She regarded the phone for a moment, sighed, and dropped the useless wreck onto the ground.

“Hey, Molls,” I said.

“Harry,” she said. “I have a phone for exactly this reason.”

“This is a business call,” I said in a quiet, low voice. “Knight to Lady.”

Molly inhaled slowly. “I … oh. I see.”

“Things are getting tense,” I said. “The Wardens have decided I am a threat. I’m being monitored, and they’re doing some kind of cheesy technical weirdness with cell phones now. Couldn’t risk a call without Ramirez getting involved in the conversation.”

Some ugly flicker went across Molly’s face at the mention of the Wardens. She shook her head, put her hands on her stomach, and said, “Ugh. That’s the strangest feeling, being summoned.”

“That seems like it should be true,” I said. “I apologize for the inconvenience.”

The Winter Lady stared at me for an unnerving second before she said, in Molly’s voice, “Apology accepted.” She looked around the circle at the objects involved in the summoning and promptly pounced on the jar of Nutella. “Aha! Payment. Now we’re square.” She opened the jar, seized the Ring Pop, and put it on her left forefinger. Then she dipped the Ring Pop in, and closed her eyes as she licked the confection off it. “Oh God,” she said. “I haven’t had food in a day and a half.”

“Hell’s bells, Padawan,” I said. “Nutella and corn syrup is probably not the place to start.”

“Probably not,” she agreed, and scooped out an even larger dollop. “You going to let me out of the circle or what?”

“Honestly,” I said, “I’m a little curious to see if you can do it yourself. I mean, you’re still human, too. That circle shouldn’t be able to hold Molly.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “Harry, you could put me through a wood chipper if you wanted. I’d get better. Immortal now, remember?” She lifted a hand and reached out to touch the plane of the circle. The tip of her finger flattened as if pressed against perfectly transparent glass. “I’m human. But this mantle isn’t like yours. It’s an order of magnitude more complex. It’s not something you put on like a cloak. It’s all through me now. Intermixed.” She shook her head sadly. “I could leave this circle, I think—but not without leaving the largest part of me behind. Whatever was left wouldn’t be … right. Find someone else to experiment with.”

A cold feeling kind of spread through me, starting right behind my belt buckle.

Because that circle shouldn’t have been able to hold Molly.

Which meant that the being talking to me … wasn’t. Not the way I remembered. Molly had taken on the mantle of the Winter Lady and become something that wasn’t quite human anymore. She was dealing with forces that I might literally be unable to comprehend. Those pressures might have changed the shape of her, made her into something else, something dangerous.

Which, I thought, must be almost precisely what Ramirez is thinking about you.

Molly had definitely become someone darker and more dangerous.

But she was still Molly. Still the girl I’d met years ago, still the young woman I’d trained, still the woman who’d fought by my side on too many occasions to easily count. My instincts told me that she was something to be feared. And my instincts were right.

But people are often more than one thing. Molly was a very pretty, very dangerous monster now. But she was also the Padawan. She was also my friend.

I leaned down and broke the circle with my hand, releasing its energy back into the universe with a subaudible popping sensation.

Molly exhaled and calmly stepped out of the circle. She regarded me for a long moment and said, “God, you look tired.”

I tilted my head at her and suddenly smiled. “You mean ‘old.’ ”

“Weathered,” she countered. “Like Aragorn.”

I laughed at that. As a wizard, I could expect three centuries and change. Maybe more. I still had a decade and change to go before my body started settling into what it would look like for most of my life. “Wanna know a secret?”

“Always.”

“Only the young think being called old is an insult,” I said, still smiling. “I am what I am, regardless of what anyone calls it. No one can change it, regardless of what anyone calls it. And it mostly means that nothing has managed to kill me yet.”

Molly gave me a small, bitter smile. “One thing did.”

“I asked for your help with that,” I said sternly. “You had a hell of a tough choice to make, and you chose loyalty to your friend. I will never forget that, Molly.”

“Neither will I,” she said quietly.

I pursed my lips. There is no guilt like wizard guilt, because there is no arrogance like wizard arrogance. We get used to having so much power, so much ability to change things, that we also tend to assume that whatever happens is also our responsibility. Throw in a few shreds of human decency, where you actually worry about the results of your actions upon others, and you wind up with a lot of regrets.

Because it’s hard, it’s really, really hard, in fact damned near impossible, to exercise power without it having some unexpected consequences. Doesn’t matter what kind of power it is—magic, muscle, political office, electricity, moral authority. Use any of it, and you’re going to find out that as a result, things happen that you didn’t expect.

When those consequences are a blown light bulb, no big deal.

But sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes they die. Sometimes innocents. Sometimes friends.

Molly probably wasn’t going to forgive herself for assisting in what had amounted to a very complicated near suicide. There’d been a lot of fallout, on every conceivable scale. Very little of it had been Molly’s fault, directly or otherwise, but she’d been a mover on that scene, and she probably felt at least as bad as I did about it, and I’d been way more in the middle of things.

And, being a wizard, I felt guilty as hell for walking her into that. I hadn’t had much choice, if I wanted to save my daughter’s life, but though the cost was worthy, it still had to be paid—and Molly had laid down cold, hard cash.

So cold and so hard that Mab had wound up choosing her to be the new Winter Lady, in fact.

Suddenly I wondered if maybe I hadn’t been hard enough on myself. I mean, hell, at least when I’d become the Winter Knight, I’d made a choice. My back had been to a wall and my options had all sucked, but I’d at least sought out my bargain with Mab.

Molly hadn’t been consulted, and Mab’s policy on dissenting opinion was crystalline: Deal with it or die.

Of course, for inveterate dissenters like myself, it created a pretty simple counterpolicy for when I was tired of Mab’s crap: Deal with it or kill me. Mab was a lot of things, but irrational wasn’t one of them, and as long as it was easier to put up with me than replace me, we had attained a state of balance. I imagined that Molly had come to similar arrangements.

I put my hand on her shoulder, squeezed slightly, and gave her another smile. “Hey. It was hard, for everyone. But we came through it. And with all these scars, we have to have learned a lesson somewhere, right?”