Right. She could manipulate me, obviously. She could deceive me. But she couldn’t change me.
Only I could do that.
And no, that wasn’t going to happen. Yeah, maybe I wasn’t perfect, but I wasn’t going to become her freaking monster, either. And while we were at it, who the hell did she think she was, to deceive me like that? And did she honestly believe that she was going to pull something like that on me and I was going to just sit there twiddling my thumbs?
No. Hell, no.
And if I did it right, maybe I could solve two problems at once.
I needed to talk to Lara.
And Molly.
Chapter
Forty
Molly leaned on the merlon with her arms folded, atop the battlements of the castle, looking down at the protesters across the street.
There were more of them now, and more organized. They spent the top twenty minutes of every hour banging drums and chanting.No more war and strife, we just want a normal life!was kind of impossible not to empathize with. Who doesn’t want that, at least for their own flavor of “normal”? But by the time they’d gotten toHo, ho, hey, hey, culty weirdos go away!it was getting a little harder not to take it personally.
They were scaring some of the kids.
Molly was wearing jeans and a bomber jacket over a turtleneck. She was looking almost inhumanly lean, and her eyes were glacial blue-green and particularly feline today. She stared out at the protesters, her expression unreadable, and looked like someone who was remembering faces. “Don’t you think you’d better do something about this?”
“People got rights,” I said firmly.
“Such as the right not to be harassed in their own homes?” Molly suggested.
“Starts getting cold in another few hours,” I said. “They’ll leave then.”
“For now,” Molly said. “What about later?”
I sighed. “As long as it’s just words, we’re fine here.”
“Makes you wonder who put them up to it,” Molly said.
“Things have been crazy,” I said. “People get worked up. They need an outlet.” I waved a hand. “Tens of thousands died in the battle. Means a lot of bereaved people. Traumatized people. People whose whole world was yanked out from under them. But they’re cut off from the rest of things here, for a while. Could be they’re just hurting. Could be there doesn’t have to be a villain at work. People get weird at times like this. Maybe it’s better to allow for that.” The chanting stopped, and the protesters broke up into casual conversations. “There, see?” I said. “Look how happy they look now.”
“Hmph,” Molly said. “They throw a single egg, vegetable, rock, or firework at this place, and the weather is going to get cold very, very quickly.”
And I realized that Molly was being protective. Of me.
I looked aside at her with a lopsided smile.
“Thank you for that,” I said.
Molly puffed a breath up from her extended lower lip, blowing some hair away from her eyes, and gave me a somewhat sheepish look. “You’ve had a tough enough year,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. I took a slow breath. “Did you know what Mab was doing?”
Molly went still. She frowned down at the protesters, her expression clouding.
“You did,” I said.
“I put it together,” she said quietly. “I wanted to tell you. I tried to tell you. But Mab forbade me from communicating with you about it, directly or indirectly. I’m sorry, Harry.”
Mab’s word was literally law in Winter. If she gave a command to one of her Court, that was that.
