“Don’t come down!” she said, her voice near panic. “I’ll have it cleaned up in a second. Okay?”
I thought about storming down there with a good hard lecture about the importance of not busting up your mentor’s irreplaceable collection of gear, but I took a deep breath instead. If anything had been destroyed, the lecture wouldn’t fix it. And I had only fifteen minutes to make myself look like a human being and find some way to get rid of the smell of Molly’s alchemical misadventure. So I decided to go finish shaving.
Am I easygoing or what?
No sooner had I gotten bits of paper stuck to the spots on my face where I’d been in a hurry than someone began hammering on the front door.
“For crying out loud,” I muttered. “It’s my day off.” I stomped out to the living room and found the smoke mostly gone, if not the smell. Mouse paced along beside me on the way to the door. I unlocked it and wrenched it open, careful to open it only an inch or three, then peered outside.
Andi and Kirby crouched on the other side of my door. Both of them were dirty, haggard, and entirely covered with scratches. I could tell, because both were also entirely naked.
Kirby lowered his arm and stared warily at me. Then he let out a low growling sound, which I realized a second later had been meant to be my name. “Harry.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” I said. “Today?”
“Harry,” Andi said, her eyes brimming. “Please. I don’t know who else we can turn to.”
“Dammit!” I snarled. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I wrenched the door the rest of the way open and muttered my wards down. “Come in. Hurry up, before someone sees you.”
Kirby’s nostrils flared as he entered, and his face twisted up in revulsion.
“Oh,” Andi said as I shut the door. “That smells terrible.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “You two look ...” Well, I would have used different adjectives for Kirby than for Andi. “A little thrashed. What’s up? You two get in a fight with a barbed wire golem or something?”
“N-no,” Andi said. “Nothing like that. We’ve had . . . Kirby and I have . . . fleas.”
I blinked.
Kirby nodded somber agreement and growled something unintelligible.
I checked the fireplace, which Molly had lit and which was crackling quietly. My coffeepot hung on a swinging arm near the fire, close enough to stay warm without boiling. I went to the pot and checked. She’d put my cup of expensive Starbucks elixir in there to stay warm. If I’d been preparing to murder her, that single act of compassion would have been reason enough to spare her life.
I poured the coffee into the mug Molly had left on the mantel and slugged some of it back. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Start from the top. Fleas?”
“I don’t know what else to call them,” Andi said. “When we shift, they’re there, in our fur. Biting and itching. It was just annoying at first, but now . . . it’s just awful.” She shuddered and began running her fingertips over her shoulders and ribs. “I can feel them right now. Chewing at me. Biting and digging into me.” She shook her head and, with an almost visible effort, forced her hands to be still. “It’s getting hard to th-think straight. To talk. Every time we ch-change, it gets worse.”
I gulped down a bit of coffee, frowning. That did sound serious. I glanced down at the towel around my waist, and noted, idly, that I was the most heavily clothed person in the room. “All right, let me get dressed,” I said. “I guess at least one of us should have clothes on.”
Andi looked at me blankly. “What?”
“Clothes. You’re naked, Andi.”
She looked down at herself, and then back up at me. “Oh.” A smile spread over her lips, and the angle of her hips shifted slightly and very noticeably. “Maybe you should do something about that.”
Kirby looked up from where he’d settled down by the fireplace, pure murder in his eyes.
“Uh,” I said, looking back and forth between them. No question about it—the kids were definitely operating under the influence of something. “I’ll be right back.”
I threw on some clothes, including my shield bracelet, in case the murderous look on Kirby’s face got upgraded to a murderous lunge, and went back out into the living room. Kirby and Andi were