Fantastic. Just what the town needed.
The alleyways had fallen silent and still again, nothing evident moving in them. “You brought goblins along?” I asked Molly.
She turned slowly back to face us after watching the Wardens go and said, “Did I?”
Molly was hell on wheels with illusion, her absolute specialty of magic. If she wanted to make you see something, or not see it, she could probably arrange to do so. Of course, she could also whistle up an armyof angry and dangerous Fae if she needed to and had done so during the battle last year. Which had given today’s bluff a solidity most sane people would be reluctant to call.
If it was a bluff.
Maybe she was just running around with a bodyguard of maniacal super-ninjas these days. Hell. I had a seven-foot, four-hundred-pound Valkyrie with a gun the size of a light pole walking next to me.
Times had changed.
The door to Bock Ordered Books opened, the little bell mounted on it jingling.
Artemis Bock came out and walked over to me. As he did, several of the folks from the ritual I’d disrupted appeared, though they lingered near the doorway like rabbits ready to dive back into their warren.
Bock looked past me to where the portal to the Nevernever had faded, leaving a smear of rapidly dissolving ectoplasm on the sidewalk.
“My God,” he said. “Those were the Wardens?”
“Yeah.”
He swallowed.
“You stopped them,” he said.
“Today.”
He looked down. His scalp was pink beneath thinning hair.
“Would they have…?”
“Probably,” I said.
He folded his arms over his chest and nodded.
“Continue the purification rituals,” I said quietly. “And keep your nose clean. Next time I might not hear about it in time.”
“Yeah,” he said, without looking up. He looked back at his people and then looked up at me for a second. “Thank you. If you need anything…”
I sighed impatiently. The anger that was surging around my chest was disappointed the situation had ended without violence.
“Why?” Bock asked me.
“Why what?”
“You came down here. Stood up for us. Why?”
I scowled.
“Someone stood up for me once,” I said. “Or I wouldn’t be here.”
Molly stepped up and got in Bock’s face. Her expression wasn’t kindly. “He wasn’t the only one who stood up for you, Bock,” she said. “Winter did as well. And now you are in Winter’s debt.”
Bock looked up, his eyes wide, face bloodless.
“You people harmed my little brother,” Molly snarled.
