"So?" I said. "I've held out this long. Suppose I do it the whole way? Suppose I never pick up the coin. Shadow-you never goes back to real-you. Who's to say that shadow-you can't find some kind of life for herself?"
Hellfire eyes narrowed at me, but she did not reply.
"Lash," I said quietly, and relaxed my will, releasing my hold on her. "Just because you start out as one thing, it doesn't mean you can't grow into something else."
Silence.
Then her voice came out, a bare whisper. "Your plan has too many variables and will likely result in our destruction. Should you wish my assistance in your madness, my host, you have only to call."
Then the form was gone, and Lasciel was absent from my apartment.
Technically, she had never been there at all. She was all in my head. And, technically, she wasn't gone. She was just off somewhere where I couldn't perceive her; and I knew on a gut level - or maybe my darker self was telling me - that she'd heard me. I was onto something. I was sure of that.
Either I'm one hell of a persuasive guy or I'm a freaking sucker.
"Get your head in the game, Harry," I told myself. "Defeat the whole damn White Court now. Worry about taking on Hell later."
I got back to work. The clock ticked down steadily, and there was nothing I could do but get ready and kill time, waiting for nightfall and the fight that would follow.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I let Mister back in after his morning ramble, which happened to fall between three and four P.M. that day - Mister has a complicated ramble schedule that changes on a basis so mystifying that I have never been able to predict it - and took Mouse out for a stroll to the area of the boardinghouse's little backyard set aside for him.
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
I took a bit of sandpaper to my staff and cleaned off some gunk on the bottom and some soot along the haft. I put on all my silver battle rings and took them to the heavy bag I'd hung in the corner. Half an hour's worth of pounding on the bag wouldn't bring them all up to charge, but something was better than nothing.
Tick, tock.
I showered after my workout. I cleaned my gun and loaded it. I pushed aside my coffee table and couch to lay out my coat on the floor and took the leather cleaner to it, being careful not to disrupt the protective spells I'd scored in the hide with tattoo needles and black ink.
In short, I did everything I could to avoid thinking about Anna Ash's corpse in that cheap, clean little hotel room shower while the time crawled by.
Tick, tock.
At a quarter to six, there was a rapping sound outside my door. I checked out the peephole. Ramirez stood outside, dressed in a big red basketball-type tank top, black shorts, and flip-flops. He had a big gym bag over one shoulder and carried his staff, nearly as battle-scarred as mine, despite the difference in our ages, in his right hand. He rapped the end of the staff down on the concrete outside again, instead of touching my door.
I took down the wards and opened the steel security door. It didn't take me more than five or six hard pulls to get it to swing all the way open.
"I thought you were going to get that fixed," Ramirez said to me. He peered around the doorway before he eased forward through it, where I knew the presence of all the warding spells would be buzzing against his senses like a locomotive-sized electric razor, even though they were temporarily deactivated. "Jesus Christ, Harry. You beefed them up even more."
"Got to exercise the apprentice's talent somehow."
Ramirez gave me an affable leer. "I'll bet."
"Don't even joke about that, man," I told him, without any heat in the words. "I've known her since she was in pigtails."
Ramirez opened his mouth, paused, then shrugged and said, "Sorry."
"No problem," I said.
"But since I'm not an old man whose sex drive has withered from lack of use - "
(Don't get me wrong. I like Carlos. But there are times, when his mouth is running, that I want to punch him in the head until all his teeth fall out.)
" - I'll be the first to admit that I'd sure as hell find some uses for her. That girl is fine." He frowned and glanced around - a little nervously, I thought. "Um. Molly's not here, is she?"
"Nope," I said. "I didn't ask her on this operation."
"Oh," he said. His voice seemed to hold something of both approval and disappointment. "Good. Hey, there, Mouse."
My dog came over to greet Ramirez with a gravely shaken paw and a wagging tail. Ramirez produced a little cloth sack and tossed it up to Mister, where he lay in his favored spot atop one of my bookcases. Mister immediately went ecstatic, pinning the sack down with one paw and rubbing his whiskers all over it.
"I disapprove of recreational drug use," I told Ramirez sternly.
He rolled his eyes. "Okay, Dad. But since we all know who really runs this house" - Ramirez reached up to rub a finger behind one of Mister's ears - "I'll just keep on paying tribute lest I incur His Nibs's imperial displeasure."
I reached up to rub Mister's ears when Ramirez was done. "So, any questions?"
"We're going to stomp into the middle of a big meeting of the White Court, call a couple of them murderers, challenge them to a duel, and kill them right in front of all of their friends and relatives, right?"
"Right," I said.
"It has the advantage of simplicity," Ramirez said, his tone dry. He put his bag on my coffee table and opened it, drawing out a freaking Desert Eagle, one of the most powerful semiautomatic sidearms in the world. "Call them names and kill them. What could possibly go wrong with that ?"
"We're officially in a cease-fire," I said. "And as we've announced ourselves as parties arriving to deliver challenge, they'd be in violation of the Accords to kill us."
Ramirez grunted, checked the slide on the big handgun, and slapped a magazine into it. "Or we show up, they kill us, and then play like we left in good shape and vanished, and oh, dear, what a shame and loss to all those hot young women that that madman Harry Dresden dragged good-looking young Ramirez down with him when he went."
I snorted. "No. In the first place, the Council would find out what happened one way or another."
"If any of them looked," Ramirez drawled.
"Ebenezar would," I stated with perfect confidence.
"How do you know?" Ramirez asked.
I knew because my old mentor was the Blackstaff of the Council, their completely illegal, immoral, unethical, and secret assassin, free to break the Laws of Magic whenever he deemed it fit - such as the First Law, "Thou shalt not kill." When Duke Ortega of the Red Court had challenged me to a formal duel and cheated, Ebenezar had taken it personally. He'd pulled an old Soviet satellite down onto the vamps' heads, killing Ortega and his whole crew. But I couldn't tell Carlos that.