Demeter gave me a wintry smile.

“But don’t get overconfident. If you make another move that obvious, he’ll figure it out. And you’ll disappear.”

Demeter let out a bare laugh and shut the filing cabinet. “I disappeared years ago.” She gave me a steady look. “Are you here to do business, Mister Dresden?”

Granted, there was a building full of very…fit girls who would be happy to, ah, work on my tone. And my tone was letting me know that it would be happy to be worked on. The rest of my body, however, thought that a big meal and about two weeks of sleep was a much better idea. And once you got up to my neck, the rest of me thought that this whole place was looking prettier and hollower every time I visited.

“It’s done,” I said, and left.

At home, I couldn’t sleep.

Finally I had enough spare time to worry about what the hell was wrong with my right hand.

I wound up in my lab, dangling the packet of stale catnip for Mister and filling Bob in on the events of the past few days.

“Wow,” Bob said. “Soulfire. Are you sure he said soul fire?”

“Yeah,” I said wearily. “Why?”

“Well,” the skull said. “Soulfire is…well. It’s Hellfire, essentially. Only from the other place.”

“Heavenfire?”

“Well…” Bob said, “yes. And no. Hellfire is something you use to destroy things. Soulfire is used the opposite way—to create stuff. Look, basically what you do is, you take a portion of your soul and you use it as a matrix for your magic.”

I blinked. “What?”

“It’s sort of like using rebar inside concrete,” Bob said. “You put a matrix of rebar in, then pour concrete around it, and the strength of the entire thing together is a great deal higher than either one would be separately. You could do things that way that you could never do with either the rebar or the concrete alone.”

“But I’m doing that with my soul?” I demanded.

“Oh, come-on, Harry. All you mortals get all hung up over your precious souls. You’ve never seen your soul, never touched it, never done anything with it. What’s all the to-do?”

“So what you’re saying is that this hand construct was made out of my soul,” I said.

“Your soul and your magic fused together, yeah,” Bob said. “Your soul converted into energy. Soulfire. In this case, the spirit energy drawn from your aura right around your right hand, because it fit the construct so well, it being a big version of your right hand and all. Your standard force-projection spell formed around the matrix of soul fire, and what had been an instantaneous exertion of force became a long-term entity capable of manipulation and exertion to the same degree. Not really more powerful than just the force spell, as much as it was more than simply the force spell.”

I wiggled my tingling fingers. “Oh. But my soul’s going to get better, right?”