and went to my tiny bedroom. I rooted around in my closet and found an old brown apprentice robe one of the shiny new Wardens had left at my place after a local meeting. I brought it out and handed it to Molly. "Keep this where you can get to it. You'll be with me at any Council meetings, and it is your formal attire." I frowned and rubbed at my head. "God, I need aspirin. And food. You hungry?"
Molly shook her head. "But I'm a mess. Do you mind if I clean up?"
I eyed her and sighed. Then I said, "No. Go ahead and get it out of the way." I stood up and went to the kitchen, muttering a minor spell and flicking several candles into light, including one near the girl. She took the robe and the candle, grabbed her bag, and vanished into my room.
I checked the icebox. The faeries usually brought some kind of food to stock the icebox and the pantry when they cleaned, but they could have mighty odd ideas about what constituted a healthy diet. One time I'd opened the pantry and found nothing but boxes and boxes and boxes of Froot Loops. I had a near-miss with diabetes, and Thomas, who never was quite sure where the food came from, declared that I had clearly been driven Froot Loopy.
Usually it wasn't that bad, though there was always a high incidence of frozen pizza, for which my housekeepers maintained the ice in my icebox with religious fervor. I often left most of a pizza lying around uneaten when I figured they'd be coming to visit, and thus continued my policy of shamelessly bribing my way into the Little Folk's good graces.
I was too tired to cook anything, and nothing was going to taste good anyway, so I slapped several hot dogs between two pieces of bread along with a couple of lettuce leaves and wolfed them down.
I got out some of my ice and dumped it in a pitcher, then filled the pitcher up. I got down a glass and filled it with ice water. Then I and my glass and my pitcher moseyed over to my fireplace. I set the pitcher on the mantel, idly flipped the neatly laid fire to life with my ignition spell, and then waited for the inevitable while sipping cold water and staring down at the fire. Mister kept me company from his spot on top of a bookcase.
It took her a little while to work up to it, but not as long as I had expected. My bedroom door opened and Molly appeared.
She had showered. Her candy-colored hair hung limp and clinging. She'd washed away the makeup entirely, but there were spots of pink high on her cheeks that I figured had little to do with cosmetics. The various piercings I could see caught the firelight in a deep, burned orange glow.
She was also barefoot. And wearing her brown robe.
I arched an eyebrow at her and waited.
She flushed more deeply and then walked over to me, quite slowly, until she stood not a foot away.
I gave her nothing to work with. No expression. No words. Just silence.
"You looked into me," she whispered quietly. "And I looked into you."
"That's how it works," I confirmed in a quiet, neutral voice.
She shivered. "I saw what kind of man you are. Kind. Gentle." She looked up and met my eyes. "Lonely. And..." She flushed a shade pinker. "And hungry. No one has touched you in a very long time."
She lifted a hand and put it on my chest. Her fingers were very warm, and a rippling flush of purely biological reaction bypassed my silly brain and raced through me in a wave of pleasure-and need. I looked down at Molly's pale hand. Her palm glided over my chest, barely touching, a slow, focused circle. I felt faintly disgusted with myself for my reaction. Hell. I'd known this kid before she'd had to worry about feminine hygiene products.
I managed to thwart my hormones' lobby to start growling or drooling, but my voice had gotten a shade or two huskier. "Also true."
She looked up at me again, her eyes wide and deep and blue enough to drown in. "You saved my life," she said, and I heard her voice shaking. "You're going to teach me. I..." She licked her lips and moved her shoulders. The brown robe slipped down them to the floor.
The tattoo that began on her neck went all the way down to her pierced navel. She had several other studs and fine rings in places I had suspected (but never confirmed) they would be. She shivered and took swifter breaths. The firelight played merrily with her shifting contours.
I'd seen better. But mostly that had been from someone using her looks to get something out of me, and the difference had largely been one of presentation. Molly didn't have much experience in displaying herself for a man, or in playing the coquette. She should have stood differently, arched her back, shifted her hips, worn an expression of thickly sensual interest, daring me to come after her. She would have looked like the patron goddess of corrupted youth.
Instead, she stood there, uncertain and frightened and too naive (or maybe honest) to be anything but totally sincere-and vulnerable. She was afraid, uncertain, the lost princess helpless in a dark wood.
It was worse than if she'd vamped onto me like a trained courtesan. What I saw in her was honest and hopeful, trusting and terrified. She was real, and fragile and precious. My emotions got together with my glands and they ganged up on me, screaming that she needed acceptance and that the kindest thing I could possibly do would be to give her a hug and tell her everything was going to be all right-and that if something followed, who would blame me?
I would. So I just watched her with a straight face.
"I want to learn from you," she said. "I want to do everything I can to help you. To thank you. I want you to teach me things."
"What things?" I asked in a quiet, measured tone.
She licked her lips. "Everything. Show me everything."
"Are you sure?" I asked her.
She nodded, her eyes huge, pupils dilated until only a bare ring of blue remained around them.
"Teach me," she whispered.
I touched her face with the fingers of my right hand. "Kneel down," I told her. "Close your eyes."
Trembling, she did, her breathing becoming faster, more excited.
But that stopped once I picked up the pitcher of ice water from the mantel and dumped it over her head.
She let out a squeal and fell over backward. It took her maybe ten seconds to recover from the shock of the cold, and by then she was gasping and shivering, her eyes wide with surprise and confusion-and with some kind of deep, heavy pain.
I faced her and squatted down onto my haunches to meet her eyes. "Lesson one. This isn't going to happen, Molly," I said in exactly the same calm, gentle voice. "Get that through your head right now. It isn't ever ever going to happen." going to happen."
Her lower lip trembled, and she bowed her head, shoulders shaking. I gave myself a mental kick in the head and snagged a blanket from the couch. I went to her and wrapped it around her shoulders. "Get over by the fire and warm up."
It took her a moment to collect herself, but she did. She hunched her shoulders beneath the blanket, shivering and humiliated. "You knew," she said in a shaking voice. "That I would...do this."
"I was pretty sure," I agreed.
"Because of the soulgaze," she said.
"Nothing to do with that, really," I replied. "I figured there had to be a reason that you didn't come to me for help when you came into your powers. I figure you've been interested in me for a while. That you wouldn't want to come up to your favorite rock star and start fumbling around on a guitar so that the first thing he thinks about you is that you're incompetent."
She shivered and blushed even more. "No. It wasn't like that..."
Sure it was. But I'd hammered her hard enough for the time being. "If you say so," I answered. "Molly, you may fight with your mom like cats and dogs, but the two of you are more alike than you know."
"That's not true."
"It's trite but true that a lot of young women look for a man who reminds them of their dad. Your dad fights monsters. I fight monsters. Your dad rescued your mom from a dragon. I rescued you from Arctis Tor. Seeing the pattern here?"
She opened her mouth and then frowned at the fire-not an angry frown. A pensive one.
"Plus, you've just been scared real good. You don't have any place to stay. And I'm the guy who is trying to help you." I shook my head. "But even if there wasn't magic involved, it still wouldn't happen. I've done some things I'm not proud of. But I'm never going to take advantage of your trust.
"What we're going to have is not a relationship of equals. I teach. You learn. I tell you to do something, you damned well do it."
A touch of sullen teenager-ness gleamed in her eyes.
"Don't even think it," I said. "Molly, getting pierced and dyed and tattooed just because you want to break the rules is one thing. But what we're dealing with now isn't the same thing. A botched dye job affects you. You botch the use of magic and someone-maybe a lot of someones-gets hurt. So you do what I say, when I say it, and you do it because you don't want to kill someone. Or you can die. That was our deal, and you agreed to it."
She said nothing. Her anger had faded from her face, but that sullen trace of rebellion remained.
I narrowed my eyes, clenched my fist, and hissed a single word. The fireplace flared up in a sudden, fiery cyclone. Molly flinched back from it, one arm lifted to protect her eyes.
When she lowered it, I was hunkered down right in her face. "I'm not your parents, kid," I said. "And you don't have time to play teenage rebel anymore. This is the deal. You do what I say or you don't survive." I leaned closer and gave her the look I usually save for rampaging demons and those survey people at malls. "Molly. Is there any doubt in your mind-any doubt at all all-that I can't damn well make make you do it?" you do it?"
She swallowed. The hard knot of defiance in her eyes suddenly shattered like a diamond struck at precisely the correct angle, and she shivered in the blanket. "No, sir," she said in a tiny voice.
I nodded at her. She sat there shivering and frightened, which had been the point of the exercise; to knock her off balance while she was still unsteady from recent events and drive home the notion of what she faced. It was absolutely necessary that she understand how things had to play out until she got her power under control. Anything less than willing cooperation would kill her.
But it was hard to remember that, staring down at her as she shivered and stared at the fire, its light turning tears to gold on her cheeks. Heartbreaking, really. She was still so damned young.