It had taken some time to finally get an exact date established for an evening out with Harry Dresden.

I shouldn't have been surprised. Officially betrothed or not, the wizard was what he was. Infuriating, obstinate, and obtuse. Almost enough to make him not worth the trouble of dealing with.

Almost.

He had planned the entire evening, and asked me to arrive at his apartment wearing casual mortal clothing at no earlier than 7pm.

Which was why I knocked on his front door at 6pm.

He should have learned long ago that I was not someone to play around with, not without an expectation of equal and opposite reprisal.

Having moved out of the swartalves' territory, the wizard had done something astonishingly adequate in terms of security. Namely, renting several different apartments across Chicago, and using Ways to get between them so that only those he trusted knew where he actually lived.

It was my first time attempting to visit him at his new home, and I'd expected to find a shell of an apartment, one of the fakes.

Instead, my knocking was responded to by a voice, speaking through the door to me. "Who is it?" It was the voice of a nervous young girl.

Ah. "I am here to see your father," I told her, hoping that would be enough.

"..."

The longer the silence continued, the more sure I was that I'd been wrong.

"...what's the password?"

I blinked. There had been no talk of a password when Dresden had laid out the details for this excursion.

Of course, I'd also arrived rather early.

I had a sneaking suspicion as to what the right word could be. "Is it 'password'?"

There was a pause, and for a moment I thought I'd judged Dresden incorrectly.

Sadly, that was not the case. Though I'm not a practitioner myself, I could still feel the wards coming down off of his apartment, followed by the sounds of physical locks being undone.

Six of them, as a matter of fact.

The door finally opened, and I saw Margaret Dresden with my own eyes for the first time. Her eyes were on the hallway floor, and I could see the way her impulses were telling her to retreat, to hide, to survive.

After all, the girl could tell what I am. A predator.

My first impulse was to see her as prey, through and through. The pain she'd been through would make her all too weak to future predation, and my Hunger knew that.

But what my Hunger wasn't really capable of understanding was that this girl was a Dresden. In all the time I'd known the girl's father, classifying him as any one thing had proven truly impossible. Still, if there was one thing he wasn't, it was prey. And I had a feeling the same was true of the girl as well.

"...my dad is getting ready..." The words were so quiet I almost didn't hear them, and I couldn't help noticing the way she stumbled over the word 'dad'. Even after...what was it? A year, possibly two, of Dresden taking the child in, she was still getting used to his presence in her life.

For a moment, one terrible instant, I thought of my own father. The memories that came up first were still stomach-churningly terrible to recollect, even after a thousand times of recalling them before. Unflinching, I kept up a pleasant smile. "May I come in?"

The girl had to think about it for a moment, before nodding. I stepped inside, and found the living room was much the same as the description I'd heard of Dresden's basement apartment, now long destroyed. I took a seat, able to hear the sound of a shower in the back, and focused my attention on the girl...and on the wooden skull sitting on the small table in front of her.

There were fiery green eyelights in the sockets of the skull, and they were focused on me.

This...was unexpected. A spirit of some sort, housed within the skull? And Dresden let it watch over his daughter? Strange.

Still, there was a decorum to be seen to. "I am the woman your father has been betrothed to. He's told you about me, yes?" It was second nature by this point to dance around giving my Name. Even leaving the spirit aside, the girl could grow up to wield power, and I would prefer it if she didn't have my Name.

The child bit her lip, seeming to give thought to whether she should reply to me at all, and not just ignore me and go back to whatever task she'd been working on when I'd arrived. Was that...schoolwork? "You're Ms. Raith."

That got the spirit talking. "Lara Raith! Daughter to the White King, but he's just her thrall now! In a practical sense, she's the one ruling their court! Like the rest of her family, she's a White Court Vampire, which means-" The spirit sounded remarkably like Margaret, though its voice was slightly higher in pitch, and it spoke with far more energy, more vitality.

I pointedly cleared my throat, interrupting the entity. Clearly a spirit of intellect, then. Strange, though, for it to be so willing to talk of what it knew in front of a stranger. The few of their kind I had met before all hoarded their knowledge with a dragon's possessiveness, relenting only to their master. "Thank you for the explanation. May I ask you who this is, Margaret?"

The girl scrunched up her nose at the sound of her name, and told me seriously, "I'm Maggie. And this is my sister, Bonnie."

"Your...sister?"

The little girl and the skull looked at each other for a moment, then back at me. Judging by the expression on Maggie's face, she thought that was a rather stupid question. "Yeah. We're sisters. But she has a different mom."

"Clearly." A question to ask Dresden when he was out of the shower.

The girl grabbed a pencil, and was about to get back to working on her homework, when she turned her attention to me again, clearly struggling to meet my eyes even for an instant. "If you're marrying my dad, does that mean you're gonna be my mom?" It was difficult to read her intentions with the question. Was that horror in her voice, or hope?

The spirit...the girl in the skull didn't add anything to that, but from the way her eyelights looked at me, I knew she was wondering the same thing.

I'd first learned of Margaret Dresden's birth a few years before Dresden himself had. At the time, it had been a potential lever to use, should Dresden ever truly incur my wrath, but good sense told me to make it a measure of last resort. I'd seen what he was willing to do for our brother. I did not want to imagine what he'd do for his own daughter.

It became clear to me how good a decision that had been when the Red Court, in its infinite stupidity, kidnapped the girl as part of a scheme.

Anyone who knew Harry Dresden knew the response would be swift and deadly.

I do not believe anyone expected it to wipe the Red Court from the face of the world forever.

On an intellectual level, I could understand the concept. After all, was I not the same way towards Thomas?

But as I looked at the girl, and heard her asking me just what our relationship was to be, I felt the beginnings of something, though then I knew not exactly what it was. I spoke the words even as I realized they were true. "Neither your father nor I planned on this betrothal. That said, at present, it seems likely to happen anyway. Should it occur, I will be your stepmother. And it will be my duty to protect the both of you."

She was not sure if she would, or truly could, come to love either child. But that wouldn't change the fact that she would keep them safe.

"Hell's bells, did I miss Daylight Savings Time?"

I looked up from the girls and saw Harry Dresden standing in the hallway, staring at me, wearing nothing but a towel wrapped around his waist, his hair still wet.

My Hunger's response was strong, but I was stronger. Only a fool let their demon rule them.

Nonetheless, I didn't make it a secret that I appreciated what I was looking at. For most of my time knowing him, Dresden had an...acquired taste to him. Rough around the edges. It had intrigued me, and more than once I'd been tempted to take a bite, even if others did not see his appeal.

Death and rebirth under Mab's care had cut the gem into something anyone with sight could appreciate.

He rolled his eyes at me. "I'll be another ten...no, fifteen minutes."

After he retreated back to whatever room he'd been in before, I looked back to the children, and saw Maggie's eyes on me. "You like my dad."

The statement almost made me laugh out loud. "He is...a useful ally. But little more than that." The lie slipped off my tongue easily.

It was not as easily believed. Still, she knew better than to try and pursue the topic. "Are you good at History? My dad tried to help me with it, but he got confused, and Bonnie doesn't know anything useful about it."

Standing up, I came closer to find it was an assignment on World War 1. "Ah, that. I remember it well. Let's see here..."

As it turned out, Dresden needed nearly another half an hour before he came out once more, this time dressed and at least somewhat presentable. "Ready?"

"For more than an hour now." I allowed him to take my hand and lead me to the door, where I would discover just what date the wizard had planned for us.