Sue spun around as Morgan charged, leaned down low, and opened her vast jaws in a bellow of challenge.

Say what you will about Morgan, the man was no coward. But the bellow of an angry Tyrannosaur is enough to give any mammal a moment or two of doubt. He slid to a halt on his heels, still grasping the sword in his left hand, and stared at Sue and then at me. He took a deep breath and then reached out his right hand, where there was a low, yawning, humming sound that shook the air around his fingers.

"No," he said quietly. "Not even this creature will keep you from justice this time, Dresden. Even if I have to die doing it."

I stared at Morgan, the same old frustration and fear suddenly yielding to a realization. I had always assumed that Morgan's irrational hatred was something personal, reserved for me and me alone. I had assumed that for whatever reason, Morgan's persecution was the result of the political and philosophical enmity of certain members of the White Council, that he was nothing but a pawn for someone higher up in the game.

But politicians don't make good kamikazes. That kind of dedication is reserved for zealots of principle and lunatics. For the first time I considered the notion that perhaps Morgan's hate was not directed at me personally, but at those that he truly believed to be violators of the Laws of Magic, murderers and traitors. I knew people who would face death, even embrace it, rather than surrender their principles. Karrin Murphy was one of them, and I was friends with most of the rest.

At the end of the day, Morgan was a cop. He worked for a different body of law, of course, and under a different set of guidelines, but his duties were the same: Pursue, combat, and apprehend those who violated the laws put in place to protect people from harm. He'd spent more than a century as a policeman dealing with some of the more nightmarish things on the planet. Thinking of him in that light suddenly gave me a different understanding of Morgan's character.

I'd seen burned-out cops before. They'd labored long and hard in the face of danger and uncertainty to uphold the law and protect the victims of crimes, only to see both the law and the victims it should have protected broken, beaten, and abused again and again. It mostly happened to the cops who genuinely cared, who believed in what they were doing, who passionately wanted to make a difference in the world. Somewhere along the way, their passion had become bottled anger. The anger had fermented into bitter hatred. Then the hatred had fed upon itself, gnawing away at them over years, even decades, until only a shell of cold iron and colder hate remained.