“Good work,” I said. Then I walked over to the bathroom door and knocked gently. “Sarissa,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” she answered.

“We’re going out,” I said. “I hope we won’t be gone long. You should be safe here, but you’re free to leave if you want to do so. I think you might be followed if you do, but you aren’t a prisoner or anything. Okay?”

There was a hesitant moment of silence and then she said, “I understand.”

“There’s food in the fridge,” Molly called. “And you can sleep in my room if you’re tired. The door has a lock.”

There was no answer.

“Let’s get moving,” I said to Molly. “I want to make a stop before we track them down.”

* * *

The svartalves’ security guy stopped us before we could leave and informed us that my car had been repaired and delivered, and that they would bring it around for me. Molly and I traded a glance.

“Um. How sure are you that the vehicle is secure?” Molly asked.

“Mr. Etri personally requested a security sweep,” the guard said. “It’s already been screened for weapons, explosives, toxins, and any kind of enchantment, Miss Carpenter. Right now, they’re running it under a waterfall to wash away any tracking spells that might be on it. It’s the same procedure Mr. Etri uses to secure his own cars, miss.”

“Who brought it?” Molly asked.

The guard took a small notebook from his pocket and checked it. “A local mechanic named Mike Atagi. Think there’s a picture . . .” He thumbed through the pages, and then held up a color printout that had been folded into the notebook. “This is him.”

I leaned forward to peer at the photo. Well, son of a gun. It was my old mechanic, Mike. Mike had been a miracle worker when it came to repairing the Blue Beetle, working with a talent that was the next-best thing to sorcery to bring the car back from the dead over and over again.

“Did he say who delivered it to him?” I asked.

The guard checked his notes. “Here. That it was waiting at his shop when he got there, along with a deposit and a rush order, reading, ‘Repair this for Harry Dresden and return it to the following address or suffer, mortal smith.’”

“Cat Sith,” I said. “Well, at least he was on the job while we were out at the island.”

There was a low growling sound and the Munstermobile came gliding up out of the parking garage, dripping water from its gleaming surface like some lantern-eyed leviathan rising from the depths. There were still a few dents and dings in it, but the broken glass had all been replaced, and the engine sounded fine.

Okay, I’m not like a car fanatic or anything—but the guitar riff from “Bad to the Bone” started playing in my head.

“Wheels,” I said. “Excellent.”

The Munstermobile came gliding up to us and stopped, still dripping water, and another security guy got out of it, left the driver door open, and came around to open the passenger door for Molly.

I touched Molly’s shoulder to stop her from moving to get in immediately, and spoke to her very quietly. “How much do you trust your friend Mr. Etri?”

“Etri might oppose you,” Molly said. “He might break your bones. He might cut your throat in your sleep or make the ground swallow you up. But he will never, ever lie about his intentions. He’s not a friend, Harry. But he is my ally. He’s good at it.”

I wanted to say something smart-ass about not trusting anyone who lived anywhere near the Faerie realms, but I held back. For one thing, svartalves take paranoia to an art form, and I had no doubt they would be listening to everything everyone said on their own property while not in private quarters. It would have been stupid to insult them. For another thing, they had an absolutely ironclad reputation for integrity and neutrality. No one crossed a svartalf lightly—but on the other hand, the svartalves rarely gave anyone a good reason to cross them, either. That garnered them a boatload of respect.

They also had a reputation for rigid adherence to promises, to bargains, and to the law, or at least to the letters it consisted of. “What are the terms of your alliance?” I asked, walking around the car toward the driver side.

“I get the apartment,” Molly said. “I mean, it’s mine. I own it. They handle any maintenance for the next fifty years, and as long as I’m on their property, they consider me to be a citizen of their nation, with all the rights and privileges that entails.”

I whistled as we got in and shut the doors. “And what did you give them for that?”

“Their honor. And there might have been this bomb problem I handled for them.”

“Hell’s bells,” I said. “Look at you, all grown-up.”

“You have been,” Molly said. “All day.”

I tried not to give her a guilty glance as we pulled out. “Um.”

“I feel it, you know,” she said. “The pressure inside you.”

“I’ve got it buttoned down,” I said, and started driving. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to let it make me . . . take anything away from you.”

Molly folded her hands in her lap, looked down at them, and said in a small voice, “If it’s given, freely offered, you can’t really take it away. All you’re doing is accepting a gift.”

Part of me felt like something had torn in my chest, so deep was the ache I felt at the hope, the uncertainty in the grasshopper’s voice.

And another part of me wanted to howl and attack her. Take her. Now. It didn’t even want to wait to stop the car. If I went purely by the numbers, there was no reason at all not to give in to that urge—except for the car crashing, I mean. Molly was an adult woman now. She was exceptionally attractive. I’d seen her naked once, and she was really good at it. She was willing—eager, even. And I trusted her. I’d taught her a lot over the years, and some of that had been extremely intimate. Master-apprentice relationships were hardly unheard-of in wizarding circles. Some wizards even favored that situation, because on the spooky side, sex can be a whole hell of a lot more dangerous than recreational. They regarded the teaching of physical intimacy as something as inextricably intertwined with magic as it is with life.

It’s possible that, from a standpoint of pure, unadulterated reason, they might even have a point.

But there was more to it than reason. I’d known Molly when she was wearing a training bra. I’d hung out in her tree house with her after she’d come home from high school. She was the daughter of the man I respected most in this world and the woman whom I least wanted to cross. I believed that people in positions of authority and influence, especially those in the role of mentor and teacher, had a mountainous level of responsibility to maintain in order to balance out that influence over less experienced individuals.

But mostly, I couldn’t do it because Molly had been crushing on me since she was about fourteen years old. She was in love with me, or at least thought she was—and I didn’t feel it back. It wouldn’t be fair to her to rip her heart out that way. And I would never, ever forgive myself for hurting her.

“It’s okay,” she almost-whispered. “Really.”