Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)(14)

“No,” I said, and kissed the side of her head. “You’re my punkin.”

“Good,” she said. “I still want pancakes.”

“Let’s go make them,” I said.

Mouse’s tail thumped hopefully against my leg.

But first, we all stood there for a moment, the three of us, taking comfort in one another’s proximity.





5


Of course it went badly,” Karrin said. “It was a fight with someone in your family. Believe me, family fights are the worst.”

“The family hasn’t even been assembled yet and there’s fights,” I complained.

“Looks pretty assembled to me, from what I’ve seen,” she said, her tone dry.

“Yeah, well. I’ve never had much opportunity to fight with family,” I said.

“I have,” she said. “Everyone cares about everyone else, so when you get mad and say something horrible, it hurts that much more. And too many things go unsaid. That’s the worst, I think. Everyone thinks they know one another better than they probably do, so you fill in the silences with things the other person never actually said. Or thought. Or thought about saying.”

I scowled and said, “Is that your professional opinion, Doctor Murphy?”

She snorted, fell silent, and squeezed my hand with hers. Her grip was small and strong and warm. We held hands a lot these days.

I’d come over to cook her some dinner. My cooking skills are modest but serviceable, and we’d both had our fill of oven-roasted chicken and potatoes and a fresh salad. Karrin was having a hard time moving around in the kitchen, between her knee, her shoulder, and all the braces she had to wear to keep them more or less immobilized. And she’d gotten sick of the available delivery food after only a few weeks of being laid up. I came over a couple of nights a week and cooked for her, when the Carpenter kids were available to babysit Maggie.

“Speaking of doctors,” I said, all smooth, “what did the doctor say today?”

“Round one of surgery went okay,” she said. She exhaled and laid her head against my arm. We were sitting on the couch in her living room, with her injured leg propped up on an ottoman I’d gotten for her. She was a bitty thing, five and not much, if a very muscular five and not much. Blond hair, clean but bedraggled. Hard to keep it styled when you’ve got to do everything with one hand. No makeup.

And she looked tired. Karrin Murphy found the lack of work during her recovery exhausting.

She’d collected the injuries on my behalf. They weren’t my fault, or that’s what I kept telling myself, but at the end of the day she’d put herself in a place to get hurt because I’d asked her to be there. You could argue free will and causality and personal choice all you wanted, but the fact was that if I hadn’t gotten her involved, she’d probably have been in one of her martial arts classes at this time of evening.

“Round two can start next week,” she continued, speaking in her professional voice, the detached one that didn’t have any emotion in it, used mostly when something really, really upset her. “Then it’s just three more months of casts and stupid braces and then I can start six months of therapy while they wean me off the painkillers, and after all of that is done, if it goes very, very well, he thinks I might be able to walk without a cane. As long as I don’t have to do it very fast.”

I frowned. “What about your training?”

“There was damage,” she said, her voice becoming not so much quiet as … dead. “In the knee, shoulder, elbow. They’re hoping to get me back to fifty percent. Of basic function. Not athletic activity.”

I remembered her scream when Nicodemus had kicked in her knee. The ugly, wet crunching sound when he’d calmly forced her arm out of its socket, tearing apart her rotator and hyperextending her elbow at the same time. He’d done it deliberately, inflicted as much damage, as much pain, as he could.

“I don’t get to be me anymore,” she whispered.

She’d been injured before, and she’d come back from it.

But everyone has limits. She was only human.

We sat in the silence while her old grandfather clock ticked steadily.

“Is there anything that …” she began.

I shook my head. “When it comes to healing, magic isn’t much ahead of medicine at this point. Our people go to study from yours. Unless you want to get Faustian.”

“No,” she said firmly.

I nodded. There wasn’t much else I could say. “I’m sorry,” I said finally.

She gave her head a tiny shake. “Don’t,” she said. “I cried about it earlier. And I’ll do it again later. But right now I don’t want to think about it. Talk about something else.”

I tried to think of something. I came up empty. So instead, I kissed her.

“You are the last of the red-hot raconteurs, Dresden,” she murmured against my mouth. But then she closed her eyes and leaned into the kiss, and everything else started going away.

Kissing was something I had to be cautious about. After about twenty seconds of feeling her breath mingling with mine, the Winter mantle started going berserk with naked lust. The damned aura of power Mab had given me let me do some incredible things, but the constant drumbeat of sex and violence it kept playing at my thoughts and emotions never went away. So at twenty seconds, I started breathing faster, and at thirty my head was besieged by impulses of Things to Do with Karrin, and by the time a minute had gone by I was forcing myself to remember that I was stronger than I realized and to be careful not to clench my hands on her and haul her bodily against me.