“Guess he was right,” Mort said.

“Where is he?” Molly asked. “I mean… his ghost.”

Mort glanced around and looked right at me—right through me. He shook his head. “Not here.”

Molly closed her eyes and began to cry quietly.

“I got her, boss,” Molly said quietly. “We got her. And I’m still here. Still me. Thank you.”

“She’s thanking me,” I said quietly. “For that.”

“And much more,” Uriel said. “She still has her life. Her future. Her freedom. You did save her, you know. The idea to have her call to Mortimer in the closing moments of the psychic battle was inspired.”

“I’ve cost her too much,” I said quietly.

“I believe that when you went after your daughter, you said something about letting the world burn. That you and your daughter would roast marshmallows.”

I nodded bleakly.

“It is one thing for you to say, ‘Let the world burn.’ It is another to say, ‘Let Molly burn.’ The difference is all in the name.”

“Yeah,” I croaked. “I’m starting to realize that. Too late to do any good. But I get it.”

Uriel gave me a steady look and said nothing.

I shook my head. “Get some rest, kid,” I called, though I knew she wouldn’t hear me. “You’ve earned it.”

The scene unfolded. Murphy and the wolves woke up less than a minute after the Corpsetaker was shown to the door. Will and company changed back to their human forms, while Mort, after a whispered tip from Sir Stuart, rushed over to Butters’s fallen body. He worked a subtle, complex magic that made some of mine look pretty crude, and drew Butters’s spirit from the disintegrating tangle of the Corpsetaker’s spell and back down into his physical body.

It took several minutes, and when Butters woke up, Andi and Marci, both naked, both rather pleasant that way, were giving him CPR. They’d kept his body alive in the absence of his soul.

“Wow,” Butters slurred as he opened his eyes. He looked back and forth between the two werewolf girls. “Subtract the horrible pain in my chest, this migraine, and all the mold and mildew, and I’m living the dream.”

Then he passed out.

The cops showed up a bit after that. Two of them were guys Murphy knew. The werewolves vanished into the night a couple of seconds before the blue bubbles of the cop cars showed up, taking the illegal portions of Murphy’s armament with them. Murphy and Mort told them all about how Mort had been abducted and tortured by the Big Hoods, and if they didn’t tell the whole story, what they did tell was one hundred percent true.

Molly and Butters got handed off to EMTs, along with several of the Big Hoods who had been knocked around and chewed up. Mort got some attention, too, though he refused to be taken to a hospital. The rest of the Big Hoods got a pair of cuffs and a ride downtown. Boz was carted out like a tranquilized rhinoceros.