Chapter Eight #2
I felt my breath catch and forced myself to keep breathing evenly.
There was this empty pit inside me where all my recent pain and loss lived, and I felt an urge to hurl myself into it, but I held off.
That was the point of all the meditation I’d been doing—to give me some measure of ability to keep functioning even when my body and my heart wanted me to collapse screaming.
Sometimes that happened to me at night, late.
I’d just start screaming. I’d scream and I wouldn’t be able to stop until I’d screamed myself out. Until I was breathing too hard to keep doing it, until my throat hurt, until my jaws ached from forcing my mouth open too wide.
Bear said it happened pretty regularly to folks who had gone to war. That I should roll with it.
I wanted to start screaming. But instead, I took a slow, measured breath as I had thousands of times over recent weeks, and murmured, “Here he is. Hang on…”
I focused on the crystal and the energies flowing through it.
The entire island was mine to command. Normally, I’d have seen the personification of the genius loci of the place, Alfred, by now, but he hadn’t shown himself.
After Alfred had wrestled Ethniu into a cell, he’d been exhausted, and was apparently still resting.
So I felt my way through the spells binding the crystal casket on my own and found the one that would let us talk to my brother.
I opened my eyes and found myself looking at a ghostly image of Thomas, superimposed over the shadowy form within the crystal.
He was a man just a shade away from six feet in height, pale and beautiful as a statue.
The image’s long black hair was curling and textured like Lara’s, and his eyes were closed.
“Hey,” I said gently. “Thomas. Can you hear me, man?”
The image blinked its eyes open slowly. It looked around blindly for a moment and then licked its lips. A voice, somehow sounding as if it was coming from twenty feet away, and not right in front of me, croaked out, “Harry? Is that you?”
Lara inhaled sharply.
“Yeah, man. It’s me.”
“Am I dead?”
I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against the crystal. “No, man. You’re in stasis until we can figure out how to help you.”
“Who is we?” Thomas asked. “Is Justine with you? Harry, it’s not her. She’s been possessed. You can’t trust her.”
“No, no,” I said. “It’s not Justine.”
Lara reached out her hand and touched the crystal. “Brother mine,” she said gently.
Thomas’s image closed his eyes for a moment, his expression pained. “Sister mine.”
“Your Hunger,” Lara said gently. “Are you all right?”
Thomas was silent for a moment before he said, “It’s…stirring.” He grimaced. “It’s still…still chewing on me.”
“I know,” Lara said, her voice compassionate. “Thomas, if we release you and feed it immediately, you might recover.”
“Hah,” he said, his tone glum. “You know where I stand on this.”
“I could make it a command,” Lara almost whispered.
“Don’t you dare,” Thomas snapped. “Harry, don’t you listen to her.”
I held up a hand to Lara and asked Thomas, “What is she talking about doing?”
“If I try to feed my Hunger when it’s like this, it’s going to rip the life right out of someone,” Thomas said quietly. “Or several someones. And after that…” His expression became ashamed. “After that, I’d go wild for a time.”
“Taking a life that way,” Lara explained to me, “is physically, psychically, and psychologically rewarding on a level that is difficult to convey. Thomas, myself, and several other of my most enlightened siblings make it a point to avoid doing so. The following high can last for weeks and…”
“And makes you want to take more hits,” I said.
Lara nodded.
“So you’re suggesting feeding him a bunch of women who he’ll certainly kill?” I asked.
“In his state, they needn’t all be women,” Lara said in a practical tone. “In the past, my people executed criminals to sate their Hunger. But that has its own dangers.”
“You are what you eat,” I murmured.
“Yes,” Lara said. “The only people who are safe to devour are the ones who least deserve any such thing.”
“I’m not going to do that, Lara,” Thomas said. “Don’t make me.”
I frowned at her. “You could do that?”
She shrugged an elegant shoulder. “His Hunger is an animal I know well how to handle. Yes.”
“No one is eating anyone just yet,” I said firmly. “Thomas, I’m on it. I’m going to find a way to get you out of there safely.”
“Okay,” Thomas said, his image’s expression pained and relieved at the same time. “Okay. Hey, how long have I been out?”
“It’s August,” I said quietly.
“Oh God,” he said. “Justine. The baby.”
Justine was Thomas’s woman. Or had been, before she’d been possessed by an enemy spirit known as Nemesis.
The spirit had influenced Justine to become pregnant and then used the lives of Justine and the unborn child to leverage Thomas into trying to assassinate the king of the svartalves, Etri.
Thomas had missed the king but taken the life of Etri’s bodyguard and friend.
What a mess.
“We’re looking for them,” I assured him quietly.
“The baby would be due in the spring,” Thomas said. “Harry, you’ve got to find her. Lara, the child is the blood of Raith. You owe it your protection.”
“I know what I owe our House,” Lara said, her voice thick with compassion. “Harry, can you feel that?”
I closed my eyes and paid attention. I could feel Thomas’s sadness and confusion and frustration—and under it, something else, something hectic and directionless and uncontrolled, building steadily, the way a seizure or panic attack might.
“That’s his Hunger,” Lara said. “It’s rousing itself up to keep attacking him.”
I took my hand off the crystal and said, “There. You’ve talked to him. Is that satisfactory, that it’s him and he’s still alive?”
She mirrored me, her expression weary. “The first thing he did was start babbling about Justine. Of course it’s Thomas.”
I nodded and put my hand back on the crystal. “Listen, man, I’ve got to get you back to sleep before you start getting torn up again. You’re going to be okay.”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said, the image’s face creasing with concern. “Find Justine! Find the baby!”
I wanted to start screaming.
But instead, I said, “I’m working on it, man. I promise.”
His image smiled faintly. “Yeah. Okay, man. Lara, you’re on it, too?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “We will find them.”
“Okay,” Thomas said. His image’s expression broke, tears spilling down his face. “Okay. God. I know I screwed up, Harry. But the thing had Justine. It had the baby. It said if I told anyone that it would kill them both. It just stopped her heart right in front of me…”
“Easy,” I said. “Easy. I get it, man. I get it.”
When the bad guys had taken my Maggie, I would have done anything to keep her safe.
I had, in fact, done unthinkable things for her sake.
I was still living with the consequences.
Even if I got Thomas out, he’d still be living with his.
The svartalves did not forget those who had either helped or harmed them.
“God,” he said. “I’m so tired. I’m so damned tired, Harry.”
“Get some rest,” I said gently. “I’ll be back as soon as I can figure something out.”
His image nodded, sagging.
I focused on the crystal, and the image faded. It went back to glowing green stillness. Thomas’s sense of unease and incipient panic faded, the sense of his presence retreating, until it was just sadness and regret again.
I took my hand down from the casket slowly.
“I raised him, you know,” Lara said quietly. “His mother wisely fled. And Father couldn’t be bothered, of course.” She shook her head. “I took care of him. Fed him. Taught him to…be.”
I turned to look at her. Her crystal-blue eyes looked vibrant against the red that had come into her sclera with what looked like the beginning of tears.
“Thomas told me what pregnancy with one of your kind is like,” I said quietly. “You can’t have children of your own, can you?”
“I have Thomas,” she said quietly. “I will save him. If my way is the only way, I will save him. I don’t care what it costs. He will recover himself in time.”
“Seems like I have something to say about that,” I said.
And suddenly I was facing Lara Raith. The creature who had subverted command of the White Court of vampires.
The being whose influence extended throughout the mortal world to a degree that was frankly scary to contemplate.
She was cold and beautiful, and her presence was suddenly a thing that I could feel with every inch of my skin, that sent the hairs on my neck crawling about, warning me that a dangerous predator was very, very close.
“There are some places,” she said finally, “where it is foolish for anyone to stand. Between a mother and her child is one of the most well-known. Thomas is mine in a way that no one else ever will be, Dresden. I think it would be best for both of us to concentrate on the goals we have in common.”
“Don’t try to make me bring innocent people out here,” I said. “It’s not going to happen.”
Lara’s blue eyes became drowning deep and the timbre of her voice slid into something lower, slower, more sensual. “I can ask,” she said slowly, her voice like honey for my ears, “very…very…sweetly. Don’t make me say pretty please, Harry.”
Approximately seventy percent of me wanted to tackle her to the floor and go primal on an immediate basis.
Maybe twenty percent of me wanted to start screaming.
The tithe of me that was left made my body turn on one heel and start walking toward the exit before anything bad (or really, really bad) could happen.
“Let’s go,” I said, and could hear how harsh my voice sounded. “Before choices get made. We both want to help him. That’s the main thing.”
I heard her quietly begin following me back to the stairs.
“He’s family,” she said. “It’s the only thing.”