Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter
Twenty-One
“Bear!” screamed Maggie as she came pelting out Michael’s door toward us, wearing a Sunday dress. “Dad!”
I scooped her up and tossed her in the air and caught her again and started tickling her on the way down. She let out a squealing peal of giggles.
Mouse came rushing up in Maggie’s wake, bounding in stiff-legged excited leaps in a circle around us.
He threw himself against Bear’s legs, all but knocking even her massive form down, and then barreled into me the second I’d set Maggie down on the Carpenters’ leaf-strewn front lawn.
I went down laughing, with the huge grey dog nuzzling my face while his great tail swooshed back and forth.
Maggie shouted something about an atomic elbow and then threw herself onto the pile.
And.
Oh.
My.
God.
That felt good.
It was like stepping out into the sun after a long, cold night.
There are moments in your life that are perfect. You know they won’t last long, you know they’re rare, you know that they might not ever come again. If you pay attention, you can feel those moments happening to you.
I sank my teeth into it. I inhaled every scent, felt every burst of laughter rise out of my stomach, filed away every single sound of Maggie’s delight, of Mouse’s whuffling affection, of the crinkle of late autumn leaves under us, felt the crisp cold of the oncoming winter bite affectionately at exposed skin.
I wrestled my dog and my little girl and filed that moment away in my heart and my head, because I knew I’d need moments like this one—both now and in the future.
And I felt something ease in my chest and belly.
“Okay, okay!” I burst out finally, with a little over three hundred pounds of love essentially pinning me to the ground. “I yield! Don’t crush me!”
Mouse chuffed cheerfully, gave my face a couple of truly viscous kisses, and rose off of me.
Maggie didn’t. She just grabbed onto my chest and hugged me.
I got to my feet and she didn’t stop, clinging to me like a limpet.
So I just carried her inside that way, with Mouse walking happily with his shoulder pressed against my leg, looking up at us with a huge doggy smile on his face.
I looked up onto the house’s porch to see Michael and Molly standing there waiting for us. Both of them were smiling widely, and Molly was holding her father’s hand.
And that was how we started Thanksgiving at the Carpenter house.
—
Michael’s wife, Charity, puts on a feast for Thanksgiving, let me tell you.
If I hadn’t been losing so much weight, I’d have had to unbutton my pants.
Not everyone was there. Matthew had become a volunteer nurse for Doctors Without Borders and was in South America.
Alicia had gotten engaged and was spending the holiday with her fiancé’s family.
I still remembered them as a bunch of kids spilling out of a minivan.
And that would happen with Maggie, too. None of us own our children. We have a little while to hold them in trust, before we turn them over to the adults we’ve been waiting a couple of decades to meet. I needed to start arranging more time with her.
After the meal and some football (Michael had temporarily mounted a TV outside the living room’s picture window, and the house’s threshold, so that my magic wouldn’t screw up the big game), I went outside to the expansive front porch to sit down.
Michael, wrapped in a cardigan against the evening chill, joined me and passed me a cup of hot coffee. We sat together in companionable silence for a while, rocking on separate chairs.
“You really don’t get cold, do you?” Michael noted.
I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt in forty degrees with a little breeze. “Not so much,” I said.
“How are you handling the mantle these days?”
“Same as always. Lots of exercise, first thing. Meditation. As long as I do that, it’s not much different than feeling like a teenager, only with more perspective.”
He raised both eyebrows. “That’s an image.”
I shrugged.
“The beard suits you,” he said.
“Covers up the new scars.”
“Ghoul wounds always scar up heavy,” he agreed. “You look worried.”
I stared at the coffee for a bit. “I got ninety-nine problems and a bi—”
He coughed and gave me a look.
“Woman,” I corrected myself, “are several of them.”
“Mab, Lara Raith, and Justine,” he said.
I exhaled agreement and sipped coffee. “Mab wants me to settle up with King Etri. But he wants Thomas’s head. I can’t think of a way to make that work.”
“The svartalves have very Old Nordic sensibilities,” he said. “Perhaps he would accept a weregild?”
“For the life of a trusted retainer of about seven centuries? I don’t have that kind of money. And besides, Etri probably makes Scrooge McDuck look like Bob Cratchit. He’s not interested in wealth.”
“There are some things money can’t buy,” he noted. “You’ve made things like that happen before.”
“Maybe,” I said warily. “But I don’t know what he wants. I suppose I could offer him favors three, but God only knows how that could end up.”
“Indeed,” Michael said. He pursed his lips. “Perhaps you need an emissary. This is a conflict between signatories of the Unseelie Accords, after all.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Mab made it pretty clear that it was my personal problem. And I’m not Council anymore. Without her support, I can’t make a claim.”
“Perhaps a personal mediator, then,” he said diffidently.
I frowned. “What are you saying, exactly?”
“I have fought both for and against the svartalves over the years,” he said. “I wouldn’t say that we are friends, but there is mutual respect. Molly increased my standing with them when she saved Etri and his family. I could talk to him on your behalf.”
I scowled. “You’re not going to get all Messianic about it, are you? People have sacrificed enough for me.”
“A Knight of the Cross can often be called upon to make such choices when they are needful,” he said.
“But as you may have noticed, I am no longer a Knight of the Cross. I have many things to look forward to with my children, and grandchildren. I fully intend to be there to enjoy them. But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a civil conversation on behalf of my best friend. ”
The coffee made me choke up a little. “Thank you,” I said quietly. “But I got me into this. I’ve got to be the one to get me out. Besides. Even if you could get terms from Etri…Thomas is dying.”
Michael frowned and leaned closer.
“It’s his Hunger,” I said. “It’s the spirit that is attached to him.
It’s what gives the White Court their abilities.
Thomas’s Hunger went berserk when the svartalves beat him within an inch of his life taking him prisoner.
His body poured all the Hunger’s energy into saving his life.
It’s starving. He won’t be able to control himself when it comes out, which means… ”
“Someone would have to die to save him,” Michael said quietly.
“Might not be enough,” I said. “He might kill them and die anyway. And he doesn’t want someone else to pay the price for him. I’ve got him in a kind of suspended animation, but it’s only buying him time, not solving anything. He…doesn’t have much hope.”
“And neither do you,” Michael said quietly.
I closed my eyes and tried to focus on how warm the coffee cup felt in my hands. “I don’t even know where to start.”
Michael pursed his lips and sat back in the rocker. He went back and forth for a while, thinking.
“A friend of mine,” he said, “once told me that when you didn’t know what to do next, you gather more information.”
I eyed him.
“Huh,” I said.
“I mean, what do we really know about the White Court?” Michael asked. “Some, probably not all, of what they can do. How they feed. How they generally operate. We do know that it’s possible for them to detach from their Hunger.”
“Sure,” I said. “If their first time is the sex of true love, which practically never happens, and which couldn’t help Thomas.”
“Yet we know it is possible. A slim chance is infinitely higher than no chance at all,” Michael said firmly. “Miracles happen, Harry. You’ve seen them. You’ve done them.”
Something bitter and snarky started to come out of my mouth but died partway.
Because he was right.
Michael was right.
I needed more information about the White Court, about Hungers, about the svartalves in general and Etri in particular, if I wanted to sort this mess out.
Assuming there was a viable way to do so.
I pretty much always approached problems knowing that I was capable, knowing that I was strong, knowing that I could do some good.
There was a fundamental arrogance in that—necessary, maybe, but arrogant all the same.
That arrogance had cost Murphy her life.
I had dismissed the terrified Rudolph as no real threat, on the scale of things we’d been dealing with that evening.
But Death doesn’t grade on a curve.
It is perhaps the only force in the universe that is always impartial, always fair, always equitable. Death comes for all of us. We all end up with the same outcome, eventually. I had forgotten that.
“You’re carrying an awful lot of weight, brother,” Michael said gently. “Grief is good and right when you lose people you care about. Love. But sooner or later, you’re going to have to let go of them and move on.”
In my head, the dice rattled on a Monopoly board.
“You’re saying I need closure,” I said.
“Not quite the same thing as letting go,” he said softly.
I licked my lips and stared down at the cup. “My magic failed me against the ghouls. It works well enough in practice. But when the storm came…it just dried up on me. Some people have told me they think it’s because I have some kind of death wish.”
“What do you think?” Michael asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. I haven’t felt this bad…ever. Not even when the Reds turned Susan.”
“Perhaps that’s what you need to let go of most,” Michael said.
“What’s that?”
“Being so angry at yourself,” he said. “Harry, you can do things. More than most of the planet. You can change things. Preserve them. You can challenge beings of tremendous power. Help people everywhere you go.” He thumped his fist lightly against my shoulder.
“But you’re still just a man. You’re going to make mistakes.
You’re going to be wrong sometimes. Sometimes you will fail.
And even if you do everything right, sometimes you will still fail to live up to your standards—not because you made a bad choice, but because you are a human being.
You can only work with what you know when you are in the moment, and we can’t know everything all the time. That’s just how life is.”
I didn’t look up at him.
“Your self-anger is nothing less than you demanding of yourself perfection, Harry. I know it’s hard to hear me from way up on the mountaintop of hubris beneath that standard.
But as I am your friend, by the living God and on my children’s souls, brother, I swear to you this truth: You deserve better than what you’ve been giving yourself. ”
To my wizard’s senses, the air shivered with the power behind my best friend’s oath.
He meant it.
And between the two of us, I probably wasn’t the one with the clearest perspective at the moment.
I was quiet while the coffee chilled.
Michael waited. He let half an hour pass in calm and patience.
“I don’t know how to do that,” I whispered finally.
“I don’t know how to tell you,” he answered easily. “But between the two of us, perhaps we can figure it out.”
Rapid footsteps thudded in the house’s entry hall, and the front door and storm door opened in rapid succession. Daniel strode out onto the porch and directly toward us, his footsteps swift and purposeful.
“We just got a call from Father Forthill,” he said, his expression strained. “There’s a problem. He’s asking for you, Harry.”