In that bleak hour, I had chosen to sell my soul. And after that, I had led my closest friends and allies out on what I knew was practically a suicide mission. I’d known that such a battle would put a savage strain on Molly’s psychic senses, and that even if she did manage to survive, she might never be the same. I’d risked the two irreplaceable Swords of the Cross in my keeping, sending them into the battle even though I knew that if we fell, some of the world’s mightiest weapons for good would be captured and lost.

And when I saw that the sacrificial blood rite the Red King had intended to destroy me could be turned back on the Red Court, I had used it without hesitation.

I murdered Susan Rodriguez on a stone altar in Chichén Itzá and wiped out the Red Court. I saved my little girl.

I created a perfect situation for chaos to engulf the supernatural world. The sudden absence of the Red Court might have removed thousands of monsters from the world, but it meant only that tens of thousands of other monsters were suddenly free to rise, to expand into the vacuum I’d created. I shuddered as I wondered how many other men’s little girls had been hurt and killed as a result.

And, God help me… I would do it again. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t noble. It wasn’t good. I’d spent less than three hours in the company of my daughter—and so help me, if it meant keeping her safe, I would do it again.

Maybe the White Council needed an Eighth Law of Magic: the law of unintended consequences.

How do you measure one life against another? Can thousands of deaths be balanced by a single life? Even if Mab had not had time to fully take possession of me, how could I be sure that the very act of choosing to cross that line had not changed me into something monstrous?

I found myself stopped, standing on the Michigan Avenue bridge over the Chicago River. The mounded snow filled the night with light. Only the waters below me were dark, a black and whispering shadow, the Lethe and the Styx in one.

I looked up at the towers nearby. NBC. Trump’s place. The Sheraton. They stood tall and straight and clean in the night. Lights winked golden in windows.

I turned and stared south of me at the Loop, at the skyline I knew so well. There was a rare moment of stillness down Michigan Avenue. Streetlights. Traffic lights. A scattering of fresh snowflakes, enough to keep everything pretty and white instead of slushy and brown.

God, my town is beautiful.

Chicago. It’s insane and violent and corrupt and vital and artistic and noble and cruel and wonderful. It’s full of greed and hope and hate and desire and excitement and pain and happiness. The air sings with screams and laughter, with sirens, with angry shouts, with gunshots, with music. It’s an impossible city, at war with itself, every horrible and wonderful thing blending together to create something terrifying and lovely and utterly unique.