I frowned. That was correct. When Mab first walked into my office in mortal guise years ago, I noticed that something was off and subsequently discovered who she really was. As far as I knew, no one else had been privy to that meeting.

“Perhaps you’d care to reminisce over old times,” mewled the eerie voice. Mab winked at me.

Crap. She’d done that the last time I’d bumped into her. And once again, no one else knew anything about it. I’d been indulging in wishful thinking, hoping she was fake. She was the real Mab.

Mab showed me her teeth. “Three favors you owed me,” Mab said—sort of. “Two yet remain. I am here to create an opportunity for you to remove one of them from our accounting.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “How are you going to do that?”

Her smile widened, showing me her delicately pointed canines. “I am going to help you.”

Yeah.

This couldn’t be good.

I tried to keep my voice steady and calm. “What do you mean?”

“Behold.” Mab gestured with her right hand, and the layer of snow on the ground stirred and moved until it had risen into a sculpture of a building, about eighteen inches high. It was like watching a sand castle melt in reverse.

I thought I recognized the building. “Is that…?”

“The building the lady knight asked you to examine,” confirmed Mab’s surrogate voice. It’s amazing what you can get used to if your daily allowance of bizarre is high enough. “As it was before the working that rent it asunder.”

Other shapes began to form from the snow. Rather disconcertingly detailed shapes of cars rolled smoothly by beside the building, typical Chicago traffic—until one of them, an expensive town car, turned down the alley beside the building, the one I’d walked down not an hour before. I had to take a couple of steps to follow it as it came to a halt and stopped. The snow car’s doors opened, and human shapes the size of the old Star Wars action figures came hurrying out of the vehicle.

I recognized them. The first was a flat-top, no-neck bruiser named Hendricks, Marcone’s personal bodyguard and enforcer. His mother was a Kodiak bear; his father was an Abrams tank, and after he got out of the car, he reached back into it and came out with a light machine gun that he carried in one hand.

While Hendricks was doing that, a woman got out of the other side of the car. Gard was tall, six feet or so, though Hendricks made her look petite. She wore a smart business suit with a long trench coat, and as I watched she opened the car’s trunk and removed a broadsword and an all-metal shield maybe two feet across. She passed her hand over the surface of the shield, and then quickly covered it with a section of cloth that had apparently been cut to fit it.

Both of them moved in a tense, precise, professionally concerned cadence.