We ended up snugged to the kitchen table. Mom had draped a tablecloth patterned with autumn leaves over it in the spirit of the holiday.

The second I was seated she shoved a plate piled high with food beneath my nose. Turkey, mashed potatoes swimming in butter, green beans, and a slice of pumpkin pie almost overflowed the plate. She stabbed a fork and spoon into the turkey and potatoes respectively.

"Eat," she ordered to disguise a residual sniffle. "You're too skinny."

The command almost made me smile. Even after all this time, she was as brusque as usual when it came down to it. It was comforting to know that some things would never change, no matter who or what I turned out to be. Besides, the mouthwatering scent of my mother's cooking had kickstarted my to-date diminished appetite. I obediently picked up my spoon, scooping up a generous helping of mashed potatoes and shoved them in my mouth. I almost groaned at the taste.

I'd eaten a lot of gourmet meals with Nicodemus and Deidre, but still, nothing compared to my mother's cooking. The work of the best sous chef in the world couldn't compare to the level of love she stuffed into it. I ate slowly, trying to stall for time. What the hell was I going to say?

Well, you see I ran away from home because your sworn enemy gave me a coin. Oh, and I'm working for him now, by the way. Yeah, that was going to go over really well when we hashed it out over desert. They were all staring at me, nine sets of eyes tracking my every swallow. At least one of them was going to catch me in a lie, and I knew it.

"Then do not lie, my host," Lasciel said, speaking to me at last. She was still incredibly miffed but probably sensed that my ideas were scant. She kept her voice low, as though we could somehow be overheard by the denizens of the kitchen.

"You want him to know about you?"

"No. I'm suggesting you borrow a tactic from the fae and...let their own preconceptions lead them to an erroneous conclusion."

"Lie by telling the truth?"

"Precisely."

I caught the flavor of her thoughts and drew in a shaking breath. Harry, especially, would be bound to make an assumption based on the story I was about to tell. I felt like crap, misleading them like this. But what choice did I have? If my father even suspected the truth, he'd track Nicodemus down and use Amoracchius like a swizzle stick to stir his insides. I needed Nicodemus intact.

For now.

I didn't speak until I'd emptied the plate. I was contemplating licking it clean as well but figured that I didn't need to compound my evil with bad manners. The question came from Harry, surprisingly enough. Most of my family was just sort of staring at me, as though they thought I'd evaporate if the silence was broken.

"Where have you been, Molly?" Harry said, tapping his own plate with the tines of his fork.

He'd barely touched any of his food, though he looked skinnier and more haggard than I'd ever seen him. I guessed I wasn't the only one who'd been put through the wringer over the last two years.

I took a deep, bracing breath and answered with a careful half-truth.

"I've been in Belize City. Sometimes San Pedro. Other places too, but Belize most often."

A series of surprised glances were exchanged and a low murmur ran through the Jawas.

Harry's brows shot up. "Belize? As in...the country?"

"Yeah. Central America. Pretty beaches, lots of tourists. Lots of vampires too, unfortunately."

That drew a reaction from my father and Harry both. They exchanged a concerned glance and Harry's hands tightened around the fork. The tapping took on a somewhat frenetic pace.

"You went looking for vampires? Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?"

"I didn't go looking for danger, Mr. Dresden. It found me. And that's why I had to leave. It was too dangerous for me to stay. I talked to some people and they put me in contact with the Fellowship of Saint Giles."

Realization slowly dawned, and Harry's face clouded over anger and a hint of disgust. "Oh God. They...Bianca's stragglers they...son of a bitch!"

"Harry," Dad said warningly.

"Son of a fudging biscuit eater," Harry amended, still seething. "They infected you?"

"I was...contaminated," I hedged, dropping my eyes to stare dolefully at the curling leaf pattern on the tablecloth. "I'm really sorry that I didn't say anything. You really did deserve better but..."

I took another shuddering breath and screwed my eyes shut. Tears were threatening to squeeze from them again. The truth, or at least, most of it, came tumbling out of my mouth in a rush, trying to beat the tears.

"I thought it would be better that way. I felt like a ticking time bomb. If I...if I gave in, I didn't want to be here. I didn't want to hurt any of you. I couldn't put you in that position. I've got a handle on things, I think. But I didn't want to come back until I was sure."

"You couldn't have called?" Daniel griped.

"I...thought about it. A lot. And about sending postcards. But I thought you'd try to find me. I wasn't ready."

I still wasn't ready, if I were being completely honest with myself. Being here, in the center of a storm of questions? It was my worst nightmare. My nerves were dancing on a livewire. The vampire's recent feeding had blunted my emotions enough that I could deal with them without imploding. But that didn't mean that I was stable.

"We wouldn't have..." Mom began, then trailed off, when she realized the whopper of a lie she was about to tell.

Even if my story had been completely true and I was Half-Turned the way my teammates had been, they still would have come. They'd have tried to exhaust every avenue possible to get me home, no matter the danger it posed to the people around me.

"What changed?" Dad asked softly.

I kept waiting for the explosion. The demands, his anger. But he just looked...sad. A little disappointed. Which was somehow a million times worse than if he'd read me the riot act.

I had to gulp down the entire glass of water mom had provided with the meal before I could budge the lump in my throat for long enough to speak. It was Lasciel who gave me the prompt, and I let the words sail past my lips rather than trying to compose some sort of jumbled response. I was a hair's breadth away from losing my cool entirely.

"Most of my cell was killed in an attack." She composed my face into a mask of delicate tragedy. Guilt prettily adorned with despair and just a hint of anger. The next words came with practiced hesitance. "And the only other surviving member may never fight again. It...put things in perspective for me. I may not be around for long. If I died, you'd have no idea where I was or how it happened. If the situations were reversed, I'd want to know. So..."

I shrugged and then wiped furiously at the tears that had escaped my careful control. "Here I am."

Ringing silence. Neither Harry nor my parents could come up with anything to say to that.

Then Hope's voice split through the silence. She tilted her little blonde head and squinted at me. "So do you drink blood?"

She accompanied the question with a gesture, crooking her fingers and waggling them in front of her face like they were a pair of mandibles.

A sharp burst of laughter escaped me, and the tension around the table was broken, with most of the others joining in.

"No, Hope. I don't drink blood. I'm not a full vampire."

"She can't be a monster," Little Harry said with a sage nod. "She can eat mashed potatoes."

"Inescapable logic," Amanda said with a grin. She tapped her chin thoughtfully before musing; "Though she can stomach the green beans. So perhaps she's an abomination after all."

I snatched a green bean from the container mom had set on the table, popped it into my mouth and chewed obnoxiously in her direction. It elicited another round of giggles, at the dinner table. Dad smiled faintly and mom actually rolled her eyes, hiding one of her own.

The rest of the conversation came easier after that, though I was under no illusions that the questions were over. Hopefully they'd be easier to duck when I was speaking one on one, and not in front of a jury.

We didn't actually leave the table most of the day, and were still sitting when time rolled around for supper. A lot had happened in two years, and everyone wanted to give me a blow-by-blow account of their lives. I was required to speak very little, and that suited me just fine.

I was a little nervous when Father Forthill arrived. After all, one of my first actions after coming into contact with Lasciel's coin had been to track down his office, raid his supplies until I found a cloth to hold the coin, and then left it where he'd be able to dispose of it. There were a million little clues that could unravel the deception I'd woven, if people just cared to put them together. But, as Lasciel and I had been counting on, most of them just seemed too relieved that I was home to try to examine the reasons too closely.

A trojan horse indeed. It was depressing just how easy it would have been to hurt them if that had been my goal.

"And then Daniel raised a bunch of zombies trying to look for you," Alicia informed me, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose in a matter-of-fact way, as though that little tidbit was just something one said every day. "Everything from Uptown to Brighton Park."

I whipped around in my seat to look at Daniel, mouth agape. "You what?"

With that bit of context, the soulgaze took on new and horrifying meaning. Daniel's thoughts were consumed by death because he was a freaking necromancer. I'd never considered that any of my other siblings might display magic, let alone that one of them would be better at it than I was. Daniel had to be the most powerful warlock in the western hemisphere if he could raise every corpse in the many miles of space that stretched between the two points.

Holy shit. What would he have been capable of if Lasciel's coin had fallen into his hands instead?

Daniel ducked his head, color flooding into his cheeks. He was doing his best to avoid looking sheepish. He failed miserably.

"I've said sorry a lot, okay? I thought I'd found the answer. Karrin Murphy had a serial case. A bunch of blonde, teenage girls had gone missing in and around Chicago. The pattern reoccurred every winter and a bunch of them were never found until I raised them. I thought that you might have been one of them. In the end we found out it was-"

"Huber." The world wrenched itself from my throat without my conscious permission. "You found Huber? Please tell me that Mr. Dresden barbequed him."

Every eye at the table swiveled to face me again, and I realized my mistake. Crap. Knowing Huber was going to throw the timeline of my lies off a lot. And if they'd seen his other form, they couldn't fail to notice the burns the hellfire had no doubt given him. It was an easy equation to solve if you had all the pieces.

One plus one equals two. Timing plus hellfire equals Molly is a Denarian. I had to cover the slip before the internal mechanisms could start whirring to life and spit out that particular answer.

"I was told he could help me," I rushed to explain. "Marcone doesn't want Reds in his city, so some of his people deal with it when it crops up. Huber was supposed to take me to the airport. Instead he whacked me upside the head with a pipe wrench and stuffed me in a storage unit. The bastard hacked a lot of my hair off and stole my stuff. I had to break my thumb to get out of the cuffs. After that I just...ran."

"Something you would not have resorted to if you'd merely listened to me," Lasciel sniffed.

"Are you really going to get snippy with me over that, again?"

I took a drink of water and tried to exude innocence from every pore. My father and brother eventually seemed to shrug it off. But Mr. Dresden's eyes lingered on the side of my face for several more minutes, like he could somehow unscrew my head and shake the truth onto the table.

"How did you raise that many dead?" I said, turning to face Daniel more fully. "I mean that's...incredible. I didn't think anyone besides the Senior Council was capable of something like that."

Daniel's cheeks were definitely pink. "It wasn't all me. I'm mostly an empath, with just a hint of potential for ectomancy. I could sense ghosts more than I could see them. But I made contact with a spirit that called itself Bob and it said it could help me find you. It turns out it's name was Hrothbert Bainbridge, and he was an Heir of Kemmler that got axed a while back. I sort of...let him possess me. He raised the dead."

I swore that Lasciel smiled in the back of my mind. I could appreciate the irony as well, though I found it a lot more horrifying than she did. More than one Carpenter child had found it expedient to depend on supernatural aid and black magic to accomplish their goals. Lasciel treated me to a small daydream of Daniel and I side by side, both of us rallying against the Red Court. The armies of the dead he could take into battle against our foe if he was in possession of a coin.

"Shut that idea down real effing quick," I hissed to her. "You promised, Lasciel. Nothing hurts my family."

"It would not harm him."

"No. Fucking. Way."

Out loud I just sort of shook my head with a wispy laugh. "Wow. And here I thought I was the black sheep of the family."

Daniel shrugged, still flushed an even deeper shade of pink. "Yeah, yeah. I'm under the Doom of Damocles for now, until Harry's done training me, so the story's not over yet. I'm working on a whole redemption arc, you know. Scintillating stuff. Wizards. Potions. Magical mishaps."

I grinned.

"I'd love to hear the rest of the story sometime, but-" I stretched my arms high above my head and feigned a yawn. "I'm a little burnt out. Can we continue the conversation in the morning?"

"She's right," Mom said, checking the clock. "It's already past some of your bedtimes. Upstairs. Let's get you all through the bath."

The Jawas contemplated a mini-insurrection, but in the end surrendered to the will of the matronly overlord, shuffling upstairs to get ready for bed.

Dad put a hand on the small of my back when we left the kitchen and led me up the stairs and toward my room. I was once again knocked breathless by a sense of grief when I saw the interior.

I'd expected one of the other girls to move into the space and claim it as her own, but nothing had changed. Barely anything had been touched, except to be moved for cleaning.

"You...you didn't touch it," I mumbled dully.

"No," he said with a sigh. "None of us could stand to. Not while we still thought there was a chance."

He drew me in for another hug and pressed his lips to my temple.

"I thank God that you're home, Molly. Please don't scare me like that again. Stay for a while. And when you need to go, please at least give us an idea where you're at."

I opened my mouth, the truth poised at the tip of my tongue. Everything I'd seen slammed home the reality that my family cared and always would. Nicodemus didn't care a whit for me beyond what he could gain from our partnership. My father wouldn't condemn me, would he? Wouldn't try to kill me?

"Jordan," Lasciel reminded me.

My mouth snapped shut and I blinked away the tears that had beaded on my lashes. She was right. No matter how badly this stung, it was the best way to keep my father from harm and to prevent further loss of life.

"I'm sorry," was all I could offer. "I'm so, so sorry."

For what I've done. For what I'm going to do.

"Don't be." He kissed my temple one more time before he drew away from me and offered me a sad smile. "I think your bedclothes might be a little dusty. I'm going to go grab new from the linen closet, alright?"

I nodded wordlessly, screwing my face up tight to contain the violent sobs I could feel coming. I turned my face into the wall rather than watch him go, sure I was about to shout after him and ruin this elaborate ruse. Why the hell had Nicodemus sent me? Trial by fire? A test of my commitment? Because if that was it, he was vastly overestimating my level of self-control. For someone who enjoyed 4-D chess, this seemed like a rookie mistake. I wasn't the queen on his board (that was definitely Deidre) but he was definitely risking losing a knight or a bishop. What was the endgame here?

The stairs creaked and I turned my neck just a fraction so I could see the figure that leaned against the top of the stairs, watching me. He lifted a brow and speared me with a look that was a little less than friendly.

"You experiencing any discomfort in the downstairs region, Miss Carpenter? A burning sensation, perhaps?"

"What?"

"Cause I think your pants are on fire. Singed, at the very least." His jaw flexed once in anger. "You're lying. And you're counting on your folks to be too relieved to call you on it."

My mouth went dry. He was too perceptive by half. It was a few seconds before I could compose a response.

"Why do you say that? What reason would I have to lie?

Mr. Dresden mounted the stairs the rest of the way and shuffled slowly toward me, leaning heavily on the quarterstaff in his hands. I was betting I could do something about the damage done to him by the Kemmlerite-Corpsetaker, he'd called her-but I wasn't about to offer. I suspected he wouldn't take me up on it, even if I did. He stopped a half-foot shy of me.

He loomed like a proverbial giant over me and, with his face in shadow, dark eyes narrowed on my face, I got a sense of just how dangerous he had the potential to be. Not just magically, but in a physical sense. If he hadn't been so badly mangled by Corpsetaker he could probably have done some real damage to me. Would probably still try, if I forced his hand.

"Listen to me very closely, Miss Carpenter," he said quietly, delivering the words in a slow, matter-of-fact manner that was more chilling than if he'd shouted at me. "Your father is my friend. Probably the best friend that I've ever had. But he's blind where his children are concerned. And I think you're banking on that. So if your agenda, whatever it is, is to hurt him? Count on a reckoning for it. No one fucks with my friends."

A tremor rocked from my head straight down to the tips of my toes. Utter sincerity rang in every syllable. Despite my best efforts, my voice quavered when I spoke.

"I don't want to hurt him."

Even though I probably would in the end. I reached a shaking hand behind me and pushed the door further open, taking a step back from Harry. Then I shut the door in his face. I pressed my back against it, partly to keep him out, and partly to brace myself so I wouldn't sink to my knees.

I didn't open it again until I was sure he'd gone. My dad helped me make the bed and wished me a good night before turning the lights out.

I crawled under the duvet and stared at the ceiling for a long time, until the shakes stopped and my heart beat normally again.

Something was going to have to be done about Harry Dresden.

AN: I drew the name Hrothbert "Bob" of Bainbridge from the Dresden Files TV show. It's not a super good adaptation, but I think that Bob was probably the only part of it I liked. His backstory is a lot different than in the books. I'm not sure if Harry is willing to fess up to the Evil Bob secret just yet, so this is the story I imagine he'd spin. :)