Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)(77)

“I can still use your help,” I said. “Just coordinating communications with our friends—”

She shook her head several times. “No. No, Harry. I’m not changing how I live my life. This is my choice. And you’ve got no stones to throw when it comes to stupid plans. So either back me up or get out of the way.”

Frustration flashed through me. Karrin might have been damned near superhuman, but she wasn’t supernatural. She’d fought. She’d been beaten. She’d been hurt. She was in no condition to get involved in another one of my problems, and there was a very real chance that it could get her killed. She didn’t have the protection of her badge anymore, and she no longer had the full use of a body that had spent a lifetime dealing with predators of one kind or another.

But she did have the enemies to show for it.

Granted, what made Karrin Murphy dangerous had never been her arms and legs. It had been the mind that directed them. But even there, I had doubts. She’d always had a lot to prove, to herself and to other people—and she had never been okay with showing weakness. Was that affecting her judgment now?

Or maybe it was something simpler than that.

Maybe she was just afraid for the man she loved.

I swallowed.

For a second, I debated killing the little saw. A simple hex would render it useless. And then I realized the manifest idiocy of that idea. Karrin would not readily forgive me that—and she’d just find another way to get the damned cast off when I wasn’t looking anyhow. She probably had a second saw waiting in a box in the garage marked REPLACEMENTS FOR THINGS HARRY SCREWED UP. She believed in being prepared.

I couldn’t stop her. It would be the same as telling her that she was weak and needed to stay home. That she wasn’t strong enough to help me. It would break her.

And besides.

You can’t go around making people’s choices for them. Not if you love them.

So I stepped back over the line between the hardwood floor of the living room and the tiles of the kitchen.

“Thank you,” Karrin said calmly.

“Murph,” I said.

She paused with the saw resting against her cast and looked at me. “What’s happening now … you’ve got no standing at all in it. No protection from the Accords. No badge.”

She watched my face, her expression serious.

“This is the jungle,” I said. “And none of the players in this are going to have a problem burying inconveniences if it means holding the Accords together.”

“You mean me,” she said.

“I mean you,” I said.

“You could have hexed the saw already,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I couldn’t have.”

“Well. You’re not all dumb,” she said, smiling faintly.

“Remains to be seen,” I said. “I know you well enough to know there’s no point trying to stop you. But I … I gotta know that you’re walking into this with your eyes open, Murph.”

She looked down for a long moment. Then she looked back up at me and said, “I have to do this.”

I stared at her bandaged, broken body for a long moment.

Then I clenched my jaw and nodded once.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll help.”

Murphy’s eyes softened for a moment.

Then she took the oscillating saw to the cast and started slicing away at it.

It didn’t take her long to get the cuts made, though she hissed in discomfort a couple of times as she went.

“Don’t cut yourself,” I said. “If you bleed out it will take a week to clean up.”

“They’re burns,” she said, annoyed. “The saw won’t cut flesh, but it heats up the cast. I’m just too impatient.”

“No kidding,” I said lightly.

“Okay,” she said. “Come help me pull it off.”

I did.

Look, when you’ve been in as much cast as Karrin had for as long as she had, the results are kind of gross. There was a buildup of dead skin, flakes of it white and hard like scales where her skin had been. There’s no dressing that up.

“Engh,” Karrin said, wrinkling her nose as her arm came free. “It’s the smell that bugs me.”

“Junior high gym lockers were that bad,” I said.

“Ew, boys,” she said. She lifted her wounded arm a little, moving it slowly, wincing.

“Leg next,” I said.

That one was worse. She hissed as the cast came free, and put a hand against her back. “Oh my God,” she muttered. “My hips forgot how to be at this angle.” She looked up at me, her face still pained. “I’ve got braces. We should put them o—”

She broke off when I simply picked her up, as carefully as I could. She got her good arm around my neck and helped as much as she was able.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

“Taking you to a hot bath,” I said. “Don’t try to move. Just … let me do it. Okay?”

Her blue eyes went very soft for a moment, and she looked down.

“For a minute,” she said.

I took her to the bathroom, moved aside the assistance equipment that was there, and set her down gently on the commode. It took me only a moment to get the bath going and then to help her out of her clothes and lower her carefully into the water.