I swallowed. “Yeah.”

“Interesting,” she murmured. “If you can control them. They are a power potentially deadly even to the one who wields it. Explosive. Dangerous. And very typical of you. Excellent.” Then she moved the fingers of her right hand through a series of little gestures and was gone.

That left me alone in my grave with my thoughts.

I leaned against the wall again, but I didn’t settle down on the ground. Instead I thought about Molly and how screwed up she was.

That was my fault, in a lot of ways.

First thing to jump out at me: I never should have let Molly go to Chichén Itzá.

I had led her into the fight of my life against the Red Court, to save my daughter. But I shouldn’t have exposed Molly to that. She was a sensitive, a wizard whose magical senses were naturally attuned to the finest, lightest, most delicate workings of the Art. Or, to put it in more Harryfriendly terms, she had great big, honking Dumbo ears that were extremely sensitive to loud noises.

Magic is life. Some forms of death—like murder, the abrupt and violent termination of a life that was not otherwise ending—were the equivalent of enormous, screeching feedback to her senses. And I had dragged her into a freaking concert hall of it at Chichén Itzá. Murderpalooza. Not to mention setting off the biggest, most violent magical curse to be unleashed in the past century—hell, I wasn’t exactly a sensitive guy, magically speaking, but even I had a blank spot in my memory over the minutes right after that arcane explosion.

It’s got to be bad for me to shut it out. For Molly, it had to have been a whole lot worse. And, oh yes, she had been shot and nearly killed to go with everything else. I had watched her collapse from blood loss.

Mistake. It had been a big damned mistake. At the time, I had been so focused on getting Maggie out that I’d let Molly persuade me that she deserved to be on the team. I never would have let her do that if I’d been thinking straight. I would have told her to stay at home, hold the fort, or maybe stay in the car. That was what I’d always done when I was on my way to a slugfest. Exposure to that kind of noise could quite effectively shatter her sanity.

And maybe it had.

Even if her mental house was still on a good foundation, you didn’t need monsters or magic to get damaged by a brush with death. Soldiers coming home from wars had known that for centuries. Post-traumatic stress disorder from life-threatening injuries had screwed up the lives of a lot of people—people who didn’t have supernatural powers as a possible outlet for their anger, fear, grief, or guilt.

And who had been there to catch her? The freaking Leanansidhe, deputy of Her Wickedness, with her Nietzsche and Darwin Were Sentimental Pansies outlook on life.