"Be very still, Dresden," Kumori said, her voice soft. "If you try to move, I'll kill you."

Chapter Twenty-nine

Kumori stood about four feet from me—easily within reach of my staff, if I wanted to strike at her. But since I was sitting down and had only one strong hand to swing the staff, I wouldn't be able to hit hard enough to disable her, even if I somehow managed to hit her before she unleashed the power she was holding in her hand.

And besides. She was a girl.

Unless she proved herself to be some kind of monstrous thing that just looked like a girl, I wasn't going to hit her. On some rational level, I knew my attitude was dangerously illogical, but that didn't change anything. I don't hit girls.

I had the feeling she was quick enough to beat me, as she stood over me with the magical equivalent of a cocked and readied gun sparkling through the metal mesh over her right palm. I could feel the air vibrating with a low, steady note of power, and her stance was both confident and wary.

One thing I was pretty sure of—she was here to talk. If she'd wanted to kill me, she could have done it already. So I stayed sitting, set my staff aside, very slowly, and mildly raised both hands. "Take it easy there, cowgirl," I said. "You got me dead to rights."

I couldn't see her face within the depths of the hood, but I heard a dry note of amusement in her voice. "Take off the bracelet, please. And the ring on your right hand."

I arched a brow. The ring was spent, and probably didn't have enough juice left in it to push her back a step, but I'd never run into anyone who had noticed it before. Whoever she was, Kumori knew how wizards operated, and it made me even more sure that she was hiding her face because she was someone I might recognize—someone on the White Council.

I slipped the bracelet off my left hand and lowered it slowly to the stair beside me, but getting that ring off was going to be problematic. "I can't get the ring off," I said.

"Why not?" Kumori asked.

"Fingers on my left hand don't work anymore," I said.

"What happened?"

I blinked at her for a second. The question had been polite. In fact, if I didn't know any better, I'd have taken her tone for actual interest.

"What happened to your left hand?" she asked, her tone patient.

I answered her as politely as I could while staring at her, trying to figure her out. "I was fighting vampires. There was a fire. Burned my hand so bad the doctors wanted to take it off. There's no way I can get the ring off unless you want to come over here and take it yourself."