She let out enough of a snort to stir the steam. She took a slow drink of hot chocolate. “Little inappropriate. Even if you were still alive.”

“But funnier,” I said.

“You’re not the one who is going to watch her entire family grow old and die, Harry.” She said it without malice. “Not just my parents. My brothers and sisters. All of them. I’m going to be beginning to get respect from other wizards about the same time Hope and Little Harry are dying of old age.”

“Maybe you’ll get lucky and someone will kill you first.”

She shrugged. “Lea’s been doing what she could about that. If it happens, it happens. As long as there’s a reason for it, that kind of death wouldn’t bother me.”

I shivered, just from the emotionless tone of her voice. “Except for the dead part?”

“Everyone dies, Harry,” she said. “There’s no use whining about it.”

I waited for a couple of beats and then said, “Here’s where you talk about how what you do with your life is what’s truly important.”

Her head fell back and she let out a belly laugh. It sounded warm and natural. Her eyes were just too wide, though, her smile too strained.

“Yeah. Exactly.” She shook her head and looked at me intently. “Is that what it’s always like for you? Throwing fire that way?”

I blinked and tried to change mental gears. I didn’t do it as smoothly as she had. Someone uncharitable or unbiased might note that it could be because Molly had stripped said gears. “Um. Oh, back at the fight with the Fomor guys?”

“They weren’t the Fomor,” Molly corrected me. “They were humans the Fomor have altered. They’re called—”

“Turtlenecks,” I said.

She arched an eyebrow. “You and Murphy both. No, they’re known as servitors. The Fomor muck around with them. Install things. Gills, extra muscles, organs for sonar, night-vision eyes…”

I whistled. “All kinds of fun.”

She nodded. “The odd bits kind of turn to jelly when they die. Police are calling them transients.”

I nodded, and tried to keep the conversation casual. “A lot of them dying around here?”

“It’s Chicago,” she said. “There’s always someone dying around here. And you should see what these… these animals do, Harry. They take people right out of their beds. Grab children waiting for the school bus. They’ve tortured people to death for fun.”

As she spoke, the calm in her voice had begun to fracture. It wasn’t dramatic. Just a break of her voice, an inhalation between sentences that was a little too harsh.

“You can’t stand around doing nothing,” I said, nodding.

“No,” she said. “They’ll come and scream at you in your sleep if you try. So…”

“So?”

Molly was silent. I didn’t push. Five minutes went by before she closed her eyes and whispered, “It’s easy. It shouldn’t be so easy.”

Technically, I didn’t have a heart anymore. It couldn’t twist. It couldn’t break.

It did anyway.