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Four

    M olly said little on the way back. She just leaned against the window with half-closed eyes, probably basking in the afterglow.
    "Molly," I told her in my gentlest voice. "Heroin feels good, too, Ask Rosy and Nelson."
    The little smile of pleasure faded into blankness, and she stared at me for a while. By degrees, her expression changed to a frown of consideration, and then to a nauseated grimace.
    "It killed her," she said finally. "It killed her. I mean, it felt so good… but it wasn't."
    I nodded.
    "She never knew it. She never had a chance." Molly looked queasy for a minute. "It was a vampire, right? From the White Court? I mean, they use sex to feed on life energy, right?"
    "That's one of the things it could be," I said quietly. "There are plenty of demonic creatures in the Nevernever that groove on the succubus routine, though."
    "And she was killed in a hotel," she said. "Where there was no threshold to protect her from a demon."
    "Very good, grasshopper," I said. "Once you consider that the other victims weren't done White Court style, it means that either there is more than one killer or the same one is varying his techniques. It's too early for anything but wild guesses."
    She frowned. "What are you going to do next?"
    I thought about it for a minute. "I've got to figure out what all of the killer's victims have in common, if anything."
    "They're dead?" Molly offered.
    I smiled a little. "Besides that."
    "Okay," she said. "So what do you do?"
    I nodded to the papers Butters had given me, now resting on the dashboard. "I start there. See what I can extrapolate from the data I've got. Then I look people up and ask questions."
    "What do I do?" she asked.
    "That depends. How many beads can you move?" I asked her.
    She glowered at me for a minute. Then she unbound the bracelet of dark beads from her left wrist and held it up. The beads all slipped down to the bottom of the bracelet, leaving three or four inches of bare cord.
    Molly focused on the bracelet, a device I'd created to help her practice focusing her mind and stilling her thoughts. Focus and stillness are important when you're slinging magic around. It's a primal force of creation, and it responds to your thoughts and emotions—whether you want it to or not. If your thoughts get fragmented or muddled, or if you aren't paying complete attention to what you're doing, the magic can respond in any number of unpredictable and dangerous ways.
    Molly was still learning about it. She had some real talent, don't get me wrong, but what she lacked was not ability, but judgment. That's what I'd been trying to teach her over the past year or so—to use her power responsibly, cautiously, and with respect for the dangers the Art could present. If she didn't get a more solid head on her shoulders, her talent with magic was going to get her killed—probably taking me with her.
    Molly was a warlock.
    She'd used magic to tinker with the minds of two of her friends in an effort to free them from drug addiction, but her motives had been mixed, and the results were moderately horrific. One of the kids still hadn't recovered enough to function on his own. The other had pulled through, but was still facing a lot of problems.
    Normally, the White Council of wizards kills you for breaking one of the Laws of Magic. Practically the only time they didn't was when a wizard of the Council offered to take responsibility for the warlock's future conduct, until they could satisfy the Council that their intentions were good, their ways mended. If they could, fine. If not, the warlock died. So did the wizard who had taken responsibility for him.
    I'd been a warlock. Hell, plenty of the Council wondered if I still w as a ticking bomb getting ready to blow. When Molly had been bound and hooded and dragged before the Council for trial, I'd stepped in. I had to.
    Sometimes I regretted the hell out of that decision. Once you've felt the power of dark magic, it could be awfully hard to