Set following Lantern. I'll try to do a part three to this to wrap it up. I went into this knowing there was no way in hell I'd actually be done by Halloween, obvs. And next week is Christmas.
We all make choices (shrug emoji).
"Dresden, you throw like a little girl." Murphy grabbed the paper bag from my hands and backed out into the street.
A group of teens — a red-masked demon, a grinning skeleton and a green-faced witch — giggled as they skirted around me on the sidewalk. I held a finger to my lips. The witch nodded and made a lip-zipping motion of her own, and mimed throwing away a key.
It was far too late to be trick-or-treating, long past midnight on Halloween. Anyone out this late was trying to scare up trouble.
A roll of toilet paper flew between the branches of the elm, spiraling into the obsessively-neat lawn in front of her younger sister and ex-husband's new home.
Murph laughed deviously as I kicked the roll toward her. She picked it up and chucked it over the tree again, until the branches were thoroughly decked with two-ply. I lobbed an egg at the front porch and it splattered on the steps, and as soon as I reached into the bag for another, a light flicked on in an upstairs window.
"Crap," we both swore. I grabbed her arm and dragged her around the neighbor's evergreen privacy hedge, ducking down below the wall of prickly needles.
The front door swung open and her ex stomped out in his boxers and houseshoes, swearing and grumbling about damned kids as he unspooled a garden hose and began to rinse egg yolk from the storm door.
She snickered, peering through the branches.
"Shh." As much as I enjoyed the sugar-high, slightly-tipsy version of Murph, she was not quite as stealth-capable as usual.
… But she thought she was.
"Let's go," she whispered. Loudly. From the corner of my eye, I saw the guy glance around as he reached for the keypad by the garage door. I pulled her backward, waited until I heard the creak of a garage door opening, then threw her over my shoulder and made a break for it.
We were already around the corner when I heard the slap of houseshoes on concrete and an angry yell.
"Get back here, you little shitheads!"
I ducked around the back of a shed and set Murphy on her feet again.
"You are terrible at this," I hissed, giving her shoulders a gentle shake. The woman would flout NFA laws without blinking but apparently couldn't handle a little criminal mischief. "No giggling during the misdemeanors!"
That only made her laugh even harder, both hands clamped over her lips so the sound escaped as a wheezy snort. The houseshoe slapping got a little closer.
"This way." She grabbed my arm and took off at a sprint down the alley for a block or two, fast for someone so tiny. We turned left into another alley, darted through a gap between a carport and a row of dumpsters, cut through an overgrown flower bed.
Murphy elbowed open a wooden gate in a stretch of fence and pushed me through backward. I immediately tripped over one of those tractor-shaped lawn sprinkler thingies. She followed, stumbled over my feet and landed directly on top of me, tackled me into the leaves under a tall oak tree behind her house.
I recognized the yard from the last time I had been knocked on my ass there, while summoning the Wild Hunt. The tree was new, which was weird, but there were more pressing matters at hand — literally. I could blame reflexes for trying to catch her, and my bad luck for where my hands and her hips ended up.
There wasn't really an excuse for the way we stayed like that, though, lingering long past awkward accident.
"What's the matter, Harry?" she asked, her attempt to break the tension completely negated by a breathless whisper and a smile. "Never taken a shortcut before?"
Next: Cauldron