from automatic weapons to protect the apprentices under her care, I tended to forget that she was about five-foot-four and might have checked in at a hundred and thirty or forty pounds soaking wet.
Which she was.
In the middle of a blizzard.
“It isn’t far,” I said. Then I went up to the door beside Kincaid and said, “Put the kid on your lap.”
“She wears the seat belt,” Kincaid said. “She’s in danger enough from exposure already.”
“Luccio doesn’t weigh much more than Ivy does,” I said in a flat tone. “She’s in almost as much danger as the kid. So you’re holding Ivy on your lap and letting my captain ride in the cab, like a gentleman.”
Kincaid gave me a level look, his pale eyes cold. “Or what?”
“I’m armed,” I said. “You’re not.”
He looked at me levelly, then at my hands. One of them was in my coat pocket. Then he said, “You think I believe that you’d kill me?”
“If you try to make me choose between you and Luccio,” I said, with a brittle smile, “I’m pretty sure whom I’m going to bid aloha.”
His teeth flashed in a sudden, wolfish smile. And he moved over, drawing the freezing child onto his lap.
By the time I got back to Luccio she was upright only because Mouse sat placidly in the cold, supporting her. She mumbled some kind of protest in a faint, commanding tone, but since she said it in Italian I declared her brain frozen and assumed command of the local Warden detachment, which was handy, since it consisted of only me anyway. I bundled her into the truck’s cab and got her buckled in beside Kincaid. He helped with it—my fingers were too cold and stiff to manage very quickly.
“Harry,” Michael said. He reached back, drew a rolled-up thermal blanket from behind the truck’s front seat, and tossed it to me. I caught it and nodded my thanks with the cold already starting to chew at my belly.
That left me and Mouse in the back of the truck, both of us soaking wet, in the middle of winter, in the middle of a blizzard. The cold moved from my belly to my chest, and I curled up into a ball because I didn’t have much choice in the matter. Magic wasn’t an option. My palm-sized ball of flame wouldn’t get along well with the back of a moving truck, especially given how much I was already shaking. I wanted to get warm, not set myself on fire.
“S-s-s-sometimes ch-ch-ch-chivalry s-s-s-sucks,” I growled to Mouse, teeth chattering.
My dog, whose thick winter coat wasn’t much good after it had gotten a good soaking, leaned against me as hard as I leaned against him, underneath the rough blanket, while the cab of the truck heated up nicely, its windows fogging. I felt like a Dickens character. I thought about explaining that to Mouse, just to occupy my thoughts, but he was suffering enough without being forced to endure Dickens, even by proxy. So we made the trip in miserable, companionable silence. There might have been emergency lights going by us. I was too busy enjoying the involuntary rhythmic contractions of every muscle cell in my freaking body to notice.
Thirty seconds into the trip I was fairly certain that I was going to black out and wake up five hundred years in the future, but as it turned out I had to endure only a miserable twenty minutes or so before Michael pulled up outside my apartment.
Both vehicle doors opened to the weary but authoritative ring of Luccio’s voice. “Get him to the door while he can still let us in through his wards.”
“I’m fine,” I said, rising. Only it came out sounding more like, “Mmmmnnngh,” and when I tried to stand up I all but fell out of the truck. Michael caught me, and Kincaid moved quickly to help him lift me to the ground.
I dimly felt one of Kincaid’s hands enter my jacket pocket and turn it out empty. “Son of a bitch,” he said, grinning. “I knew it.”
Luccio emerged from the truck’s cab, carrying the entirely limp form of the Archive draped over one hip. The girl’s arms and legs flopped loosely, her mouth hung open in sleep, and her cheeks were bright pink. “Get up, Dresden,” she stated. Her voice was firm, but though warmed by the trip, she was still nearly as damp as she had been at the station, and I saw her buckle as the cold sank its