Those few hours were a luxury, though. She wanted me to break her out of the hospital.

She wanted me to kill her. I knew that was what it boiled down to. I had to get over myself and respect her wishes.

I thought of Mike.

I thought of the danger Charles Sarlac was in now he was mixed up with me. The danger Kanesha was in.

If too many more people died, I thought, I would start developing a complex. I wasn’t about to do the Harry and Ginny thing of pushing everyone away so they didn’t get hurt, though. That was, well. It was a bad idea period, and a worse idea for me. I had a feeling I could turn into a total bitch without support.

So, I had to let them risk themselves and make sure they knew how dangerous things could get. There was nothing else I could do at this point.

Nothing else I could ever do. Except trust that things would all work out. Trust Thruor, I supposed, to a point.

Thruor.

I was going to need her on this one. Even if valkyries didn’t collect the souls of people who died of cancer.

If it came to breaking somebody out of hospital, I would bet she’d done it before. And she was back in town, albeit not full time.

I called her apartment. “Hey. I need your help.”

“Was hoping for a social call.”

“Help me on this and I’m all yours for a day,” I promised.

I heard the grin in her voice. “What do you need?”

“Not over the phone.” I wasn’t that paranoid, but I knew better than to be absolutely sure nobody was listening. “My place or yours?”

“My place. I have some really good pasta left over that I wouldn’t mind sharing.”

I laughed, but headed towards her apartment, a little more cheerful. And not just at the thought of really good pasta.

Once there, she nuked the pasta and found a bottle of wine that I would never tell anyone she shared with me. Valkyries, I’d found, had a firm believe in “Old enough to fight, old enough to drink.”

“So, what’s up?”

“Monica’s in the hospital. She’s not coming back out. Her parents have forbidden me from being allowed near her. She wants hospice. They want to keep her alive as long as possible. I’m not sure how much of that is the hope they can convert her back to their brand of Christianity to save her soul.”

Thruor laughed. “Too late for that.”

“I know. But they don’t, and if they did they’d…I don’t want to think what her father would do. Her mother’s an abused mouse.”

Thruor winced. “So. What…oh…you’re going to break her out. You know what will probably happen.”

“More to the point, she does. And it’s still what she wants.”

“Which hospital is it?”

I told her. We spent the rest of the night coming up with a plan.