Turn Coat

Molly, acting on her own initiative, had begun putting her own trouble kit together the same day she’d learned about mine. Except that her backpack was pink.

"You sure about this?" I asked her, pitching my voice low enough that Morgan wouldn’t hear.

She nodded. "He can’t stay there alone. You can’t stay with him. Neither can Thomas."

I grunted. "Do I need to search your bag for candlesticks?"

She gave me a chagrined shake of her head.

"Don’t feel too bad, kid," I told her. "He had a couple of hours to work you up to that. And he’s the guy who nearly cut your head off, during that mess around SplatterCon."

"It wasn’t that," she said quietly. "It’s what he said to you. What he’s done to you."

I put my hand on her arm and squeezed gently.

She smiled faintly at me. "I’ve never… never really felt… hate before. Not like that."

"Your emotions got the better of you. That’s all."

"But it isn’t," she insisted, folding her arms against her stomach, her shoulders hunching a little. "Harry, I’ve seen you all but kill yourself to help people who were in trouble. But for Morgan, that doesn’t matter. You’re just this… this thing that did something wrong once, and you’ll never, ever be anything else."

Aha.

"Kid," I said quietly, "maybe you should think about who you were really angry with back there."

"What do you mean?"

I shrugged. "I mean there’s a reason you snapped when he started in on me. Maybe the fact that he was being Morgan just happened to be coincidental."

She blinked her eyes several times, but not fast enough to stop one tear.

"You did a bad thing once," I said. "It doesn’t make you a monster."

Two more tears fell. "What if it does?" She wiped at her cheeks with a brusque frustrated motion. "What if it does, Harry?"

I nodded. "Because if Morgan’s right, and I’m just a ticking time-bomb, and I’m trying to rehabilitate you, you haven’t got a chance in hell. I get it."

She pressed her lips together, and it made her words sound stiff. "Just before Mouse knocked me down, I wanted to… to do things to Morgan. To his mind. To make him act differently. I was so angry, and it felt right."

"Feeling something and acting on it are two different things."

She shook her head. "But who would want to do that, Harry? What kind of monster would feel that?"

I slung the pack over one shoulder so that I could put my hands on either side of her face and turn her eyes to mine. Her tears made them very blue.

"The human kind. Molly, you are a good person. Don’t let anyone take that away from you. Not even yourself."

She didn’t even try to stop the tears. Her lip quivered. Her eyes were wide and her cheeks were fever-warm under my fingers. "A-are you sure?"

"Yes."

She bowed her head, and her shoulders shook. I leaned down to rest my forehead against hers. We stayed that way for a minute. "You’re okay," I told her quietly. "You aren’t a monster. You’re gonna be all right, grasshopper."

A series of sharp, rapping sounds interrupted us. I looked over my shoulder and found Morgan glowering at me. He held up a pocket watch-an honest to God gold pocket watch-and jabbed a forefinger at it impatiently.

"Jerk," Molly mumbled, sniffling. "Big fat, grumpy jerk."

"Yes. But he has a point. Tick-tock."

She swiped a hand at her nose and collected herself. "Okay," she said. "Let’s go."

The storage rental facility was located a couple of blocks from Deerfield Square in a fairly upscale suburban neighborhood north of Chicago proper. Most of the buildings nearby were residential, and it was tough to go more than a quarter of an hour without spotting a patrol car.

I’d picked it as the spot for my bolt hole for one reason: shady characters would stand out against the upper-middle-class background like mustard stains under a black light.

Granted, it would probably work even better if I wasn’t one of them.

I used my key at the security gate, and Thomas pulled the van around to my unit, a storage unit the size of a two-car garage. I unlocked the steel door and rolled it up while Thomas got Morgan out of the van. Molly followed, and when I beckoned, she wheeled Morgan into the storage space. Mouse got down out of the van and followed us. I rolled the door back down, and called wizard light to the amulet I held up in my right hand, until its blue-white glow filled the unit.

The interior of the place was mostly empty. There was a camp cot, complete with sleeping bag and pillow, placed more or less in the middle of the room, along with a footlocker I had filled with food, bottled water, candles, and supplies. A second footlocker sat next to the first one, and was filled with hardware and magical gear-a backup blasting rod, and all manner of useful little items one could use to accomplish a surprisingly broad spectrum of thaumaturgic workings. A camp toilet with a couple of jugs of cleaning liquid sat on the opposite side of the cot.

The floor, the walls, and the ceiling were covered in sigils, runes, and magical formulae. They weren’t proper wards, like the ones I had on my home, but they worked on the same principles. Without a threshold to build them upon, no single one of the formulae was particularly powerful-but there were lots of them. They began to gleam with a silvery glow in the light coming from my amulet.

"Wow," Molly said, staring slowly around her. "What is this place, Harry?"

"Bolt hole I set up last year, in case I needed someplace quiet where I wouldn’t get much company."

Morgan was looking, too, though his face was pale and drawn with pain. He swept his eyes around and said, "What’s the mix?"

"Concealment and avoidance, mostly," I replied. "Plus a Faraday cage."

Morgan nodded, glancing around. "It looks adequate."

"What’s that mean?" Molly asked me. "A Faraday what?"

"It’s what they call it when you shield equipment from electromagnetic pulses," I told her. "You build a cage of conductive material around the thing you want to protect, and if a pulse sweeps over it, the energy is channeled into the earth."

"Like a lightning rod," Molly said.

"Pretty much," I said. "Only instead of electricity, this is built to stop hostile magic."

"Once," Morgan corrected me primly.

I grunted. "Without a threshold to work with, there’s only so much you can do. The idea is to protect you from a surprise assault long enough for you to go out the back door and run."