White Night

"You guys?" Murphy asked me.

"People," I said. "Living people."

Mouse pressed his head a little harder against my boot. There was silence, and I felt Murphy’s stare.

"Come on, Karrin," I said. I winked at her and pushed myself wearily to my feet. "That isn’t gonna happen while I’m still alive."

Murphy rose with me. "You have a plan," she stated.

"I have a plan."

"What’s the plan, Harry?"

I told her.

She looked at me for a second and then said, "You’re crazy."

"Be positive, Murph. You call it crazy. I call it unpredictable." She pursed her lips thoughtfully for a second and then said, "I can’t go any higher than insane."

"You in?" I asked her.

Murphy looked insulted. "What kind of question is that?"

"You’re right," I said. "What was I thinking?" We left together.

Chapter Thirty-Three

I was up late making arrangements that would, I hoped, help me take out Madrigal and his Malvora buddy, and put an end to the power struggle in the White Court. After which, maybe I would try turning water to wine and walking on water (though technically speaking, I had done the latter yesterday).

After I was through scheming, I dragged my tired self to bed and slept hard but not long. Too many dreams about all the things that could go wrong.

I was rummaging in my icebox, looking for breakfast, when Lasciel manifested her image to me again. The fallen angel’s manner was subdued, and her voice had something in it I had rarely heard there – uncertainty. "Do you really think it’s possible for her to change?"

"Who?"

"Your pupil, of course," Lasciel said. "Do you really think she can change? Do you think she can take control of herself the way you would have her do?"

I turned from the fridge. Lasciel stood in front of my empty fireplace, her arms folded, frowning down at it. She was wearing the usual white tonic, though her hair seemed a little untidy. I hadn’t slept all that long or all that well. Maybe she hadn’t, either.

"Why do you ask?" I asked her.

She shrugged. "It only seems to me that she is already established in her patterns. She disregards the wisdom of others in favor of her own flawed judgment. She ignores their desires, even their will, and replaces them with her own."

"She did that once," I said quietly. "Twice, if you want to get technical. It might have been one of her first major choices, and she made a bad one. But it doesn’t mean that she has to keep on repeating it over and over."

There was silence as I assembled a turkey sandwich and a bowl of Cheerios, plus a can of cold Coke: the breakfast of champions. I hoped. "So," I said. "What do you think of the plan?"

"I think there is only a slightly greater chance of your enemies killing you than your allies, my host. You are a madman."

"It’s the sort of thing that keeps life interesting," I said.

A faint smile played on her lips. "I have known mortals for millennia, my host. Few of them ever grew that bored."

"You should have seen the kind of plans I came up with a couple of years before you showed up. Today’s plan is genius and poetry compared to those." There was no milk in the icebox, and I wasn’t pouring Coke onto breakfast cereal. That would just be odd. I munched on the Cheerios dry, and washed each mouthful down with Coke in a dignified fashion. Then I glanced at Lasciel and said, "I changed."

There was silence for a moment, broken only by the crunching of tasty rings of oats or baked wheat or something. I just knew it was good for my heart and my cholesterol and for all the flowers and puppies and tiny children. The box said so.

The fallen angel spoke after a time, and her words came out quiet and poisonously bitter. "She has free will. She has a choice. That is what she is."

"No. She is what she does," I said quietly. "She could choose to change her ways. She could choose to take up black magic again." I took a bite of sandwich. "Or she could ignore the choice. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Or pretend that she doesn’t have a choice, when in fact she does. That’s just another way of choosing."

Lasciel gave me a very sharp look. The shadows shifted on her face, as if the room had grown darker. "We are not talking about me."

I sipped Coke and said mildly, "I know that. We’re talking about Molly."

"We are," she said. "I have a purpose here. A mission. That has not changed." She turned away from me, the shadows around her growing darker. Her form blended into them. "I do not change."

"Speaking of," I said. "A friend pointed out to me that I may have developed some anger issues over the last couple of years. Maybe influenced by… oh, who knows what."

The fallen angel’s shadow turned her head. I could only tell because her lovely profile was slightly less black than the shadow around it.

"I thought maybe you would know what," I said. "Tell me."

"I told you once before, my host," the shadow said. "You are easier to talk to when you are asleep."

Which was just chilling, taken in that context. Everyone has that part of them that needs to be reined in. It’s that little urge you sometimes feel to hop over the edge of a great height, when you’re looking out from a high building. It’s the immediate spark of anger you feel when someone cuts you off, and makes you want to run your car into that moron. It’s the flash of fear in you when something surprises you at night, leaving you quivering with your body primed to fight or flee. Call it the hind brain, the subconscious, whatever: I’m not a shrink. But it’s there, and it’s real.

Mine wore a lot of black, even before Lasciel showed up.

Like I said. Chilling.

The fallen angel turned to depart on that note, probably because it would have made a nicely scary exit line.

I extended my hand, and with it my mind, and barred her departure with an effort of simple will. Lasciel existed only in my thoughts, after all. "My head," I told her. "My rules. We aren’t finished."

She turned to face me, and her eyes suddenly glowed with orange and amber and scarlet flickers of Hellfire. It was the only non-black thing about her.

"See, here’s the thing," I said. "My inner evil twin might have a lot of impulses I’d rather not indulge – but he isn’t a stranger. He’s me."

"Yes. He is. Full of anger. Full of the need for power. Full of hate." She smiled, and her teeth were white and quite pointy. "He just doesn’t lie to himself about it."