my head. “I don’t think so. Last time, he had Martha Liberty’s support. I don’t know if he would, this time around. If that’s the case, the Senior Council vote would definitely go against me. So he’d have to leave it to an open vote of the whole Council and … well …”
“Useless,” Murphy repeated, more firmly. She pushed away from me, hauled herself to her feet, and hobbled out of the room stiffly on her cane.
When she came back in, she was carrying a blue plastic pistol case. She set it down on the table and sat down. Then she clicked open the case decisively.
Only instead of removing a pistol, she pulled out a handheld oscillating multitool and tossed me the end of its power cord. “Plug that in.”
I clambered around until I found the power strip between the couch and the end table, and did. Then I withdrew a bit. Wizards and technology don’t get along so well, but I’d been hitting new highs of self-restraint over the past few months. If I didn’t get close to something as simple as an electric motor, I probably wouldn’t screw it up, as long as I stayed calm. Probably. “What are you doing?” I asked.
Instead of answering, she snapped a saw blade onto the tool, flicked a switch that set it to buzzing, and immediately took the blade to the cast on her shoulder.
“Karrin,” I blurted, rising.
“Back off before you short it out,” she snapped. “Go stand over there in the kitchen. Go.”
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I asked.
She gave me a brief annoyed glare. “You’re obviously doing this, no matter how stupid it is. I can’t help you get away with it if I’m too busy being a starfish.”
I clenched my fist against my nose and said, “There are times when I could choke you, too.”
“Try it and I’ll break your wrist,” she said grimly.
I took a step toward her.
“No, don’t come help me, you lummox. I can do it myself.”
“Karrin,” I said.
I might have sounded a little terrified.
She hesitated.
“Karrin,” I said, more gently. “Murph. You can’t keep doing this to yourself. You’re hurt. You need time to heal. Please.”
She looked away from me, into the middle distance, her lips tight. “This is probably as healed as I’m going to get, for all practical purposes,” she said. Her voice was very thin.
“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