“Hah.”
Molly swallowed. “She says to tell you the Wild Hunt is at your disposal. That she will lend you her steed.”
I paused.
I thought of the howling supernatural tempest that was the Wild Hunt. The pure, primal joy of the hounds’ calls. The thunder of hooves. The cries of the riders. And I could let the mantle have me. Be a creature of rage and instinct and fury. Remove that little weasel from the planet. I could ride on Mab’s black nightmare unicorn and crush Rudolph’s legs beneath its great hooves. Then the Hunt could circle him.
What happened to Rudolph after that would require thirty people to clean up.
“Not today,” I said in a quiet, rough voice.
Molly nodded. She put her hand over mine for a moment.
“I know how you feel,” she said with gentle emphasis. “I feel it, too. I want him torn apart. But I also want you to be whole. And even more than that, I want you to be Harry.”
I stared out at the children playing and began methodically shoving down the vicious, violent feelings trying to claw their way clear of my chest.
Not today. God, not today.
“Yeah,” I said. “I want that, too.”
But I wasn’t sure which I was talking about.
Chapter
Twenty-Seven
It took considerable effort to get the roof to myself at oh God thirty in the morning, but I managed it. Took me two sound-muffling spells and some extreme caution to slip past the sleeping Valkyrie, but the secure communication I had arranged between myself and Lara—notes carried by tiny fae—had specified that she wouldn’t show up if anyone else, at all, was present.
So I wound up on the roof of the castle at two o’clock in the morning of New Year’s Eve, waiting in stillness and silence. I just sort of sank into the cold of the clear, dangerously chill night and waited. The Winter mantle understood stillness and patience, like all predators. It was pleased to pass the time in quiet.
I waited and soaked up the cold.
There was a whisper in the air, and then Lara, dressed in a long white coat, glided up over the ramparts of the castle at the rear of the building, where she wouldn’t be seen by the guards at the front gate. She landed as weightlessly as a bird on one of the merlons, dropping down to a feline crouch with the ease and power of a gymnast. Her eyes were silver-grey in the night, catching light and reflecting it weirdly, even when her face was in shadow.
Lara stared at me with those intent, inhuman glittering eyes for a long moment.
Two predators, facing off.
If Lara wanted to try something underhanded with me—say,seducing me into becoming her devoted sex doll—this would be a prime opportunity for her to do it.
“Welcome,” I said to her in a very quiet voice.
Lara inclined her head and prowled down to the roof. I emerged from the patch of shadows I’d been occupying and crossed to the spot where I’d considered pitching Ilyana to the street below. Lara mirrored me, her body and motions tense.
“I’ve thought about it,” she said. “Your…offer.”
“To be fair,” I said, “I more or less demanded it.”
The nearly full moon was clear overhead. The silver light bounced off of plenty of snow, making the city glow with that weird frozen illumination of a quiet winter night. It made light spots nearly bright enough to read in, and the shadows darker than Morticia Addams’s lingerie drawer.
“You did,” she said firmly. “I’m willing to tell you what you want to know, in both of our interests. But I have a demand of my own.” She tilted her head at me, shadows showing me first her mouth and then her eyes as she turned. They were the palest possible shade of sapphire. “One you’re going to agree with.”
“That’s where I keep thinking I recognize you from,” I said abruptly.
Lara narrowed her eyes.
“Those paintings. From the eighties. Every young yuppie had them in his apartment back then. They lived all over boy basements in the nineties. Narel? Nargle?”
