Chapter Twenty-Six #2
Her expression was remote but unhappy for a moment. Then she saw me looking, smiled, and it was gone. “You look like you’ve stopped losing weight.”
“Yeah,” I said. “If I can figure out how to get more sleep, I should be fine.”
“Best I can do is thirty-year stretches,” she said. “And you might have things to do before that spell came undone.”
“Yeah, I don’t need to be Van Winkled.” Little Harry helped Maggie onto the bike again and tried to talk up her confidence as he helped her get it going once more.
I suspected Maggie was throwing it a little.
She was an uncommonly well-coordinated child.
I think she was indulging young Harry’s genuine enjoyment in teaching and supporting her.
She was a hell of a kid.
“Have you decided yet?” Molly asked quietly.
“Decided what?”
“If you want to live or not,” she said quietly, bluntly.
I nodded toward Maggie. “She needs me.”
She snorted. “Does that dodge work with everyone else? Especially now that she’s living with you?”
“Most people get a really nervous look when they get anywhere close to asking me something like that,” I said, “and they think better of it.”
She bumped my thigh with her hip. “Yeah. But I’m not afraid of you.”
I exhaled slowly.
She wasn’t.
“Harry,” she said. “Do you want to live?”
“I’m trying to remember how,” I said quietly. “I’m still in that space where…I don’t know. I don’t think much past the next meal.”
“I’m aware,” she said wryly. “Especially when you’re in close proximity, but anytime I think about you. It’s like I get this update about you, from Winter. I get flashes of what you feel like.”
I frowned. “Not sure I like that.”
“I don’t, either,” she said. “But if I know, it’s a safe bet that Mab knows, too.”
That made me feel distinctly uncomfortable.
Mab tended to manipulate me with all the subtlety of a swinging axe.
But if she had that kind of intimate emotional knowledge of me, she might be operating on more subtle levels, too.
Maybe her arm-twisting was mostly a smoke screen for her working me more discreetly.
That I hadn’t considered the possibility until now scared me a little. If true, it put me several…well, years behind her in my thinking.
“Thanks for the warning,” I said quietly.
She nodded. “Sure.”
“I feel like it’s my fault,” I said quietly.
I wasn’t talking about Maggie, or the Winter Queen.
Molly’s bright eyes studied my profile. “It wasn’t you. You were in the midst of war,” she said softly. “And Rudolph was supposed to be one of the people you were protecting.”
A flash of pure hatred went through me at the name.
Molly saw it.
“You haven’t taken vengeance,” she said.
“Wouldn’t bring her back.”
“It might let you move forward,” she noted.
“Into becoming what?” I asked. I shook my head. “He left town. That’s enough for me. It’s got to be.”
“You’re lying,” she said softly.
I mean. I was. I wanted to tear his arms off. I wanted to shove his face into the earth of Murphy’s grave and keep pushing until he ran out of air. I wanted to kill him.
But Rudolph wasn’t a monster. He was something less than that, and worse: A fool. An idiot. A coward.
I exhaled slowly.
And my pain was not unique. Was not special.
“You haven’t let her go,” Molly said gently. She was silent for a moment, then seemed to make a decision and took a breath. “I know what that feels like. I’ve done that. With someone I loved.”
I looked down. I couldn’t have met her gaze.
“I got very lucky,” she said. “He came back. But if he hadn’t, I’d have…become something I very much would not want to be.”
I could feel what she was talking about.
Deep down, there was a part of me that wanted to say screw it. That being a decent person was too painful, too harsh, too self-destructive. A part of me that wanted to take my power and use it to start crushing my enemies. Or anyone else who wanted to hold me back. Including me. Especially me.
I closed my eyes.
I said the same thing I said to that part of me every time it stirred: Not today.
“There he is,” Molly said very quietly, as if she could sense the direction of my thoughts. “Part of what you’re feeling is the Winter mantle,” she said. “Pure, primal rage. Someone took your mate. The mantle wants them dealt with appropriately. It’s adding pressure.”
“Fun,” I said.
“Mab wants me to tell you to go kill Rudolph. You’ll feel better, she says.”
“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.