Chapter Seventeen
Iwould have burst into the kitchen first, but Bear grabbed me by the collar and dragged me a step behind her with about as much effort as it would have taken me to round up an errant toddler. Bear was calm-natured and genial. It was easy to forget exactly how scary strong the Valkyrie was.
I came through the kitchen doors after her, and once Bear had a chance to assess the situation, she let me take a step around her to get a look at what was going on.
It was a commercial-sized kitchen and had kept up with the needs of a little more than thirty people in the months following the Battle of Chicago.
Three large steaks were sizzling on a broad pan over a gas flame.
A container of garlic salt sat on the counter beside the stove, along with three plates, forks, and steak knives.
And Fitz stood holding up the glass pan the steaks had been thawing in, tilted to drink from it.
My apprentice lowered the pan, a thin trickle of blood from it running down from one corner of his mouth. His expression was distant, his eyes unfocused.
His stomach gurgled, and the presence of the Lurker grew rapidly and steadily more intent.
“Fitz,” I said carefully. “Hey, man. How’s it going?”
“I’m just … wow,” he said quietly.
I stepped a little closer and found several other packages of red meat had evidently had their plastic wrappings popped open and had been drained of the leftover juice as well. We bought direct in bulk, and the butcher we used wasn’t always as neat as the ones at the grocery stores.
Fitz had drunk quite a bit.
I could smell the steaks burning.
“There’s power here, Harry,” Fitz said slowly. “I can feel it. Like I could start throwing fire the way you do.” He turned to me, his balance wavering a little, his eyes as glassy as a drunk’s. “Oh, yeah. I could get to like this. Let’s go find these bad guys. I can help you, man.”
“Bear,” I said quietly. “My lab, south wall, second shelf from the top. There’s a container of flasks of holy water. Bring me one.”
“On it,” she said quietly, and vanished.
“I’m serious,” Fitz continued as if I hadn’t spoken. He mimed a few slow-motion punches. “Man, I feel like I could blow holes in the walls right now. Let’s go fuck something up.”
The wall behind Fitz rippled, and Basil the gargoyle stepped out of it as if it had been no more substantial than a veil of mist. Basil was six and a half feet of living stone, with a head that was only a fair approximation of a lion’s and the build of something close to a muscular human being but with much-longer forearms.
“My lord,” Basil rumbled in greeting. “We have sensed a threat from within the castle. Are you well?”
“Keep everyone out for now, Basil,” I said quickly. Fitz wasn’t firing on all cylinders at the moment. I didn’t want him getting spooked by the presence of a gang of protective gargoyles and starting to see if he could blow holes in walls. “I’m fine.”
“I’m fine,” Fitz said with a small titter. “Just fine. This is incredible.” He held up his fingers, murmured something beneath his breath, and sent a quick, slender arc of lighting leaping from one hand to the other. “Oh, yeah, that was easy.”
“Fitz,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “I need you to engage in a mental exercise for a moment. Can you do that?”
He frowned a little and peered at me. “What exercise?”
“Analysis,” I said. “Look around the kitchen. I want you to tell me what’s happened here.”
Fitz looked around the kitchen vaguely for a moment. I saw him gather himself and focus. “Okay. Um. Oh, man, steaks are burning.” He picked up tongs and peeled them off the pan, flipping them over. “Hell, and I was so hungry too.”
“Right. You came down here to fix steaks, right?”
Fitz looked around blearily. “Uh. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I did.”
“Okay. Then what happened?”
“Um.” Fitz stared at the opened packages of red meat. “I … The blood off the steaks in the pan just smelled so good. So, I had some. And I got some more.”
“Here’s the exercise part,” I said. “Fitz. Is that something you would normally do? Drink blood?”
“Point of order,” Basil said in a pedantic tone. “That is not precisely blood. It is instead—”
I slashed a hand at Basil and made a shushing gesture. Technically, he was correct, but magically speaking, it was close enough for government work.
Fitz stared at me for a second and then licked his lips. He found the bit that had trickled from one corner of his mouth and looked distracted. “I … I know it must look weird. But you don’t understand how much … wow, how strong I feel right now. Look!”
He spun toward the set of stainless steel shelves holding pots, pans, and steel bowls, thrust out both hands from his chest and shouted, “Forza!”
The kid unleashed his will at the shelves and sent them smashing over onto their sides like they’d been hit by every lineman on the Bears at once, raising a tremendous crashing noise.
“Yeah!” Fitz cheered, turning back to me. “And I don’t even feel it, Harry! I’m not even tired!”
He found Basil standing between him and me, crouching, his clawed hands brushing the kitchen floor, lion’s face set in a stern expression of disapproval.
“Master Fitz,” Basil said firmly. His deep voice held the rumble of a leonine growl. “The kitchen is a place of order. Food comes in one side. Meals come out the other. Your behavior is unacceptable.”
Fitz eyed Basil and said, darkly, “How much you wanna bet I can throw some earth magic around right now too?”
I stepped to where the gargoyle wouldn’t be between us. “Fitz,” I said in a sharp, hard voice.
He turned to me, blinking.
I hadn’t spoken to him like that before.
“Harry?” he asked quietly.
“The exercise,” I said in the same firm tone. “Remember the exercise. What happened?”
“I drank the blood,” he said, his tone less certain.
“Okay,” I said. “Remember what we talked about earlier? What we’ve been dealing with today?”
“The … the Lurker,” he said.
His stomach gurgled again, and his face twisted in sudden discomfort. He put one hand on it.
“Right,” I said. “Keep going. Remember what it was?”
“It’s …” He belched, and his mouth turned up in a grimace of pain. “Oh … it’s a parasite?”
“Good,” I snapped. “Keep going. What happened here?”
Fitz let out a short cry and doubled over, hands going to his belly. “Oh! Oh, God!”
“Fitz,” I shouted. I stepped around Basil and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Fitz, keep going. What happened here?”
He looked up at me, his eyes bewildered, and then they widened. His voice dropped to the hollow ghost of a whisper. “It got inside me. Hell’s bells. It got inside me.”
“There you go,” I said. “There you go, kid. It’s influencing you. You’ve got to steady yourself against it. What are the five fundamental forces of magic?”
He gulped air, braced against another clench of his stomach, and closed his eyes in a scowl. “Fire. Air. Water. Earth. Will.”
“And which of those is also known as the quintessence?”
He writhed in pain, gasping. “Will!”
“Good,” I said. “Will. The only thing you can use to change the things around you. The only thing you can use to make choices. This is what it means to fight with your will, kid, right now. This is what it feels like when something is trying to use its will to overcome yours.”
“Ah!” he cried again, and lost his balance.
I stepped in close to help ease him down to the floor.
“What’s … what’s happening? Harry, it hurts.”
“It knows you’re fighting against it,” I said. “It’s trying to make you stop. It doesn’t want you to think clearly. What is Newton’s Third Law?”
Fitz was panting hard now, in obvious pain. “For every action there is an … ugh … equal and opposite reaction.”
“Exactly. Exactly like you’re reacting to the Lurker trying to move into your head, kid. You’re going to fight it and you’re going to win. Pythagorean theorem, go.”
He kicked one leg in some kind of futile effort to escape the pain. “The sq-square of the hypotenuse of a triangle equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides.”
“My lord,” Basil said, crouching beside us. “The malice within him grows.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s using the blood to gain mass.”
“It isn’t actually blood—”
“Dammit, Basil, that’s not helping!”
Fitz clawed at his jeans, unfastening them. His belly writhed and bulged weirdly. Fitz screamed.
“List prime numbers!” I snapped. “Do it!”
“Two!” he screamed. “Three! Five! Seven! E-eleven!”
The floor shook. A second later, I heard the pounding of heavy boots in the hall outside the kitchen, and then Bear came running in, carrying the bottle of holy water.
“Fitz!” I said. “The Lurker. What is its weakness?”
“Fire!” he moaned. “Sunlight. Blessed water.”
I took the flask of holy water, opened it, and pressed it into his hands. I could have just poured it down his throat, but this was too good of a teachable moment. He’d have to be able to handle this kind of thing for himself. “Think, kid. Think. What do you need to do?”
Fitz clasped the flask with both hands, stared up at me for a second, and then said, “Hell’s bells. This is going to hurt, isn’t it?”
But he made me proud.
He didn’t wait for an answer.
He upended the bottle and started swallowing.
And then his arms and legs flew straight out and he screamed.
“Hold him!” I shouted.
Bear and I got his arms. Basil pressed gently down on Fitz’s hips.
My apprentice screamed and screamed, struggling wildly, too strongly for someone as slender as him, and made horrible, clogged, fluidic sounds mixed with belches.
Stench erupted from him. And then he ripped his arm free of my grasp, turned on his side, and began vomiting.
“Let him, let him!” I shouted, and Bear and Basil let go of him.
Fitz went to his hands and knees, his body rebelling, tensing, casting out everything from his mouth. It was disgusting. Blood and black sludgy matter and bilious fluid all mixed together. The smell was hideous.
And some of it was moving.
It writhed and shuddered and seemed to blacken and half-boil away. I took up the dropped flask of holy water and immediately poured more over the moving parts, splashing it on anything that might have resembled the Lurker, and smoke and more stench arose as the thing was dissolved.
Fitz gasped, exhausted, his body shuddering with weariness, almost too tired to continue holding himself up. He made weary, guttural moaning sounds between spits. Then collapsed slowly over to his side, gasping for breath, shaking.
I went to him and hauled him up, half into my lap.
“Hey, hey,” I said, voice gentle now. “Hey, kid. Hey. You did it. You did great. You won. Good work. I got you. I got you. You did it. We’re gonna take care of you. Don’t worry.”
Fitz opened unfocused eyes and his mouth tried to form a smile.
Then his head just lolled to one side in total exhaustion.
“Ods bodkin,” Bear breathed quietly. She took his wrist for a moment and reported, quietly, “Feverish. Pulse is strong. His heart rate is steadying.”
“Basil,” I said quietly, “as soon as we’re out of here, would you and the boys clean this up, please? I don’t want any of it staying inside the castle. Gather it up, get it to the roof, and burn it as quickly as possible.”
“My lord,” Basil said, inclining his head, and sank into the stone as he did.
“Bear,” I said, “get him to the infirmary.”
“Of course,” she said, and gathered up Fitz as lightly and carefully as if he’d been an infant.
I stood up too. I turned off the burner under the ruined steaks.
“Tell Estevez I’m moving the deadline to tomorrow night,” I said quietly, and I felt my voice go to that place where people start giving me nervous glances.
“We’re going to set up the meeting for the witching hour.
Tell him if he doesn’t have the money by then, I’m setting fire to everything he has. ”
“Is that wise?” Bear asked.
I set my hand gently on my apprentice’s too-hot forehead. “It’s personal.”