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"Mom is going to kill you if she finds out."
I didn't pause as I applied black lipstick carefully to my reflection in a small compact mirror. Trying not to move my lips so as not to mess up the lines, I said, "But she isn't going to find out unless someone tells her. Right?"
I shifted the mirror slightly so that I could see the little fink, sitting on her bed in the attic room we shared. My seven-year-old sister had shoulder-length golden curls, the face of an angel, and the soul of a born con artist.
"What's it worth to you, Molly?" she chirped.
I rolled my eyes, dabbed a little more mascara on the lashes, and snapped the compact shut. "I'm already helping you with your homework for the next month and covering when it's your turn to watch the babies, you little blackmailer. What else is there?"
"You'd better think of something," said the angel sweetly.
Muttering words that would've made Mom hit the ceiling, I stuffed the makeup into my purse. The trouble with sharing a room with your sister is that she always knows when you sneak out of the house ... and this particular little rat-fink always made sure to profit from it. I couldn't wait until Dad finished the addition so we could all have our own rooms and I could have some freaking privacy. "Um, I'll take your place on the chore roster for a week, how about that?"
She curled up cheerfully on her bed, wrapping her arm around a big pink stuffed teddy bear and looking as cute and innocent as a Hallmark card. "Done."
At this rate, it wasn't going to be long before I couldn't sneak out of the house because I'd be too gosh-darn busy doing chores for my blackmailer. Sighing, I plumped up the pillows under my bedsheets, producing an approximately Molly-shaped lump. "Remember, I'm meeting Tiffany and Dark-Raven at Club Goth, okay? I'll probably be back around, like, one or two. If you have to call me for some reason, I've got my phone on me."
My sister yawned and snuggled around her stuffed toy. "Okay. Have fun."
I wormed out of the window onto the roof, quietly closed it with the ease of long practice, and scampered across the roof tiles in my fishnet-stockinged feet. I let myself down off the porch roof to the dew-damp lawn and laced my boots back on.
The plan was that I would walk a few blocks down the street to a 7-Eleven, where Dark-Raven, whose real name was Brittany and who had a learner's permit, would use her brother's car to pick me up. However, I had just reached the driveway when headlights swept the lawn. At a quick glance, I recognized the car, and I could have moaned in frustration. I knew that car. It belonged to a friend of my dad's. There was no mistaking it. There couldn't possibly be two people in the whole world who drove cars that stupid-looking.
My dad's friend Harry was a pretty cool guy, for a grown-up. He didn't rat me out when he caught me changing out of my very much not-Mom-approved school clothes in the treehouse, for example. But all grown-ups are alike about certain things, and somehow I didn't think he'd be nearly as cool if he caught me sneaking out of the house in the dead of night.
I only had seconds before the headlights would hit me, so I vaulted into the bed of Dad's pickup and scrunched down next to the toolbox and some sacks of lawn fertilizer. I couldn't see anything, but I could hear Harry's Volkswagen rattle and sputter to a halt beside Dad's truck, and then Harry's shoes crunching on the driveway. The motion detector light snapped on, and I scooted lower in the bed of the truck. I heard Harry's footsteps on the porch, and then he tapped softly on the door.
Come on, go inside. I was almost home free.The door opened; I heard soft voices, my Dad's and Harry's. Then ... crap. The door closed, but the voices got louder. They were coming my way. Harry must have come and got my dad to go hunting something.
Okay, so ... my parents are usually pretty vague about what my dad does for a living, at least when it comes to details. The part where he's not a carpenter, I mean. But none of us are stupid. We know Dad comes home bloody sometimes, reeking of sulfur and worse things. Most people's houses don't have a hidden saferoom, just in case.
I know there are things out there in the world that most people don't know about.
I know that my dad is a hero.
I also know that when he's going off to do hero things, he usually takes the truck. I crossed my fingers quietly against my thighs, and hoped that, by some miracle, he was planning on going in Harry's car.
The truck's doors opened; the springs creaked as two adults got in, and then the body shuddered when the door slammed. A minute later, the engine roared to life.
Guess it wasn't a good night for miracles.
I could feel the truck pull out of the driveway, turning left. I didn't dare sit up, because my dad put the defense in defensive driving, and I had no doubt that he'd notice me wiggling around in the back. Just to make things worse, the ventilation window in the back of the truck's cab was open; I could tell because I could still hear Dad and Harry talking, although I couldn't make out any of the words. So I was afraid to even move for fear they'd hear me. Seriously, I would be in so much trouble if I got caught dressed like this, let alone hiding in the back of the truck. "I jumped in here so you wouldn't see me" was probably not going to fly as an excuse.
The truck picked up speed. We weren't moving at expressway speeds, but we seemed to be going at a pretty fast clip. I tried to burrow deeper into the burlap sacks, because the wind whipping over the sides of the truck bed was really cold, and my skimpy little vinyl jacket didn't help at all.
Then it got worse when my phone started ringing.
The current ringtone was a techno beat. It wasn't terribly loud, but I heard the voices in the cab of the truck fall to a sudden hush. Crap, crap! Frantically I felt around for it and fumbled it to my face. "What?" I whispered.
"Molly, where are you?" Dark-Raven demanded in a voice that could raise the dead ... or, worse, my father. Her voice cut in and out; the connection wasn't very good.
"Shush! Shush!" I whispered frantically. "Ix-nay! Arents-pay! Don't wait for me, I'm having parent troubles, so just go meet Tiff without me, okay?"
She was saying something else on the other end, but meanwhile the conversation in the cab of the truck hadn't resumed, and I was thinking Don't notice me, don't notice me so hard I almost popped a blood vessel in my brain.
I was listening so hard for Dad and Harry that it took me a second to realize that my phone had gone dead. I gave it a little shake, and it gave a weird fizzling pop and smoked a little.
The truck jolted a bit and the headlights flickered. I scrunched down lower. A spike of pain went through my head, and I rubbed my temple. This was a stupid, stupid time to get a migraine.
"Harry," my dad said reprovingly in the truck cab.
"I didn't do anything," Harry said with gruff indignation.
"Harry, I just spent most of my Saturday servicing this truck. Please don't kill it."
"I've had a tracking spell running since the house, but it shouldn't have—" The voices dropped to where I couldn't hear them, although I was intensely curious now. Tracking spell?! I tried to sit up a little, but just then we slowed for a traffic light, so I plunked back down again to avoid being seen.
I shook my phone again and punched some buttons, but it was well and truly dead. RIP phone. This was the third one this year. Phones had this way of dying on me. It was really annoying, and Mom had said she wasn't buying me another one if I couldn't be more careful with this one. But I swear it wasn't anything I did! They just kept crapping out on me, through bad luck or cheap electronics or whatever.
I stuffed the cell phone carcass back into my little black clutch bag. We drove on for a few more minutes, and then the truck turned onto a rough road, rattling me around in the truck bed. My head still hurt, and the bouncing was making it worse. I was starting to feel like one of those lotto balls rolling around in its little ball machine by the time the truck came to a halt and Dad killed the engine.
I listened to Dad and Harry get out of the truck, and waited a minute or two before very cautiously poking my head up to see where I was.
We were on the waterfront in one of the industrial parts of the city. I could see lights reflecting in the ruffled black waters of Lake Michigan. The truck was parked behind a big warehouse or something, with no lights on. A chain-link fence separated us from the docks, and Dad and Harry were in front of it, silhouetted against the lights shining out across the water. Harry's long coat fluttered in the wind, while my dad's cloak was a splash of billowing white. Definitely on a job, then. Their hushed voices carried to me clearly.
"Bolt cutters," Harry was saying.
"Harry," my dad said in a reasonable tone, "I'm sure we can find a night watchman to unlock the gate."
"Yeah, because we look so inconspicuous and harmless, what with the sword and the gun and all. Hey, if we knocked on my door, I'd let us in."
"There's no need to damage property if we don't have to," my dad said in his "Harry, why are you like this" voice.
"Leaving aside the fact that before the night's over, we'll probably blow up the whole place, I bet your sword could cut through —"
Dad's voice sounded faintly reproving. "Breaking and entering is hardly a suitable task for a holy object, Harry."
"Bolt cutters, then," Harry said, and turned around, heading back towards the truck.
It was too dark to tell, but one of the hard objects pressing uncomfortably into various parts of my body was almost certainly Dad's bolt cutters. Crap on a stick. At least the truck was parked in a patch of shadow. In the darkness, I doubted if my dad or Harry could see me — not yet, anyway. Just like on the roof, I slipped out of my boots so as not to make noise, and then, holding them by the laces, slithered over the side.
I retreated to the shelter of a Dumpster moments before Harry arrived at the truck. From the shadows, I watched him rummage around in the bed of the truck with a small flashlight, muttering and cursing under his breath. He didn't look in my direction. I noticed how stiffly he moved, keeping his left arm against the side of his body and doing most of the rummaging with his right.
I didn't know the details, but I did know that Harry and Dad had both almost died not too long ago. Harry had spent a few days at our place, recuperating from what I was pretty sure was a gunshot wound. And I'd seen the bullet holes in Dad's Kevlar breastplate. Mom was really upset about it, a white-lipped kind of upset that I hadn't seen very often and hoped never to see again.
Mom had tasked me with keeping the little hellions away from the spare bedroom where they'd stashed Harry; I think she was worried about his corrupting influence, or something. Naturally all of us kept sneaking in to take a peek at him. I ended up spending quite a bit of time in there, actually, bringing him food and drinks and aspirin, and sometimes just hanging out with him playing card games.
I don't know why. I guess I was curious.
In us kids' minds, Harry Dresden had this kind of mythic status. We kinda grew up seeing him around, but none of us knew much about him at all. The way Mom talked about him, you'd think he was Satan incarnate, while Dad trusted Harry with his own life and with ours. Heck, my little brother was named after him.
Just looking at him, you'd think that he was a homeless guy or something — he's like crazy tall, and skinny as a coat rack, and always looks like it's been two days since he shaved. He makes jokes about everything, but sometimes I get the idea it's just to make sure that he doesn't have to talk about anything he doesn't want to.
Hanging out with him in the spare bedroom, I guess he seemed like — well, not a hero and not a demon, and not a street bum either. Just ... a person. He was so pale and sick-looking. Sometimes I went in while he was sleeping, to pick up dishes or whatever, and as he slept, he'd shiver sometimes, or make little whimpering sounds. I used to wish I could send him good dreams instead of whatever he was dreaming about.
I thought about that as I watched him grab the bolt cutters one-handed and turn away. I had been upset about missing out on clubbing with Tiff and Raven, but all that seemed very petty and childish as I watched Harry limp back over to rejoin my dad. Whatever they were doing here tonight, it was probably dangerous. They could come back hurt, like they had before. Or maybe they wouldn't come back at all.
A sick shiver swept through me. I had this crazy desire to run out there and throw my arms around my dad and stop them both from going to do whatever they were doing.
Of course I didn't move from my hiding place. I just watched Harry swing the gate open, and they both walked through before he swung it loosely shut behind them. On the other side of the gate was an expanse of pavement that went down to some more warehouses and the dark bulk of a barge moored at a long concrete dock. A crane hung over it and some containers were stacked on the dock, but the barge itself appeared to be unloaded and vacant.
I watched Dad and Harry walk towards it, keeping to the shadows, until I could no longer pick out even Dad's white cloak.
I shivered again, though more with cold than fear this time, and straightened up, slapping my arms to get some warmth into them. If I knew I was going to spend the evening by Lake Michigan rather than inside an overheated nightclub, I would've worn a heavier jacket and a skirt that was more than six inches long. At least my feet could be warm. I pulled my boots over my chilly toes and crouched to lace them up properly. My footwear was probably the most practical thing on me, a pair of clompy boots that Tiff had given me. They were shiny and stompy and I loved them to death. I sort of privately thought of them as my monster-kicking boots, not that I expected to run into a monster when I was out and about. Still, if there was anywhere in Chicago I was likely to meet some monsters ...
Okay, no. Bad thought.
At this point I wasn't really sure what to do. No force on heaven or Earth could entice me to set foot on the boat where Dad and Harry had gone, and with my phone dead, this pretty much just left waiting in the truck.
I looked out toward where Dad and Harry had disappeared into the shadows, and then tiptoed (to the extent that it's possible to tiptoe in clompy boots) and found, to no particular surprise, that Dad hadn't locked the truck doors. His biggest flaw is that he thinks everybody is as trustworthy as he is. In this case, though, it saved me from turning into a Mollysicle in the bed of the truck.
"Warmth, blessed warmth," I murmured, sliding into the passenger seat with a sigh of bliss. I didn't have the keys to turn it on, but it still had some residual heat from the drive, and I was out of the wind. My dad's denim jacket lay neatly folded on his seat; I guess he took it off when he put on his working cloak. I wrapped it gratefully around me. It was warm and smelled comfortingly of Dad.
I locked the doors of the truck out of habit, because Mom always said to keep the doors locked when you're sitting in a parked car. Hijackers and whatnot. Mom is the opposing counterbalance to Dad's trusting nature, the yin to his yang or whatever.
Then I snuggled down in Dad's jacket, leaned back in the seat and tried not to fall asleep. I had to stay awake to sneak around back before Dad and Harry came back.
I actually was drifting a bit when the whole truck shuddered.
I jolted out of a weird half-waking dream that involved Tiffany handing me a giant floating ice cream cone. Blinking, I looked wildly around, trying to figure out where I was, and, as that clicked into place, my confusion turned to fear that what woke me up was Dad and Harry coming back.
Then I looked forward, and forget being scared of getting caught in clubwear: it was true terror, a whole world of panic that surged up and overwhelmed me.
There was a ... thing ... sitting — or standing or lying or something — on the hood of the pickup truck. At first glance, it looked like a pile of garbage. But it was very much alive, or so I could guess, in the part of my mind not frozen into a silent scream of terror, because it was moving.
It lay sprawled over the truck's hood like a giant spider made up of garbage. I recognized a paper Coca-Cola cup on one of its appendages, and various candy wrappers stuck here and there. Most of its body — if you could call it that — seemed to be made up of sand and gravel and dry grass and crumpled newspaper: typical roadside garbage, in other words.
I couldn't scream. Couldn't move. I just stared as the thing raked cautiously, experimentally, at the truck's windshield with claws made from nails and broken bottles. Then it abruptly raised the lump of garbage that passed for a head, and looked — as much as something without eyes can look at anything — over in the direction of the barge. In eerie silence, other than the rattling of its trash body, it leaped off the hood of the truck and scuttled rapidly across the pavement, shedding bits of old newspapers and a paper takeout cup or two. It swarmed over the gate and out of sight.
I stared after it, my mouth hanging open. Then I lunged for the passenger door of the truck, so freaked out I totally forgot that I'd locked it already, and hammered on the lock for a minute before realizing that it was already down. Then I did the same thing to the driver's side. Then I curled up in a ball on the seat and cried a few stifled half-sobs of pure terror.
Eventually I calmed down enough to sit up and dry my face. Okay, that settles it, I thought. I wasn't getting out of this truck ever again. I had thought that the worst thing that could happen was Mom and Dad catching me in my clubbing gear. Ha. No. I would rather have Dad ream me from now 'til Tuesday and ground me until I'm 35 than deal with whatever that was.
And then ...
Then the ship exploded.
I saw it out of the corner of my eye, a wash of brilliance that turned the sky white for a moment. And the noise hit me next, breaking over me along with a shockwave that rocked the truck. For a moment afterwards there was just a ringing silence, and as my hearing came back, I could hear the faint roaring of flames.
I crawled into the driver's seat and pressed my hand against the window of the truck. My breath left a faint mist that half-obscured the sight of flaming debris flung far and wide, floating on the dark water. Fire poured out of great gaping holes in the hulk of the ship, sending up a column of black smoke that blotted out the stars.
I whispered, in a strange hoarse voice I didn't even recognize as mine: "No."
Crouched on the seat, I stared at the fire as it slowly began to burn down. One of the warehouses was burning, too, but at least it didn't seem to be spreading very quickly. Someone must have heard that and would call for help ... surely?
The whole dock area was lit up bright as day, and in that flickering radiance I saw something dark move quickly past the burning carcass of the ship.
Cold fear poured through me like water, but in its wake came a great roaring anger. I heard Harry's sarcastic voice, in my head: Before the night's over, we'll probably blow up the whole place. I thought of Mom, staying up late as she always did, waiting for Dad to come home. I remembered the feeling of Dad's beard scraping on my cheek as he'd kissed me goodnight a couple of hours ago.
Fury grew in me until it towered like the flames rising from the barge. Acting on a dimly remembered scrap of conversation that I once overheard between Mom and Dad, I leaned over and reached under the truck's seat. There was another toolbox under there — how many did Dad have? — and a rolled-up blanket and various emergency supplies ... and, behind it all, a shotgun.
It was in its case, broken down and unloaded, because Dad was, of course, still Dad. I stared at the gleaming parts. Technically, I knew how to put it together. Mom didn't like it, but when I had turned thirteen, Dad had started teaching me gun safety. I had never fired a gun, but I knew what all the parts were, and I could take one apart and put it back together. I knew how to point and aim, how to clear it, how to check whether it was ready to fire. The only thing I had no experience with was the actual shooting part, but we had started with a shotgun because according to Dad, all you had to do was point it in the general direction of the thing you wanted to kill. (And only at something you wanted to kill. We'd had a big long talk about that, too.)
I began snapping the well-oiled pieces into place. It was a simple, double-barreled break-action shotgun. There was a box of shells with it, and when I had everything together, I loaded both chambers like I'd been taught and then slipped the box into the pocket of Dad's coat.
I couldn't believe I was doing this instead of hiding away safe in the truck, but I was way, way too pissed off not to.
Besides, I didn't know how to drive yet. I was still at the "theoretical driver's ed" stage of getting my learner's permit. If I didn't find Dad and Harry, I couldn't get home.
Before I could lose my nerve, I unlocked the door and dropped to the pavement. My monster-kicking boots made a nice, satisfying clomp.
The gate stood open, swinging a little in the wind, the cut chain swaying back and forth. I approached it, feeling horribly exposed and clutching the shotgun in trembling hands.
Be invisible, I told myself firmly; be invisible, chanting the mantra to myself, just like when I used to play hide-and-seek with the sibs when we were all littler. I was the very best at hiding. Sometimes my sibs didn't seem to see me even when I was in plain sight.
Another stab of ice-cream-headache pain lanced through my temple. I winced and crept through the open gate, looking around.
The fire didn't seem to be spreading, at least. It was just one warehouse on fire, as well as the flaming remains of the barge. As far as I could tell, this part of the docks was deserted, with a lot of boarded-up windows and just a few scattered floodlights here and there. With the searing light of the flames, the whole dock area was a patchwork of too-black shadows and too-bright, exposed open spaces. It was the worst possible combination of giving me not enough places to hide, and way too many places for other things to hide.
Be invisible. Be invisible. I crept forward.
I tried to tell myself that it was just like playing paintball, or hide-and-seek; that there wasn't a very real possibility that Dad and Harry were dead. I tried to convince myself I was trying to hide from other kids armed with paintball guns, or a little sister who at very worst might jump on me and tickle me — not by freaky-ass garbage monsters.
A clatter from up ahead made me jump and nearly drop the gun. I fumbled with it until I had the business end pointed in the general direction of whatever had made the noise.
I could still go back to the truck.
I tried not to listen to the voice of reason and common sense.
Instead I crept along the side of the nearest warehouse. The one next to it was the one on fire, and the wash of heat from that and the burning barge were withering. The air smelled like burning plastic. There was a lot of debris scattered around everywhere, pieces of metal from the barge, lumps of stuff, all kinds of junk, making it pretty hard to figure out where a monster made entirely of junk might be hiding in all of this. Drifting smoke kept getting in my way, stinging my eyes and obscuring my vision.
I saw the sword first.
A shiny five-foot-long broadsword is pretty distinctive, after all. It was out of its scabbard and lying on the ground maybe twenty feet or so in front of me.
At the sight of its gleaming, unmistakeable blade and cross-shaped hilt, my knees turned to water and I swayed against the side of the warehouse. If the sword was there, then that meant Dad was dead. He would never, ever drop the sword, not for any reason.
Then I got myself together. I thought of Mom waiting at home, of the little kids, and I straightened my back and held the gun in front of me and took another few steps forward.
Looking out beyond Amoracchius, I saw Harry's staff lying haphazardly on the dock. It took me a moment to see Harry himself; he was a lump in the sprawling muddle of his dark coat. I couldn't tell if he was alive; I also couldn't tell if it was just the ambient smoke in the air, or if there was actual smoke rising from his coat. It looked more like the latter option. After another moment's frantic searching, I finally found Dad, a white puddle in contrast to the dark one that Harry made. Or, formerly white; Mom was going to have to spend a lot of time and a lot of bleach to get the cloak back to its former state.
And there was movement out there, and it wasn't them.
Some of the pieces of junk were pulling themselves together, and picking themselves up into a sort of shape.
I stared. It was unreal. It was ... magic, I thought. It was magic, real magic. I knew there was such a thing; like I said, us kids aren't stupid and we have a pretty good idea of what's going on around us, out there in Dad's world. And I had just gotten an up-close-and-personal look at the garbage monster on the truck ... but seeing it through the windshield, with at least that level of separation, made it a little easier to handle.
This was something else.
I watched the ... the whatever-it-was, the trash Frankenstein monster, put itself together, forming the major parts of its body from huge, jagged pieces of barge hull and massive chunks of rebar-jutting concrete. More trash rolled toward it, and I thought I glimpsed the small creature (and it was small, it seemed as harmless and small as a neighbor's dog to me now) roll toward it as if borne by the wind and fragment into the bulk of the greater one.
It cautiously put down a metal leg, tapping out a foothold on the dock. If it was like anything, it was like a sort of giant spider, made out of explosion debris with about a dozen legs. Parts of it were still smoldering.
It took a step forward. Then another. Ponderously and slowly, it crunched its way across the field of debris toward Harry, which was way too close to me. It looked as big as a house. There was no way the shotgun would even scratch that thing. Frozen, I watched in a haze of shock as it hooked two prongs of rebar into Harry's shirt and lifted him like a rag doll. He jerked suddenly to life and motion, fighting its grip in a dazed kind of way.
"Wizard." The voice was a grating vibration that made my teeth hurt. It made me think of stones rasping together in an old rusty drainpipe.
Harry coughed and subsided in its grasp, his feet dangling dangerously high above the dock. "So," he said hoarsely, his voice carrying to me. "Guess throwing around fire spells with fuel tanks right there is a bad idea."
There was a grinding sound I couldn't at first figure out, and then I realized it was—oh God—the creature trying to talk. It took a few tries before it managed to make recognizable words from the rasping noise that could only have been made by various parts of itself grinding together.
"Wizard," it rasped out.
"That's me," Harry said with a cough. He was doing something with his hand, and I caught a flash of something glittering between his fingers, maybe some of those rings he always wore. "Can I call you something? Can't call you Bob, it's already taken. How about Larry? Or—I've got a better idea." It was now tilting its head, or headlike appendage, in confusion. "How about — Forzare!?"
He flung his hand into its, for lack of a better word, face, and there was a muffled thump, and both it and Harry went flying in opposite directions. It disintegrated, or at least most of it did. Harry hit the deck and rolled a few times in a swirl of coat.
The monster didn't seem to be dead, exactly, but it was now scattered in pieces again, and I broke from my paralysis and ran toward my dad.
"Dad," I said, half-sobbing as I crouched beside him. I laid down the shotgun and tried to turn him over. "Dad!"
His face was bloody, but he was breathing. I started crying wholeheartedly in relief. Then I looked up, through my tears, and saw the monster looming over us again.
I grabbed the shotgun. There was suddenly no doubt in my mind about what I needed to do. Crouching beside my dad, I pointed then gun at what passed for the thing's head, and let it have both barrels.
The kick smacked into my shoulder; the noise was horrendous. It blew a few pieces of trash out of the side of its head and did nothing other than that.
Then a big, sharp-edged piece of metal came down toward us.
It glanced off empty air with a bright flash. The creature reeled back in a trash avalanche as a bunch of it fell apart again, but it immediately started drawing themselves back together. And then Harry was kneeling next to me.
"Yeah, shotguns don't help much against hoarderbeasts. What are you doing here?" he said, laying a hand in the middle of my back.
"Uh," I said, because it wasn't like I had an explanation. My whole body shuddered and I had to stop myself from bursting into tears of sheer relief.
Harry laid two fingers lightly against my dad's neck, and breathed a little at whatever he found. "Michael," he said, giving him a shake. "Hell's bell's. Molly, do you see the sword?"
"There." I pointed, and then I got up and ran over to it.
I hadn't had much to do with my dad's sword. We weren't supposed to touch it. I didn't even know if I could touch it. But I grabbed the hilt on pure instinct, and it didn't, like, burn me or anything. It was also a lot heavier than it looked. I lugged it back over to where Harry was getting my dad up with an arm over his shoulder.
"Truck," Harry said, and we made a hasty retreat. Harry was limping a lot worse now. I clutched the sword in front of me and wondered what would happen if I actually had to use it in a fight.
I had lost sight of the monster, which you wouldn't think would be possible when you were dealing with a twenty-foot-high garbage spider, but the attack, when it came, seemed to come out of nowhere. Its metal-edged feet rebounded off Harry's shield, but there wasn't nearly as much of a rebound this time, not even enough to knock it down. Whatever was keeping that thing off us, Harry was running out of it.
The next blow shattered the shield. We went sprawling, and ingloriously, I lost my grip on the sword. It went spinning out of reach on the concrete. So much for Molly Carpenter, Monster Slayer.
And the next thing I knew, I was being dragged into the air by my fancy, useless little vinyl jacket.
I twisted around, screaming and lashing out. I really never meant for my monster-kicking boots to have to live up to their name, but it turned out they were actually pretty good for the job. It jarred my feet, but it didn't really hurt, and the creature seemed to pause in bafflement at encountering a shrieking, kicking, too-tall-for-her-age teenager instead of the passive victim that it had (I guess) expected.
"Molly, curl up as tight as you can!" Harry's ragged voice shouted at me.
I obeyed, curling up into a ball as tight as I could in my awkward dangling position. This meant that I couldn't really see anything, which was probably best, except if I was going to die impaled on sentient debris I did actually kind of want to see it.
"Forzare!" Harry yelled.
I used to get in pillow fights with the sibs when we were younger. What happened was sort of like being slapped with a pillow full of cement. It knocked the breath out of me and I went flying in a hail of flying debris.
Rather than smashing into the pavement, I hit something that felt like a marginally softer pillow (made of drying cement, say) and then wrapped around me like an overly friendly octopus. I tried to scream, muffled — it smelled like leather and sweat — and tumbled to a stop, thoroughly tangled in what was, I found, as I awkwardly untangled myself, Harry's coat.
"Molly!" Harry called. He sounded exhausted. "You okay?"
I had to try a couple of times before I managed to get out, "Fine!" I staggered to my feet and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. For a horrified instant I thought I was bleeding black, then realized it was lipstick.
"Get back over here with me!" Harry called. "Bring the coat!"
I tottered over to him with an armload of oversized leather duster dragging on the ground. When I got there, he was crouched beside my dad, hastily drawing something with chalk on the pavement.
Magic symbols. Sure. Why not. The garbage spider was already pulling itself back together with a lot of clanking and grinding.
"Do you have anything, or see anything around here made of organic materials?" Harry demanded. "A wool scarf, leather, it doesn't matter—I could use the coat, but I really don't want to —"
"I have something." I coughed a little, and crouched down, and started unlacing one of my boots. They were genuine leather, according to Tiff. (Also hella expensive, according to Tiff, and my favorite footwear, but somehow that didn't seem important right now.)
"Ah, yeah, perfect," Harry said, and took it.
The monster was just about pulled back together now, rearing up above us. Harry ignored it completely — I wasn't sure how he could manage that — and focused entirely on my boot, placing it in the middle of the circle he had drawn.
It was starting to throw off green sparks.
I tried to divide my attention between starting at the monster, and staring at Harry charging up my boot with ... whatever. It was spitting sparks like a Roman candle when he picked it up and threw it at the monster.
He had a good throwing arm. It hit dead center.
Green light flashed through the garbage spider's entire structure, and then it began to crumble. This wasn't the way it had fallen apart on impact before. This was something more insidious, a disintegration that even I could tell it wasn't going to be getting up from.
It fell apart in a glorious clatter of broken materials, and as I turned around to cheer and high-five Harry, I was just in time to watch him wilt to the pavement, though not in time to catch him.
"Harry!"
I groped for a pulse and eventually found it right where the lady who taught the first aid class at my summer camp said it was supposed to be. Definitely a pulse. That was about all I could tell, but it was a lot better than like ... no pulse.
I checked Dad's pulse too — present — and then went and got the sword. I gave a wide berth to all the pieces of monster, but none of them moved. It just looked like debris scattered on the docks. Whatever Harry had done to it the last time seemed to have held.
So here we were.
I was absolutely freezing. I wrapped Harry's coat around me and sat down between him and Dad, and just shivered for a minute.
I closed my eyes, but kept cracking them open to peek at the garbage monster, which still hadn't moved.
Harry and Dad were going to wake up soon — I hoped. And then I was going to have to face the music for being here tonight. I just hoped that being ultra-brave against a garbage monster would counterbalance the "grounded until 35" aspect.
It probably would with Harry. Dad ... not so much. Actually, me having put myself in danger would make it worse.
Forget 35. Try 65.
It occurred to me gradually, penetrating my dazed state, that Dad had never actually seen me tonight. He was unconscious the whole time. The only person who knew I was here was Harry.
I turned to look at him. He was lying next to me, sprawled with a sort of ungainly vulnerable look, and I felt a ghost of that feeling I'd felt in the spare bedroom back at him, where I just wanted to somehow protect him a little bit.
Although I was still shivering, I unwrapped the coat from me and covered him with it. I could deal. It was my fault I was out here in a vinyl jacket and a skirt that barely covered my anything, after all.
I just wished there was some way I could convince him not to tell my parents that I was here tonight.
There was a belief I'd had ever since I was a little kid, that I could get people to think what I wanted them to think just by thinking it hard enough at them. It didn't ever really work, at least I couldn't bring myself to believe so, but there were times when it genuinely did seem to have some kind of effect. So I did it now, staring at Harry like I could see into his brain. And I thought as hard as I could:
"Hey, Harry? Please, please, please, please forget I was here tonight. You never saw me. I was back in the my bedroom the whole time. The only person out here was Dad. You —"
And then it was like the world went still, and a voice like a metal spike in my ear said, "Child, what are you doing?"
I looked up.
There was a woman standing in front of me. I had no idea where she came from. I knew she wasn't there a second ago. She was icily beautiful, with blonde hair and a simple white tunic that fell to her knees. If I was cold, she must be absolutely freezing. Her legs were bare and so were her feet. But she looked perfectly comfortable — and very angry.
Once again I found something scarier than my parents. I very much did not want this woman angry at me.
"Explain yourself," she said. "What were you trying to do to his mind?"
I could only stammer. "I ... I don't know." I was close to tears. "Who are you?"
She gazed at me with her strange, cool eyes, and then went abruptly to one knee to look at me more closely.
"You really don't know," she said in a voice close to wonder.
"Don't know what?"
She gave her head a brief shake, and smiled at me. It was an eerie smile, edged like a blade. "You know what, I'm going to do you a favor. I won't actually peel your mind like a grape. What you were trying to do is like taking a sledgehammer to a glass bowl. I'm a scalpel."
"I wasn't—" I began.
"Shhh. I'm not done." She reached out a finger. It didn't quite touch my lips, but I hushed anyway. "No one gets inside his head but me. This is me giving you a big warning sign that says KEEP OUT." The freaky thing was, for an instant, I did see a sign just like that, edged with barbed wire. "Now, you just keep your mind to yourself, and so will I. Understand?"
"No!" I said desperately, and just like that, I was alone on the docks, with nothing but the unconscious bodies of the adults.
*
Harry started coming around after that, waking up slowly, groaning and rubbing his head. He didn't ask me any questions. I didn't ask him any questions either. Between us, we got Dad back into the cab of the truck. Harry wrapped me up again in his coat.
I stammered out my story about stowing away in the truck bed, and begged him not to tell my parents.
"That kinda depends," Harry said. "What did you see tonight?"
"Nothing?" I said faintly.
"Good answer."
We were in the cab of the truck with Dad slumped against the passenger door, Amoracchius by his leg, and me between them, huddled in Harry's big coat. Harry turned to me now, and, gently, brushed some hair out of my eyes. His face was bruised and very tired, but his expression was kind.
"Go home, Molly," he said gently. "Don't think about what happened tonight. After a while, it won't seem real to you. You'll wonder if you imagined most of it. And that's where you want to be, at home with the door between you and the dark. Understand?"
I nodded wordlessly. I was afraid that if I said anything, I was going to cry.
Harry put the truck in gear.
I held Dad's cool, limp hand the whole way.
When we pulled up outside the house, I wanted to cry all over again. It looked so homey, so nice and safe. There was a light in the downstairs window. We sat there in the driveway for a moment with the truck idling, and Harry gave me another of those tired, kind looks.
"I'm gonna guess that your parents think you're in your room."
I nodded wordlessly.
"Then you'd better get back up there, huh?"
He opened the door. Dad's hand jerked a little in mine—he was starting to wake up—and my heart unclenched a little. I climbed down quickly after Harry, and he took his coat back, sliding it off my shoulders and then back onto his own.
"I'm gonna guess," he said, and a weary flicker of amusement sparked in his eyes, "that you have your own way of getting back in."
I nodded.
"Well, better get to it then."
I nodded again and turned to take a few quick, running steps across the lawn, limping awkwardly on my one boot and one stocking foot. I jumped up on the old-fashioned rain barrel under the eaves, pulled myself onto the porch roof, and paused to take off my remaining boot to make sure not to make noise.
I looked back once. Harry was helping Dad out of the truck. I gave a little wave; I don't know if he saw me. Then I lightfooted my way across the roof, pried open the window from the little crack I had left for myself, and slipped in.
The room was dim except for my sister's nightlight. I undressed quietly in the dark, shaking a little. My head still throbbed fiercely, I had a million scrapes and bruises that were going to be hard to explain, and just like Harry had said, the night already seemed to be turning into kind of a blur, especially the blonde woman. I couldn't remember her clearly anymore, and her face, especially, was nothing but a haze. I was already starting to doubt some of what I'd seen.
But not all of it.
There was real magic in the world. I had always known this, but now I had seen it and touched it, and the reek of diesel smoke was still in my clothes and hair to remind me.
My sister rolled over with a groan, and then sat up in bed. "Have you been smoking?" she said in a piercing whisper.
"No!" I whispered sharply back, reaching for my nightgown. Maybe I'd just burn these clothes. Or sneak out after the household settled down from Dad coming home—I could hear voices downstairs now, so Mom was awake—and stuff them into the recycling.
"You totally owe me to keep this quiet," said the grade-school extortionist smugly.
"I'll pay you whatever you want, just go to sleep."
I crawled under the covers and pretended I couldn't hear her, and eventually she fell back asleep again.
I lay awake for a long time, listening to the cadence of the voices from downstairs—Mom angry, Harry conciliatory and occasionally sarcastic, and Dad interjecting what sounded like peacemaking comments in his low, soothing rumble.
He was well enough to talk. He was going to be okay. I closed my eyes and let a few tears slip out.
No one came up to knock on my door, so I guess Harry didn't rat me out.
After a while, it all blurred into strange nonsensical dreams, most of them featuring fire, and a blonde woman with no face.
*
It wasn't long afterwards when I accidentally turned invisible in front of my mom and changed my whole world forever.
And it was even longer before I really understood some of the things I had done that night.
As for the blonde woman in Harry's head ... I never was entirely sure I hadn't made her up.
But there's a lot that I now know about the world, and a lot that Harry hasn't told me about himself. I have some guesses. Maybe someday I'll get some answers.
Things are really different now, but of the few things that haven't changed, I still like to keep a pair of monster-kicking boots on hand for emergencies. I have much more powerful weapons now, but like I learned that night on the docks with Harry Dresden, sometimes there's just no substitute for the classics.