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Molly was in her midtwenties and gorgeous, though she still looked a little too lean to my eyes. Her hair, which had seemed to be colored at random ever since she was a teenager, was now long and white-blond. She wore old designer jeans, a blue T-shirt with a faded recycling symbol on it, and sandals.
“I hate dreams like this,” I said. “There’s no plot—just random weird things happening. I get enough of that when I’m awake.”
She looked at me as if startled and blinked several times. “Harry?”
“Obviously,” I said. “It’s my dream.”
“No,” she said, “it kind of isn’t. How are you doing this?”
I took my hands off the steering wheel long enough to waggle my fingers and say, in a dramatic voice, “Wizard.”
Molly burst out into a warm laugh. “Oh, good Lord, it’s an accident, isn’t it? Are you finally off the island, then? How’s your head?”
At that, I blinked. “Wait. Molly?”
“Me,” she said, smiling, and leaned across the car. She snaked an arm around my neck for a second and leaned her head against my shoulder in a quick hug. There was a sense of warmth to the touch that went beyond the normal sense of a dream, a sense of another’s presence that was too absolute to question. “Wow, it’s good to hear from you, boss.”
“Wow,” I said. “How is this happening?”
“Good question,” she said. “I’ve been attacked in my dreams, like, fifty times since the New Year. I thought I had my defenses locked up pretty tight.”
“Attacked? By who?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said in an offhand tone, “the Sidhe, mainly.”
“Wait,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be their princess?”
“In the flesh, sure,” Molly said, her eyes sparkling. “In dreams, though, they can come at me anonymously, so every punk thinks he’s tough. It’s like the Internet for faeries.”
“What jerks,” I said.
“No,” she said, “not at all. Look, Harry, Maeve was a really, really awful Winter Lady. I have a job to do. The Sidhe just want to be sure I’m up for it. So they test me.”
“By coming at you?” I asked.
“Quietly, where Mab can’t see,” Molly said. “It actually kind of reminds me of when Mom used to leave me in charge of all my little brothers and sisters at home. Only more felonious.”
I blinked at that and let out a short bark of laughter.
“There, good, a smile,” she said. “They step up. I swat them down. It’s nothing personal,” she continued. “Then I get back to business. Which, by the way, is why you haven’t heard much from me. Sorry. I’ve had about a hundred and fifty years of Maeve’s backlog to deal with. What’s your excuse?”
“I’ve been sending messengers every day for the last six months,” I said.
Molly’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “Mab.”
“Mab.”
“Grrr,” she said. “You need me?”
“The day before yesterday. There’s this thing in my head that’s going to kill me in the next couple of days. Demonreach says you can help. Apparently, Mab thinks so, too.”
Molly’s blue eyes went icy. “Or she wouldn’t have intercepted your messengers. That bitch. If I’d known . . .” She chewed on her lower lip. “She’s got me doing something that I can’t get out of right away.”
“What, it isn’t convenient?” I asked.
“I’m under two miles of ice at the moment,” she said. “It took me a day to get here—that’s why I’m asleep now. What’s the situation?”
I told her.
“Oh, God, Harry!” she said. “Nicodemus, really? Is Sanya there?”
“No,” I said, then amended it. “At least, not yet.”
“A Knight will be there,” she said. “That’s how it works. And I’m on the way.” Her expression became distressed, and a moment later the dream world started flickering, and I was suddenly driving in a small herd of Blue Beetles, all of them filled with slightly different versions of Harry Dresden and Molly Carpenter. I had to slalom the VW through them.
“. . . there as soon as I can . . .” came Molly’s voice, distantly, and then I was driving alone.
The traffic got worse and worse and more confusing, and then there was a loud screech of tires and twisting metal, a bright light, and a sensation of tumbling and falling in exaggerated, graceful slow motion.
The radio blared with static and a woman’s voice spoke in the tones of a news commentator. “. . . other news, Harry Dresden, Chicago wizard, blindly charges toward his own destruction because he refuses to recognize simple and obvious truths which are right there in front of him. Dresden ignored several excellently placed warnings, and as a result is expected to perish in the next forty-eight hours . . .”
* * *
I hauled myself out of the dream and sat up in bed, shaking and sweating, with my instincts keyed up for danger and certain that I was no longer alone in the room.
My instincts were half right.
Karrin shut the door behind her almost silently and padded over to the bed in the dim glow of a reflected streetlight outside. She was wearing a long, faded CPD T-shirt and her hair was back in a simple ponytail. She also had her favorite SIG in her hand, held down at her side.
“Hey,” she half whispered. She stopped at the side of the bed. “I heard noises. Are you all right?”
I rubbed at my eyes with one hand. Had my dream of Molly been just that? A dream? Or had it been something more? I knew that a lot of crazy stuff was possible when it came to dreaming, and I knew that it had felt incredibly real, but that didn’t mean that it had been real. “Dreams,” I muttered. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you.”
“I wasn’t really sleeping anyway. You were muttering, moving around a lot.” I heard her set the SIG down on the bedside table. She was maybe a foot and a half away from me, and from that close, I could smell her. Clean laundry, some kind of vaguely floral deodorant, a hint of sunlight-warmed skin, a trace of cleaning solvent from tending to her guns. A second later, she laid her hand across my forehead.
“You’re running a temperature,” she said. “Fever dreams are the worst. Sit tight.” She went into the bathroom and came out a minute later with a Dixie cup of water and four pills. “Ibuprofen,” she said. “How’s your stomach?”
“Fine,” I muttered. “It’s the cuts and bruises that are bothering me.” She passed me the pills and the water and I swallowed both and put the cup down on the table. “Thanks.”
She picked up the cup and turned to drop it in the trash can, and the light from the bathroom highlighted the strong, curved muscles in her legs as she did. I tried not to notice how much that appealed to me.
But Karrin did.
She paused that way, looking at me obliquely, noticing me noticing her. Then she turned and reached around the bathroom door to shut off the light. The motion showed me even more of her legs. Then the light shut off and we were in sudden darkness. She didn’t move.
“Your eyes,” she said quietly. “You’ve only looked at me like that a few times. It’s . . . intense.”
“Sorry,” I said. My voice sounded rough to me.
“No,” she said. Cloth rustled softly. Her weight pushed down on the edge of the bed. “I . . . I’ve been thinking about what we talked about last year.”
My throat suddenly felt dry, and my heartbeat accelerated. “What do you mean?”
“This,” she said. Her hand touched my chest and slid up to my jaw. Then her weight shifted the bed a little more in the darkness, and she found my mouth with hers.
It was a good kiss. Slow. Warm. Her lips were soft and gentle and explored mine in gentle surges. I could hear her breathing getting faster, too, and her fingers slid up into my hair, her short nails scratching over my scalp and then tracing down over my neck to my shoulder.
Desire flooded through me in a sudden surge of hot, hungry need, and the Winter in me rose up with a howl, demanding that I sate it. Every instinct in my body told me that Karrin was there, and warm, and real, and pressing more of her body against mine through one fragile layer of cloth—that she was mine for the taking.
I didn’t move my hands. But I broke from the kiss with a gentle groan and said, “Karrin.”
“I know,” she said, breathing harder, not drawing away, her breath hot against my skin. “This thing you have with Mab. It pushes you. I know.”
Then she took my hand and guided it to her hip. After a second, she moved it lower, below the hem of the shirt, and then slid it up. I felt the soft skin and tight muscle of her thigh, the curve of her hip as she moved my hand up to her waist.
She was naked beneath the shirt.
I absolutely froze in place. It was the only alternative to doing something sudden and primal.
“What?” she breathed.
Something in me that had nothing to do with Winter howled at me for stopping, urged me to start moving my fingers, to get the shirt out of the way, to explore further. I beat it down with a club.
She was too important. This wasn’t something I could decide with my glands.
