“I’m not going to do anything desperate,” I told her. Not yet, anyway. “I just need some time.”
“Okay,” she said. “Come on, Mouse.”
Mouse watched me worriedly, but padded out of the apartment and up the stairs with Molly.
I went to my shower, started it up, stripped, and got under the cold water. I just stood there with it sheeting over me for a while and tried to think.
Mostly, I thought about how good Susan’s mouth had felt. I waited for the cold water to sluice that particular thought down to a bearable level. Then I thought about Vadderung’s warning about the Red Court.
I’ve taken on some tough customers in my time. But none of them had been godlike beings—or the remnants of them, or whatever the Lords of Outer Night and the Red King were. You couldn’t challenge something like that in a direct confrontation and win. I might have powers, sure. Hell, on a good day I’d go along with someone who said that I was one of the top twenty or thirty wizards on the planet, in terms of sheer magical muscle. And my finesse and skill continued to improve. Give me a couple of hundred years and I might be one of the top two or three wizards on the planet.
Of course, if Marcone was right, I’d never make it that high. And the boss predator of the concrete jungle was not stupid. In fact, I’d say that there was an excellent chance I wouldn’t live another two or three days.
I couldn’t challenge the masters of the Red Court and win.
But they had my little girl.
I know. It shouldn’t matter that she was my little girl in particular. I should have been just as outraged that any little girl was trapped in such monstrous hands. But it did matter. Maggie was my child, and it mattered a whole hell of a lot.
I stood in the shower until the cold water had muted away all the hormones, all the emotion, all the mindless power of blood calling to blood. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that three courses lay open to me.
The enemy was strong. So I could show up with more muscle on my side. I could round up every friend, every ally, every shady character who owed me a solid. Enough assistance could turn the tide of any battle—and I had no illusions that it would be a battle of epic proportions.
The problem was that the only people who would show up to that kind of desperate fight were my friends. And my friends would die. I would literally be using them to shield myself against the crushing power of the Red King and his court, and I had no illusions of what such a struggle would cost. My friends would die. Most of them. Hell, probably all of them, and me with them. Maybe I could get to the kid and get out, while my friends gave their lives to make it possible. But after that, then what? Spend my life running with Maggie? Always looking over my shoulder, never stopping in one place for longer than a few days?
The second thing I could do was to change the confrontation into something else. Find some way to sneak up close enough to grab the girl and vanish, skipping the whole doomed-struggle part of option one. That plan wouldn’t require me to get my friends killed.
Of course, to pull it off, I’d have to find some way to get more clever and sneakier than beings with millennia of practice and experience at just such acts of infiltration and treachery. You didn’t survive for as long as they had among a nation of predators without being awfully smart and careful. I doubted it would be as simple as bopping a couple of guards over the head, then donning their uniforms and sneaking in with my friends the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Woodsman.
(I had cast myself as the Scarecrow in that one. If I only had a brain, I’d be able to come up with a better plan.)
So, the stand-up fight with an all-star team was a bad idea. It probably wouldn’t work.
The sneaky smash-and-grab at the heart of Red Court power was a bad idea. It probably wouldn’t work, either.
And that left option three. Which was unthinkable. Or had been, a few days ago. Before I knew I was