Mab stopped under the hole in the roof and stared up at it, her face pale and perfect in the wan shaft of daylight, filtered through thick, sleepy rain clouds. The raindrops that made it through bounced off her and landed on the floor with sharp clicks, as tiny chips of ice. “You begin to see the shape of my problems, my Knight.” She glanced at me. “You are a wolf. A predator. One they need.”

“I’m the hero Chicago deserves,” I said in my best overblown Batman voice. “But not the one it swiped on Tinder.”

Mab glanced at me wearily. “You know what it is,” she said, “to sell pieces of your soul so that someone who will never know your name will have another chance at life.”

I didn’t have a response for that.

Silence fell.

I walked over beside Mab and looked up out of the castle at the soft daylight and the falling rain.

When droplets hit me, I just got wet.

“I always figured,” I said, “that when you sold your soul, it went all at once.”

She smiled faintly. Click, click, click.

“You didn’t even understand who would be receiving it,” she said. “Honestly, why you children keep making such bargains with old serpents like me, I shall never understand.”

I frowned up at the light.

“When big, bad, hungry evil showed up at the door,” I said, “I wanted the people of Chicago kept safe. So I fought it. With everything I had.”

“Yes,” Mab said.

“So did Marcone,” I said. “End of the day, when push came to shove, he gave people who were in trouble shelter behind his walls. And he fought to defend the city.”

“He did,” Mab said.

“I won’t forget it.”

I eyed her.

“So did you,” I said.

She stared up at the light, ignoring me. Click, click, click.

“Thank you,” I said. “You fought for my city. My people. Thank you.”

She looked at me in sudden confusion.

“Thank you,” I said, for the third time.

Three repetitions separate the random from the intentional. Repeat something three times, and you make it more real.

Mab shivered at my gratitude.

She closed her eyes.

And for a second, raindrops fell through the hole in the roof.

Then they went click, click, click again. And Mab opened her eyes. “Child,” she said. “You are welcome.”

“I have a question,” I said.

“Ask.”

“The Eye,” I said. “It was made of pure hate. I felt that.”

“Yes.”

“It destroyed everything it touched,” I said. “Except you. Even Titania didn’t touch it when she faced it. But you could. Why?”

Mab’s mouth turned up into a faint smile.

“Everyone,” she said, “thinks that hate and love are somehow opposite forces. They are not. They are the same force, facing opposite directions.” She glanced aside at me. “Love is a fire, my Knight. Love turned the wrong way has killed as many as hate. Reason, young wizard, is the opposite of hate, not love. Ethniu could not destroy me with a single blast of the Eye. I was quite certain of it. I ran the numbers.”

I stared at her for a moment. Then I nodded.

“You need to run a few more,” I said. “Because you’re asking too much of me. It’s more than I can give you.”

“Why?” she asked. “Because your lover fell in battle?”

I gave her a furious look.

She took it without noticing, and I was too tired to keep it up. “You will heal. I have buried a cohort of lovers over the years, Dresden,” she said, without malice. “We won this battle. Enjoy the victory. But the war goes on—and it must yet be fought.”

It wasn’t like I saw Murph’s shade standing there. That would have been too much. But I could imagine what it would look like, standing there, staring at me impatiently while Mab said things that would become no less true just because I didn’t like them.

“You’re asking too much,” I said.

“You find the pairing undesirable?”

“I find it suicidal, and it wouldn’t matter who she was,” I said. “You’re forcing me into something that shouldn’t be forced.”

Her voice turned colder and harder than any stone in Antarctica. “Yes. I am.” She glanced at me. “Because I judge it necessary. Our world has just become infinitely more uncertain and dangerous. We must become stronger and more stable to face it, securing both the appearance and fact of a secure alliance with a competent partner. That is more important than any given person or their petty desires. Including yours.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “And it doesn’t matter. You should do it.”

“Do what?”

“Get married. Lara wouldn’t mind.”

“Not possible,” Mab said. “If it was work I could do myself, I would.”

Which . . . I believed, actually. “Why not?”

“Certain aspects of my power have to do with choices I made when I was mortal,” she said. “There would be . . . compatibility issues. This is part of the task the Knight was designed for.”

“Designed for? I’m not. . . . That isn’t how it works. It’s not a choice I’m making. That’s just how it is.”

Click, click, click.

“There is,” Mab said, a very soft, very gentle tone of warning in her voice, “one year, for it to be different.”

“That isn’t how it works,” I said. “People aren’t machine parts. You can’t just plug them in wherever. They aren’t game pieces. You can’t just pick them up and move them around the board, wherever you want them to go.”

“Yet the machine still must function. The game must be played,” she said, her voice implacable, stating facts, not angry. “Do not test me. There is no margin here for you to dance within. Bend, wizard. Or I will break you.”

I drew in a breath and let it out again.

“I guess we’ll see,” I said.

Her eyes glinted. But she looked like someone who had heard what she expected to hear. She inclined her head to me in an opponent’s acknowledgment. “We will see.”

* * *