Susan smiled. "I heard you saved the world from some kind of doom. Is it true?"

I fiddled with my drink. "Sort of."

Susan laughed. "How do you sort of save the world?"

"I only saved it in a Greenpeace kind of way. If I'd blown it, there might have been a historically bad storm, but I don't think anyone would have noticed the real damage for thirty or forty years-climate change takes time."

"Sounds scary," Susan said.

I shrugged. "Mostly I was just trying to save my own ass. The world was a twofer. Maybe I'm getting cynical. I suspect the only thing I accomplished was to keep the faeries from screwing up the place so that we could screw it up ourselves."

I sat down on the chair again, and we opened the Cokes and drank in silence for a bit. My heart eventually stopped pounding quite so loudly.

"I miss you," I said finally. "So does your editor. She called me a couple of weeks ago. Said your articles had quit coming in."

Susan nodded. "That's one reason I'm here. I owe her more than a letter or a phone call."

"You're quitting?" I asked.

She nodded.

"You find something else?"

"Sort of," she said. She brushed her hair back from her face with one hand. "I can't tell you everything right now."

I frowned. For as long as I'd known her, Susan had been driven by a passion for discovering the truth and sharing it with other people. Her work at the Arcane had arisen from her stubborn refusal to deny things she saw as the truth, even if they had seemed insane. She was one of the rare people who stopped and thought about things, even weird and supernatural things, instead of dismissing them out of hand. That's how she'd begun work at the Arcane. That was how she had originally met me.

"Are you all right?" I asked. "Are you in trouble?"

"Relatively speaking, no," she said. "But you are. That's why I'm here, Harry."

"What do you mean?"

"I came to warn you. The Red Court- "

"Sent Paolo Ortega to call me out. I know."

She sighed. "But you don't know what you're getting into. Harry, Ortega is one of the most dangerous nobles of their Court. He's a warlord. He's killed half a dozen of the White Council's Wardens in South America since the war started, and he's the one who planned and executed the attack on Archangel last year."

I sat straight up at that, the blood draining from my face. "How do you know about that?"

"I'm an investigative reporter, Harry. I investigated."

I toyed with the Coke can, frowning down at it. "All the same. He came here asking for a duel. A fair fight. If he's serious, I'll take him on."

"There's more that you need to know," Susan said.

"Like what?"