too strained.
“Yeah. Exactly.” She shook her head and looked at me intently. “Is that what it’s always like for you? Throwing fire that way?”
I blinked and tried to change mental gears. I didn’t do it as smoothly as she had. Someone uncharitable or unbiased might note that it could be because Molly had stripped said gears. “Um. Oh, back at the fight with the Fomor guys?”
“They weren’t the Fomor,” Molly corrected me. “They were humans the Fomor have altered. They’re called—”
“Turtlenecks,” I said.
She arched an eyebrow. “You and Murphy both. No, they’re known as servitors. The Fomor muck around with them. Install things. Gills, extra muscles, organs for sonar, night-vision eyes . . .”
I whistled. “All kinds of fun.”
She nodded. “The odd bits kind of turn to jelly when they die. Police are calling them transients.”
I nodded, and tried to keep the conversation casual. “A lot of them dying around here?”
“It’s Chicago,” she said. “There’s always someone dying around here. And you should see what these . . . these animals do, Harry. They take people right out of their beds. Grab children waiting for the school bus. They’ve tortured people to death for fun.”
As she spoke, the calm in her voice had begun to fracture. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a break of her voice, an inhalation between sentences that was a little too harsh.
“You can’t stand around doing nothing,” I said, nodding.
“No,” she said. “They’ll come and scream at you in your sleep if you try. So . . .”
“So?”
Molly was silent. I didn’t push. Five minutes went by before she closed her eyes and whispered, “It’s easy. It shouldn’t be so easy.”
Technically, I didn’t have a heart anymore. It couldn’t twist. It couldn’t break.
It did anyway.
“The first one was paying off a cop. Gold coins. He stood there with a little girl in a gym bag and paid the cop to look the other way.” She swallowed. “God, if I could be like you. Have so much power to pour out. Like water from a hydrant. But I’ve just got a squirt gun. Not even a Super Soaker. Just one of the little ones.” She opened her eyes and met mine. “But it was enough. They didn’t even know I was there.”
“Molly,” I said gently, “what did you do?”
“An illusion. A simple one. I made the bag of gold look like a gun. The cop drew his weapon and shot him. But the servitor lived long enough to break the cop’s neck.” She held up a pair of fingers. “Twofer. For one little illusion.”
I swallowed. I couldn’t speak.
Her voice slowly gained volume. “There have been others like that. I mean, God, they make it simple. You just need an opportunity and the right little nudge at the right time. Green traffic light instead of a red one. Put a knife in someone’s hand. Or a wedding ring on one finger. Add a spot of blood to someone’s collar. They’re animals. They tear into one another like animals.”
“Molly,” I said gently.
“I started leaving the bits of rag on them,” she said. “It hurt at first. Being near that kind of . . . experience. It still hurts. But I have to do it. You don’t know, Harry. What you did for this town.”
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know how many things just didn’t come here before, because they were afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
She looked at me as if her heart was breaking. “Of you, Harry. You could find anything in this town, but you never even noticed the shadow you cast.” Her eyes overflowed and she slashed at them angrily with one hand. “Every time you defied someone, every time you came out on top against things you couldn’t possibly have beaten, your name grew. And they feared that name. There were other cities to prey on—cities that didn’t have the mad wizard Dresden defending them. They feared you.”
I finally understood. “The Rag Lady.”
“Sometimes me,” Molly said. “Sometimes it’s Lea. She’s like a kid on recess when she takes a shift. I’m building a new name. Creating something else for them to fear. I can’t do what you did, Harry.” Her eyes, red and blue, flashed with something dangerous, deadly, and she slammed the heel of her hand onto the table as she leaned toward me. “But I can do that. I can kill them. I can make the fuckers afraid.”
She stared at me, her breathing heavy. It took her several seconds to look slowly around the room.
Every eye in