“Marcone? Is too trusting?” I widened my eyes at her. “Lady, that pretty much puts you in a paranoiac league of your own.”

“It isn’t paranoia—just practical experience. A safe house isn’t safe if it isn’t secret.” She reached down and pressed bloodied fingers against a loop of gore, gently kneading it back into the wound. She let out a hiss of pain as she did, but she didn’t let a little thing like an exposed internal organ get in the way of conversation. “You threatened her?”

“Uh. Mostly I told her I’d help Marcone.”

She lifted the tube of airplane glue and smeared some of it onto either side of the wound, where she’d pushed her guts back in. She bled a little more. I noted that several inches of the wound had already been closed and sealed together.

“You gave her your word?” Gard asked.

“Uh, yeah, but—” I couldn’t take it anymore. “Look, could you maybe not do that while we talk? It makes it sort of hard for me to focus on the conversation.”

She pressed the edges of the wound together, letting out a breathy curse in a language I didn’t know. “Did you know,” she said, “that this kind of glue was originally developed as an emergency battlefield suture?”

“Did you know that you’re about to find out what I had for breakfast this morning?” I countered.

“I don’t know if it’s true,” she continued. “I saw it in a movie. With—dammit—with werewolves.” She exhaled and drew her hands slowly from the wound. Another two or three inches of puckered flesh were now closed together. Gard looked awful, her face grey and lined with pain.

“Why, Dresden? Why are you looking for Marcone?”

“The short version? It’s my ass if I don’t.”

She squinted at me. “It’s personal?”

“Pretty much. I’ll give you my word on it, if you like.”

She shook her head. “It’s not…your word that I doubt. That’s…always been good.” She closed her eyes against the pain and panted for several seconds. “But I need something from you.”

“What?”

“The White Council,” she rasped. “I want you to call upon the White Council to recover Marcone.”

I blinked at her. “Uh. What?”

She grimaced and began packing another couple inches of intestine back into her abdomen. “The Accords have been breached. A challenge must be lodged. An Emissary summoned. As a Warden”—she gasped for a moment, and then fumbled the glue into place—“you have the authority to call a challenge.”

Her fingers slipped, and the wound sprang open again. She went white with pain.

“Dammit, Sigrun,” I said, more appalled at her pain than her condition, and moved to help her. “Get your hands out of the way.” When she did, I managed to close the wound a little more, giving the sharp-smelling glue a chance to bond the flesh closed.

She made an effort to smile at me. “We…we worked well together at the beer festival. You’re a professional. I respect that.”