Dangerous Women

I told that part of me to shut up and sit its ass down.

“Okay,” I said. “But later. I’m kind of busy.”

I started to brush past her into the room, but she stopped me short by placing a hand against my sternum and shoved me back against the door. It didn’t look like she was trying but I hit the wood firmly.

“Now’s good,” she said.

In my imagination, I clenched my fists and counted to five in an enraged scream. I was sure Harry had never had to deal with this kind of nonsense. I didn’t have time to lose, but I didn’t want to start something violent with Andi, either. I’d catch all kinds of hell if I threw down. I allowed myself the pleasure of gritting my teeth, took a deep breath, and nodded. “Okay. What’s on your mind, Andi?”

I didn’t add the words “you bitch” but I thought them really loud. I should probably be a nicer person.

“This is not your apartment,” Andi said. “You don’t get to roll in and out of here whenever you damned well please, no matter the hour, no matter what’s going on. Have you even stopped to think about what you’re doing to Butters?”

“I’m not doing anything to Butters,” I said. “I’m just borrowing the shower.”

Andi’s voice sharpened. “You came here today covered in blood. I don’t know what happened, but you know what? I don’t care. All I care about is what kind of trouble you might draw down onto other people.”

“There was no trouble,” I said. “Look, I’ll buy you a new razor.”

“This isn’t about property or money, Christ,” Andi said. “This is about respect. Butters is there for you whenever you need help, and you barely do so much as to thank him for it. What if you’d been followed here? Do you have any idea how much trouble he could get into for helping you out?”

“I wasn’t followed,” I said.

“Today,” Andi said. “But what about next time? You have power. You can fight. I don’t have what you do, but even I can fight. Butters can’t. Whose shower are you going to use if it’s his blood all over you?”

I folded my arms and looked carefully away from Andi. In some part of my brain I knew that she had a point, but that reasoning was coming in a distant second to my sudden urge to slap her.

“Look, Molly,” she said, her voice becoming more gentle. “I know things haven’t been easy for you lately. Ever since Harry died. When his ghost showed up. I know it wasn’t fun.”

I just looked at her without speaking. Not easy or fun. That was one way to describe it.

“There’s something I think you need to hear.”

“What’s that?”

Andi leaned forward slightly and sharpened her words. “Get over it.”

The apartment was very quiet for a moment, and the inside of me wasn’t. That ugly part of me started getting louder and louder. I closed my eyes.

“People die, Molly,” Andi continued. “They leave. And life goes on. Harry may have been the first friend you lost, but he won’t be the last. I get that you’re hurting. I get that you’re trying to step into some really big shoes. But that doesn’t give you the right to abuse people’s better natures. A lot of people are hurting lately, if you didn’t notice.”

If I didn’t notice. God, I would absolutely kill to be able not to notice people’s pain. Not to live it beside them. Not to sense its echoes hours or days later. The ugly part of me, the black part of my heart, wanted to open a psychic channel to Andi and show her the kind of thing I went through on a regular basis. Let her see how she would like my life. And we’d see if she was so righteous afterward. It would be wrong, but …

I took a slow breath. No. Harry told me once that you can always tell when you’re about to rationalize your way to a bad decision. It’s when you start using phrases such as “It would be wrong, but …” His advice was to leave the conjunction out of the sentence: “It would be wrong.” Period.

So I didn’t do anything rash. I didn’t let the rising tumult inside me come out. I spoke softly. “What is it you’d like me to do, exactly?”

Andi huffed out a little breath and waved a vague hand. “Just … get your head out of your ass, girl. I am not being unreasonable here, given that my boyfriend gave you a key to his freaking apartment.”

I blinked once at that. Wow. I hadn’t even really considered that aspect of what Butters had done. Romance and romantic conflict hadn’t exactly been high on my list lately. Andi had nothing to worry about on that front … but I guess she didn’t have way too much awareness of people’s emotions to tip her off to that fact. Now I could put a name to some of the worry in her. She wasn’t jealous, exactly, but she was certainly aware of the fact that I was a young woman a lot of men found attractive, and that Waldo was a man.

And she loved him. I could feel that, too.

“Think about him,” Andi said quietly. “Please. Just … try to take care of him the way he takes care of you. Call ahead. If you’d just walked in covered with blood next Saturday night, he would have had something very awkward to explain to his parents.”

I most likely would have sensed the unfamiliar presences inside the apartment before I got close enough to touch the door. But there was no point in telling Andi that. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t really understand the kind of life I lived. Certainly, she didn’t deserve to die for it, no matter what the opinion of my inner Sith.

I had to make my choices with my head. My heart was too broken to be trusted.

“I’ll try,” I said.

“Okay,” Andi said.

For a second, the fingers of my right hand quivered, and I found the ugly part of me about to hurl power at the other woman, blind her, deafen her, drown her in vertigo. Lea had shown me how. But I reeled the urge to attack back under control. “Andi,” I said instead.

“Yes?”

“Don’t hit me again unless you intend to kill me.”

I didn’t mean it as a threat, exactly. It was just that I tended to react with my instincts when things started getting violent. The psychic turbulence of that kind of conflict didn’t make me fall over screaming in pain anymore, but it did make it really hard to think clearly over the furious roaring of ugly me. If Andi hit me like that again … well. I wasn’t completely sure how I would react.

I’m not Mad Hatter insane. I’m pretty sure. But studying survival under someone like Auntie Lea leaves you ready to protect yourself, not to play well with others.

Threat or not, Andi had seen her share of conflict, and she didn’t back down. “If I don’t think you need a good smack in the face, I won’t give you one.”

Waldo and Justine had gone out to pick up some dinner, and got back about ten minutes later. We all sat down to eat while I reported on the situation.

“Svartalfheim,” Justine breathed. “That’s … that’s not good.”

“Those are the Norse guys, right?” Butters asked.

I filled them in between bites of orange chicken, relaying what I had learned from the Leanansidhe. There was a little silence after I did.

“So …” Andi said after a moment. “The plan is to … boink him free?”

I gave her a look.

“I’m just asking,” Andi said in a mild voice.

“They’d never sell,” Justine said, her voice low, tight. “Not tonight.”

I eyed her. “Why not?”

“They concluded an alliance today,” she said. “There’s a celebration tonight. Lara was invited.”

“What alliance?” I asked.

“A nonaggression pact,” Justine said, “with the Fomor.”