Return to part one

I could see Mrs. Reyes at her window when I pulled up. The curtains were drawn back and in one brief glance before hastily looking away, I discovered that she was wearing what had probably been fashionably sexy nightwear in about 1942, and nothing else. Fortunately, the fact that I travel with a dog the size of a city bus appeared to discourage her from coming out to show it off to me. Thank God.

I started down the stairs to my apartment and then froze at a movement in the darkness below me. Mouse didn't seem worried -- in fact, his tail swished against my leg, indicating that it was someone he knew -- but I still readied my blasting rod and held the shield bracelet before me. "Halt, who goes there?" I can't help myself sometimes.

"Harry?" I recognized that voice, and I could have smacked myself in the forehead -- except that my hands were full, and I'm usually not that melodramatic anyway -- at having forgotten one of the most likely people to be able to help me. Elaine. Probably the one person I knew who was an expert in detail-oriented spells and wasn't on the White Council.

And, unfortunately, someone I didn't want within a mile of me at the moment. I started backing away, shield bracelet held wardingly in front of me, as Elaine climbed the stairs, all swaying hips and falling hair. "Lily can't come, but she contacted me to let me know that you were in some kind of trouble. I waited outside rather than trying to unravel your defenses --" She paused at the top of the stairs, and I had just enough time to hope that she'd be unaffected -- maybe actually having had sex at some point in the past conferred immunity? Then I saw the spreading flush in her face and thought Oh shit.

"Harry," Elaine said huskily, and started for me, swaying provocatively. For a split second, my reptile hindbrain took over, babbling things like She wants it too and It's not like you've never slept with her before -- but, damn it all, there's wanting to get laid and then there's magical date rape, and this would pretty clearly be the latter.

I flung up my shield before I could think about it. Elaine, focused only on me, bounced off the shield and blinked, bringing up a hand to rub at her face. "Ow," she said.

"Elaine?" Maybe the impact had been enough to bring her to her senses.

She lowered her hand slowly from her face, and I saw that her pupils were almost completely dilated. Okay, perhaps not.

"Playing hard to get, Harry?" she asked, sounding slightly dazed and disturbingly cheerful. She raised her hand in a gesture I recognized, and her lips began to move, framing a set of syllables.

Shit on a stick.

The force that slammed into me didn't quite manage to penetrate my shield, but it bowled me over backwards, into Mouse, who let out a startled yelp.

"This is fun!" Elaine chirped happily, sounding about as un-Elainelike as a person can get. "Magic-play! Why didn't we ever try this before? Take me if you can!" I could feel the tension of gathering magical energies as she readied another spell.

There was very little doubt in my mind that I couldn't survive a one-on-one magical duel with Elaine. Of course, she wasn't trying to kill me, but the end result would be almost as bad. Not only would she hate me in the morning, but I'd hate me, too.

Which was why I decided to play my hole card.

Putting together complicated spells is not really my forte, but considering the life I lead, I do take the time to prepare magical defenses every now and again. I don't do a lot of that sort of thing, because it hardly seems worth it to spend weeks investing the same amount of magical force that I can get with one well-placed Fuego. However, there are times when finesse works a lot better than brute force.

Like now.

As Elaine readied another onslaught, I grabbed a scrap of charmed burlap from my pocket, mumbled the activation word and threw it at her. The coarse mesh exploded around her in a web of threads. Elaine made a startled little squeak and released the energy that she'd been gathering in a fountain of green sparks. It tore a hole in the net, but by then, the sleep spell woven into the threads had taken effect and she keeled over.

"Sometimes I impress myself," I told Mouse, who looked distinctly unimpressed and also kind of annoyed that I was sitting on his tail.

I slung Elaine over my shoulder and hauled her into my apartment. The spell was one that Ebenezar had taught me; he developed it to deal with problem raccoons and escaped livestock. Elaine should stay tangled up and asleep for eight hours or so, and hopefully by that time I would have figured out what to do with her.

I tied her up and locked her in the bathroom just to be on the safe side.

"I think I'm actually making reverse progress here," I informed Mouse as I uncovered the trapdoor to the basement lab. Maybe Bob had come up with something.

"Where's my gay porn, Harry?" was the first thing the skull said as I climbed down to the lab. "If you won't let me out of my skull, the least you could do is bring me gay porn."

I stopped and stared at him. "Given present circumstances, do you really think visiting a gay porn store is the best thing for me right now?"

Bob's eyelights turned inward, contemplative. "Hmm, you do have a point. I take it the spell doesn't seem to be wearing off, Casanova?"

"No, and now I have Elaine tied up in the bathroom, and my elderly neighbor seems to be one step away from setting livetraps in front of my door to bag herself a husband."

Bob made a chortling sound. "Maybe your irredeemable prudishness pissed off some lust deity somewhere and you're being punished. Or blessed. Do you have any idea how many times you could have gotten laid by now if you weren't so hopelessly --"

"Moral?" I snapped.

"I was going to say 'retarded', but whatever blows your skirt up, Harry." I swear the skull waggled its eyebrow ridges at me.

I suppressed the urge to drop-kick him. "If you know how to get rid of this spell and you're holding out on me, I'm flushing you down the toilet."

"I wouldn't do that," Bob protested. "Not to you, anyway, boss. I'm working on it. The spell is incredibly subtle, and deep; it seems to be woven into the very fiber of your being. I've never seen anything like it." He hesitated. "Well, actually it does remind me of something, but --"

A screech and clang from upstairs made me stiffen. That had been my door opening.

"Expecting company?" Bob asked.

"No," I said between my teeth. No sound from Mouse, at least not that I could hear. Maybe Elaine had somehow unraveled my sleep spell and gotten out of the bathroom. Maybe my unknown enemy had figured I'd be sufficiently distracted and come over to finish the job he, she or it had started.

I didn't have my staff or blasting rod down here with me, so I picked up a solid rod of ash wood, about four feet long, that I'd been keeping on hand for use in various spells.

"Oh yes, very effective," Bob remarked. "After spending your entire life in the study of magic, this is what it's brought you to: attacking intruders with a baseball bat."

"Shh!" I hissed at him, and cocked my head to one side, listening.

I heard footsteps crossing the floor, then the bathroom door opening, then a muffled voice saying, "What the hell?" and then, louder, "Harry?"

"Shit!" I snapped, and threw down the chunk of wood. I stomped up the ladder, too pissed to think straight. "I told you to stay away from here, Thomas!"

"Excuse me for thinking you might be in trouble!" my brother retorted, turning around from the bathroom door. "Next time leave me actual information rather than incoherent rambling! Why is Elaine tied up in your bathtub?" Then he paused, going still and silent in a way that was becoming all too familiar.

I froze at the top of the stairs.

I'd still held out a small hope that Thomas would be immune to the curse, either through his vampire nature or his relationship to me, but that hope crumbled when he moved towards me with supernatural speed. My eyes could barely even track him before his hard-muscled body slammed into me and flattened me against the wall.

"Thomas, don't!" I didn't have anything to attack him with, even if I thought I'd be able to bring myself to do it. His vampire strength was an inexorable force pressing me to the wall. I could barely breathe. My arms were pinned; I tried kicking him in the nuts -- he was my brother, so he'd have to forgive me, eventually -- but he hooked a leg around mine and immobilized that, too.

Michael had actually managed to gain some control over the curse. Elaine, though equally strong-willed, hadn't done so. Thinking wildly as I dodged a series of attempted kisses, I rationalized that maybe the spell's effect was related to how strongly it pushed a person against their basic nature. Elaine was attracted to me anyway; she hadn't had a chance. Michael, though, was in love with Charity and strictly heterosexual and monogamous -- he'd been able to use that to control its effects over him.

Thomas's lips were drawn back from his teeth. I couldn't tell if he was trying to kiss me or bite me, but either way, I was starting to feel the tug of his lust-vampire mojo -- not as strong as with Lara, but still enough to creep me out and terrify me.

What he was about to do would destroy him. Of course, it would destroy me first.

I head-butted him in the face to gain a few seconds to talk. "Thomas, you're hurting me! And if you do this, you're going to kill me! Like Justine."

I felt like an ass, but the response was immediate. Thomas froze, then pulled his head back. His skin was dead white, his eyes silver-white out to the edges. Blood smeared the corner of his mouth, which made my heart lurch until I realized that it was too pale to be mine -- it was probably from when I'd struck him in the face

His grip on me remained implacable; trying to free myself was like struggling against iron. However, if there's one person in this world who has experience at controlling lust, it's Thomas.

I kept talking, the way you'd talk to a rabid dog or a jumper on a ledge -- sort of a calm, rational babbling. "Thomas, it's me. Harry. You don't want to do this." Stupid, inane stuff. But it was working. I could see the blind hunger fading from his eyes as the rational, human part of him began to reassert itself. With a sudden jerk of his whole body, his pupils went human-normal and he shoved himself away from me so hard that he left bruises on my upper arms.

"Oh God," he said, and sank down onto the couch with his arms wrapped around his torso.

I raised my hand to feel gingerly at the sore spots on my chest and arms. "You okay?" I said after a moment.

"No." He was staring at the floor, studiously not looking at me. "What happened?"

"There's a lust spell on me. A powerful one, apparently."

Thomas gave a snorted laugh that sounded dangerously close to a sob. "Well, that just figures, doesn't it?" He raised his eyes to mine, then quickly looked away. "I can still feel -- it's a -- yeah, that's pretty powerful."

"Sorry," I ventured. "I did tell you not to come over."

"I know. I just thought that it was you being you, trying to keep other people out of the line of fire, you know."

"I don't do that."

Thomas just snorted. His head turned, his gaze going to the half-open bathroom door and Elaine's trussed form in the bathtub. "Is that why she's like that?"

"Pretty much." I took a step away from the wall, with some idea of sitting down next to him on the couch, but Thomas made an involuntary hissing sound, so instead I sat down as far away from him as I could get, on a chair in the kitchen.

"So," Thomas said finally.

"So," I agreed. I waved a hand at him, sitting with his shoulders hunched over as if he were in pain. "Are you, uh -- resisting?"

He shot me a quick look of disgust. "Since you're not a dried-up husk on the floor, obviously I am."

"I'm sorry," I said. I wasn't sure what else to say.

This time his laugh was genuine, if a bit strained. "You attract trouble like a magnet attracts iron filings, don't you, Dresden?"

"Hey, it's not like I plan it this way," I protested.

Thomas pushed himself off the couch. "So. Let's see if we can figure out who did this. When did you first notice the effects?"

I stared until my mouth caught up with my brain. "Wait, wait! 'We' who?"

He glared at me, though his eyes still tended to skate away rather than meeting mine. "We us, Harry. That's what family does."

My throat closed up in a very unmanly way. Finally I managed to say, "That would be more comforting if you could stand to be within twenty feet of me without wanting to rip my clothes off."

Thomas's mouth curled in a crooked grin. "Well, as long as you stay over there, everything should be fine, then."

---

It's funny how much easier it is, sometimes, to think things over when you've got someone else to throw ideas to and have them batted back. I could do that with Bob, but it's tiring, and there's so much about human thoughts and motivations that he just doesn't get. Thomas was easier -- even though I could see the strain in his face, the effort that it took him to fight back against the curse.

"If this gets to be too much to deal with, you could leave."

"I'm dealing," he said, and that was all he'd say about that.

Thomas didn't think anyone in his family would be capable of working a spell as complex as the one on me. "We're not wizards, Harry. Not that we couldn't be -- not that most of us don't have some at least knowledge of magic. But the training and dedication that it takes to actually get good at it ... that's not really White Court style."

"Don't tell me you guys are all about the instant gratification, because I've seen how complicated the court's politics can get."

He shook his head. "It's different. As a means to an end, we can be incredibly patient, but the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge, even as a way of theoretically gaining more power ... I just don't really see us doing it. On top of everything, if we started attaining high-level magical skill it would probably bring down the Council on us. We don't want open warfare, the way the Reds have done. Existing in shadows, pulling strings behind the scenes -- that's our way."

I didn't like the way he kept saying "us" and "our" about the White Court. I didn't think of Thomas as one of them, and I didn't want him to think of himself that way, either. But Thomas is a big boy, and I can't fight his battles for him.

Mouse rose suddenly from his position at Thomas's feet, stretched all over, and then padded his hulking way over to the trapdoor in the floor. He stared down at it, pointedly.

Thomas raised an eyebrow at me.

"Your guess is as good as mine." I got up and went around my brother, giving him as much space as possible -- I trusted Thomas's control, but I didn't want to push it. Pushing Mouse gently but firmly aside, I climbed down into the lab.

"Finally!" Bob said, exasperated. "I've been trying to get your attention. I can hear you up there; can't you hear me? Oh, I like the mussed look on you, though, Harry. It makes me want to --"

I folded my arms. "If you called me down here to lust after me, I swear to God --"

The skull made a little sound like feh. "No, the lusting is a side benefit, and rather unsatisfying, I must say, considering your ongoing refusal to put out. No, I figured out why that spell on you looks so familiar to me."

"Well?"

There was, uncharacteristically, a bit of a hesitation before Bob said, "It's Lasciel's work."

I groaned, leaned over and banged my head into the wall.

Thomas called down through the trapdoor, "Everything okay down there?"

"Everything's fine!" I hollered back up to him, and to Bob, "When did she do it? And how? It's been weeks since I got her out of my head."

"I have a theory," Bob said, "but you're not going to like it."

"It never means anything good when you say that, Bob. And you say it a lot."

"Yes, well, I can't help it if it's true." He rolled his eyelights, then -- well, there's no way that an expressionless skull can sober up, but he seemed to do so anyway. "What really puzzled me about the spell is the way that it's worked into the deepest recesses of your -- well, for lack of a more magically accurate term, your soul. The personal energy that makes you, you. Most spells, seen from the outside by a being like me, look like they're hanging around a person's own energy. Kind of like, draped on it -- maybe laced into its outer layers, like mold. This almost seems to come from inside."

Bob was right, I didn't like where this was going. "Please tell me I didn't do this to myself."

"Unfortunately, I think that's exactly what you did," Bob said without sympathy. "What with your ongoing sexual frustration, not to mention the amount of time you've been spending lately with Murphy, and Elaine, and Molly --"

"I don't lust after my goddamn apprentice, Bob!"

"Maybe not consciously, but you're human, and male, with a normal sex drive." If skulls could smirk, Bob would be smirking; I could hear it in his voice. "And I notice you didn't say anything about the other two."

I cleared my throat. "Look, no matter how tidy a theory it is, there's no way that I could accidentally cast a spell on myself; it just doesn't work that way."

"But that's not exactly what happened. If my theory is right, a little of Lasciel's power and maybe a little of her consciousness lingered for a little while after she made her sacrifice. Not enough to form another personality, not enough for me to pick up on, but enough to work with your subconscious desire for sexual gratification, eventually ending up with you being the deliciously appealing specimen of humanity that you now have become."

I rested my forehead against the wall. "I hate me."

"Harry?" Thomas called down again.

"Just a minute! I'm busy!"

"Elaine's waking up."

---

By the time I made it up the ladder, which was pretty damn fast, she was unconscious again. I gave Thomas a narrow-eyed glare.

"She'll be fine," he said.

While I really didn't want to delve too deeply into Thomas's apparently extensive knowledge of rendering young women helpless, he seemed to be right. Elaine's color was good, her breathing deep and regular. "Okay," I said. "We have to get her out of here. If she goes for me again, at least one of us is probably going to have sex or die."

"You can't have sex with only one; it would have to be both of you," Thomas pointed out.

I glared at him.

"I think your execrable sense of humor is rubbing off on me," he sighed. "Why don't I move Elaine to my apartment for now, unless you know where she's staying in town. Then I'll come back --"

I shook my head. "No, don't. I mean, yes, take Elaine somewhere, and stay with her, so that you can explain to her what's going on when she wakes up."

"What about you?"

"I'll be okay. Bob's got a theory, a pretty good one. I think I might know who did this to me, and if so, I can probably get it off."

He watched me for a moment more, silently questioning me with his eyes. When I offered nothing more, he smiled a little, then stooped to pick up Elaine.

"Thomas." Family, and all that goes with it, doesn't come easily to me. I wanted to tell him everything, but at the same time, I couldn't quite take that extra step. Both Thomas and I have our secrets, after all. Finally I said, "Thank you."

"Call me," he said simply. I opened the front door for him, and he swung Elaine's unconscious and trussed-up body through the opening. I wondered what the neighbors would think of that, especially since I'd done pretty much the same thing with Molly this morning. Hopefully Mrs. Reyes would be too distracted by her new crush on me to notice anything else incriminating that might be going on in the vicinity of my apartment. By this point, I was pretty sure that my neighbors, the surviving ones, had developed a healthy Harry-sized blind spot for the most part.

Mister zipped inside on Thomas's heels, and resumed his love affair with my ankle. I tried to ignore him while I reinforced my wards and then went back down to the basement. Mister tried to follow and I pushed him out and slammed the door in his face. If he remembered any of this, I was going to be in for weeks of sulking.

"You're so cute when you're annoyed," Bob said. "Your upper lip has this little thing that it does --"

"If I don't get this spell off me soon, Bob, you'll get to find out whether or not I'm cute when I'm insane."

"Point taken," the skull muttered. "Okay, if you put the spell on yourself, then the only one who can remove it is you. So get meditating."

"That's it? That's your advice?"

"What?" Bob retorted. "It's true. Since you're the one who put it on, even if you didn't consciously realize it at the time, then it should be fairly simple for you to unravel it from the inside. And it's not as if anyone else can do it for you."

"And if you're wrong and I'm not the one who put it together?"

"It still shouldn't hurt anything to try, as long as you're careful. Just don't tug on the wrong thread or else you'll explode," Bob added cheerfully.

Bob should write greeting cards; he has such a comforting bedside manner. An unpleasant possibility occurred to me. "What if I need Lasciel to help me remove it?"

"Then perhaps you'd better consider an alternate career as a male stripper. You could make a bundle, with that ass."

I reminded myself that there were perfectly valid reasons not to lock Bob in a safe and drop him into the nearest swamp. I just couldn't think of any at the moment. Instead I went back upstairs to cleanse myself for meditation. Having learned from past experience, this time I unplugged the phone first.

After all of that, the actual removal of the spell was highly anticlimactic. Bob was right, I had to have done it to myself, even though I'd never consciously achieved anything of that complexity and subtlety. In a meditative trance with my Sight turned on myself, I could see it as an incredibly convoluted web of light, imbued with my personal style, as individual as handwriting. Bob might not have recognized it as mine, because it was far beyond anything that I'd ever accomplished on my own, but I knew. I could see. It was a last gift from Lasciel, like the guitar playing.

Frikkin' demons and their twisted ideas of what was good for me.

I traced the inner workings of the spell with metaphorical spirit fingers. If I'd done it, I could undo it -- in fact, given my current situation, I'd pretty much have to. Bob's comment about blowing myself up stuck with me, along with some of the less pleasant things that had happened with Little Chicago. If Lasciel had done it through me, though, maybe she'd also left me with the ability to undo it.

With exquisite gentleness, I untwisted a couple of strands. The spell's breathtaking complexity collapsed with a slow grace, unraveling and bleeding its energy away into the world around me. No exploding. Instead I swam up out of the meditative state back to regular consciousness, becoming aware of my heavy, tired limbs dragging me down. I felt like I'd run a marathon, and also, strangely bereft -- a deep, lonely emptiness that left me hollow and aching inside. Maybe it had been there all along and I hadn't noticed.

"Nicely done, boss," Bob said as I began to unfold myself stiffly from the floor. "It's completely gone; there isn't a trace of it left. And I, ah, no longer find myself entranced by your ass."

"Good for you," I said, limping over to the ladder. I think I blew my store of magical energy for the whole week on that little stunt. I just wanted to lay down and sleep for a week. On the top rung, though, I paused. "Bob, you don't suppose there's any more of Lasciel hanging around in my brain, do you?" I'd felt around for her while I was under, and couldn't find anything that felt like her, but Bob had certified me Lasciel-free once before.

"I guess it's impossible to say for certain, boss, but I really don't think so. Of course, there's only one way to know for sure."

"Wait and see if I start attracting pigeons again?" I asked wearily.

"Yeah. Pretty much."

I made a rude noise at the skull and escaped to my living room. Mister, I saw, was sitting on top of a bookshelf in the corner, and he hissed and threatened me with his claws when I detoured close enough to get a look at him.

Yep. Not a happy cat. I figured I should probably eat something, but couldn't muster the energy to cook, so I flopped down face-first onto the couch. "Wake me up if the building's on fire," I mumbled out of the corner of my mouth to Mouse, and fell asleep.

A deep rhythmic thumping dragged me slowly out of a sleep so deep that I couldn't remember what, if anything, I'd been dreaming about. Slowly I started gathering my muddled wits as a fresh round of thumping broke out somewhere nearby, and I realized that someone was pounding on the door.

"Harry? It's Murphy." Her voice was muffled, and sounded anxious.

"Mhpharghl," I answered incoherently into the couch cushions.

"Harry, I'm sorry, I know I shouldn't be here and I won't come in, but I had to come by and make sure that you hadn't been, I don't know, gang-raped by pigeons or something. I tried calling you, but you didn't answer."

Phone. Damn. Guess I never plugged it back in. I took a couple deep breaths to fortify myself and dragged my ass off the couch and over to the door. Snapping back the deadbolts, I drew the door to its usual six inches, braced myself and gave it a hard yank. Damn it, I really need to get it fixed.

On the other side, Murphy jumped back like I'd just shoved a dead skunk in her face. "Harry! What are you doing!"

It took my sleep-fogged brain a moment to catch up, remembering what I'd told her earlier over the phone. "Oh, that. Lust spell gone. I'm safe to be around. Hi Murph. C'mon in." I staggered back, rubbing my hand over my face.

Murphy peeked cautiously into the apartment, and, apparently confident that I wasn't going to turn her into a lust zombie, slipped inside and shut the door. She wore a loose denim jacket and her hair was twisted back in a rough tail, with blond wisps trailing around her deceptively cherubic face. "Gee, thanks for calling and letting me know you were okay," she said sarcastically.

I sank back onto the couch, trying to get my brain in gear. "Was I supposed to?"

"I keep forgetting that social niceties are a foreign concept to you, Dresden." She leaned down to ruffle Mouse's ears.

"I'm sorry, you're gonna have to use smaller words if you insult me. Brain's asleep."

"I can see that, yes." I realized that she was rummaging around in my kitchen and got my head up over the side of the couch to see what she was doing.

"Hey, that's my kitchen," I said inanely.

"I noticed," came her voice from behind a cupboard door. "I'm also aware of what a lousy host you are, and it's been a very long day, and if I'm not going to fall asleep the minute I sit down on that couch, I need caffeine." She closed the cupboard and riffled through the drawers of the battered cabinet underneath. "Do you even have coffee in this house?"

"Guess I need to go to the store," I mumbled, letting my head drop down onto the end of the couch again.

"You have no coffee in the house, but an entire drawer full of bouillon cubes? You are a strange man, Harry Dresden."

I decided not to respond to this. The faery housekeepers do a lot of my shopping, which is great, because I'm lazy, but they also have strange ideas of what humans eat. I once had to live on Lucky Charms for two months. I guess they must have liked the box or something.

"Aha!" Murphy held up a handful of loose tea bags triumphantly. Unable to find a teakettle, she put a saucepan of water over my gas burner and then came over, stood and stared at the couch for a moment (covered, as it was, with me) and then seized hold of my feet, unceremoniously moved them out of the way, and sat down.

"You're a very pushy woman," I said into the arm of the couch. "What are you doing here, again?"

"Having a cup of tea."

"I was speaking somewhat more generally than that."

"Oh, I don't know. Some idiot called me today with a problem. While it seems that it's been resolved, I'd like to hear the whole story." She got up and went into the kitchen. "Tea?"

And so the irresistible (at least for today) force known as Harry, meets the immovable object. I sat up with a sigh. "Sure. There's sugar, uh, somewhere."

She brought us two mugs and sat down again on the end of the couch. Mouse leaned against her leg. "This is nice," I said, sipping my tea. "Room service. Do you cook and clean too?"

Murphy snorted. "Don't forget I'm armed."

This was the point when I should have made some chauvinist comment about taking her handcuffs to bed, or little women compensating with big guns. I realized that she was waiting for it, her head cocked to the side, a verbal tennis player preparing to return my serve. But, tonight, it cut too close to the truth. I'd subconsciously turned myself into the ultimate babe magnet because I was freakin' lonely, and joking about sex with the one woman I really wanted to use that charm on, but couldn't ... Well, at the moment, wiped out and vulnerable and exhausted, I really didn't have the strength for it.

After not receiving the expected verbal riposte, Murphy just studied me for a while, her angel's face showing just a hint of steel underneath. Finally, she said softly, "You okay?"

"No," I said. "Not really."

Her hand closed over mine, small strong fingers wrapping around my own fingers and holding them against the mug of tea beneath. I could feel warmth seeping through from both directions, the hot water and the heat of her hand, driving away the chill of exhaustion.

"Tell me," she said, quietly.

So I did.

---

Author's Notes: Since this is for a HARLEQUIN challenge, I thought about ramping up the Harry/Murphy relationship, but in the end it felt more natural to leave it on the same level as the books -- friendship and UST. Yes, I'm a terrible romance writer.