Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
Bear and Freydis kept a discreet distance from Lara and me as we made a few rounds of the ballroom.
Lara talked to pretty much everyone. I nodded and gave brief smiles when introduced and otherwise said little.
More and more people arrived as the evening got later, the rich and swanky mostly.
There were some famous faces there, apparently, but I didn’t really recognize them.
I did recognize a couple of aldermen, the superintendent of police, and several attorneys from the DA’s office, and got introduced to the mayor’s senior assistant.
None of them really took any notice of me, what with Lara right there, and several other members of the White Court drifting through the room.
The gathering was noticeably more sedate than Halloween had been, by which I meant I didn’t see any of the White Court drawing off victims to be fed upon.
It was boring as hell.
Lara wore a deep blue dress matching my cummerbund. It plunged in the back, was slit up high on one side, and looked fabulous, even for her. The Winter mantle wanted me to find out if her skin was as soft and smooth as it looked. I squired her about with her hand on my arm, a cool, light pressure.
We escaped the room around eleven and took an elevator to the top floor.
Freydis produced a key card from her dress and opened the door before I’d gotten close enough to screw up the card reader.
The two Valkyries took up position on either side of the door to the executive suite after Bear handed me my duster, with the necessary implements in the pockets, and Lara and I went inside.
“Are you sure that’s all he said?” Lara was asking me. I’d given her a précis of my conversation with Lord Raith while we rode up in the elevator.
I checked over the conversation in my head. “Yeah, pretty much. Some smug insults, some excuses over them, veiled threats.”
She frowned as I shut the door behind us. “That’s…He hasn’t acted like that in a while.”
“Like a jerk?” I asked.
“Like he thinks he has teeth,” she replied. “Perhaps I should have a chat.”
The executive suite was large and tasteful. I felt oddly uncomfortable in the room and after a moment realized it was because of the electric lights. I’d gotten used to lanterns and candles, to longer shadows and dimmer rooms.
Probably said more about me than about the hotel.
“Sounded like standard egotistical villain bluster to me,” I said. “Not like I’m gonna believe the guy was giving me a warning out of the goodness of his heart.”
“A warning about me,” Lara said. She walked over to the wall of glass windows that looked out over the city.
The lights only went for a few blocks beyond the hotel.
Then darkness. She stared out at the night, or maybe at her ghostly, translucent reflection in the glass.
“Do you think he was right?” she asked lightly.
“Do you?” I replied.
She shrugged one alabaster shoulder. “He’s had his own philosophy that has guided him. I have mine. They differ. He maintains that his is the more sustainable of the two. I suppose time will tell.” She turned to face me. She looked amazing. “Harry? What do you need me to do?”
I realized I’d been staring. I cleared my throat, turned to a dining table, and began unpacking my duster’s pockets onto it. “Right, uh. Right. Give me a second here.” I forced some order into my thoughts and eyed the short carpet. “Um. You can afford some cleaning or, uh, repair charges, I hope?”
“If we don’t burn down the building,” she said drily, “it shouldn’t pose a challenge.”
“No promises.” I took up a can of white spray paint and began shaking it to make the steel bead inside rattle. “But good to know.”
—
It took me half an hour to do the layered circle I was going to need.
We had to push the furniture out of the way to clear out a spot about twenty feet across.
It took an inner and outer circle for what I had in mind, with the space between them lined with sigils of protection and containment.
I hadn’t done this kind of work in a good long while, and only a single day’s preparation and visualization probably hadn’t been ideal, either.
This was a test run to see how viable my idea was, and didn’t have to be done with the same accuracy as the final product.
I hoped. Then there was the condition I was in to think about and…
…and Hell’s bells, Lara smelled good.
I forced that out of my head. I had to focus to get this set up.
Within the center of the circle, I laid down a figure-eight infinity loop, big enough for someone to stand in either circular side.
I laid down five white candles upon the exterior circle, equidistant as I could manage them, then five incense cones centered between them.
Then on the table, I set up the stand with the largish tuning fork held upright, and laid down the metal striker beside it.
Candles for sight and feel, incense for smell and taste, the fork for sound.
The smell of the spray paint was sharp in my nose, and I’d gotten flecks of it all over the pants of the tux and the expensive, shining shoes.
I suppose my magical style was not precisely formal.
Lara watched it all in silence.
“Okay,” I said, going over the circle. The runes and sigils were rough but correct—I’d been most careful about those. The circles were even, or at least even enough to the casual eye. Candles and incense were unlit but ready to go. “I think we’re just about good.”
She arched a raven-dark eyebrow. “Really. I expected it to be…”
“Flashier?” I asked.
She frowned. “Well. Less…like you’d gotten the things for it at a hardware store.”
“I’m not particularly wealthy,” I said. “Few more months of running the castle and I’m broke, in fact.”
She blinked at me. “You’re kidding.”
I shrugged. “Never really been a priority.”
“I see.” She shook her head. “You seem to think little enough of wrecking a hotel room and having me pay for it.”
“You going to try to tell me that you’ve never trashed a hotel room in your time?”
“Hmm,” she said. “What will you require of me?”
I stepped into the circle carefully, without touching any of the paint.
It hadn’t been empowered yet and wasn’t active, but I didn’t want to smear the lines.
Lara took note of my caution and when I gestured for her to join me, she followed my example.
I nodded at one side of the infinity loop. “You’re going to stand there.”
“And do what?”
“Don’t step out of it,” I said. “Whatever happens, you stand in place.”
She pursed her lips, which took me out of the right headspace for a second. “What should I expect to happen?”
“Could hurt,” I said. “Or, uh, upset your Hunger.”
“Upset it?”
“I’m about to see if I can contain your Hunger without touching the rest of you,” I said.
Her eyes widened slightly. “Is that possible?”
“In theory,” I said. “Yeah. Of course, the difference between theory and reality is what you aren’t aware that you don’t know.”
She gave me a long look. “What happens if I step out of the circle?”
“Depends,” I said.
“Upon?”
“What your Hunger does in reaction. Um, how hard the two of you are stuck together, for lack of a better term. How much energy I’ve got to pour into this. I’m creating a very specific kind of energy field. I’m going to stretch reality a little here.”
A little white showed around her grey eyes. “Is that dangerous?”
“If you don’t step out of the circle,” I said, “it should be fine.”
“In theory?”
“Hmm,” I said.
She gave me another look and exhaled through her nose. Then she bent slightly, lifting her feet one at a time, and slipped her heels off. It did interesting things to her calves. “How long will this take?”
“This is just a test run,” I said. “Not long.”
“You’re not going to”—she frowned—“do anything permanent to me?”
“Not really set up for it,” I said. “This is a proof-of-concept sort of thing. Modified exorcism. If it’s working, I should be able to tell, and we’ll back off.”
“If?” she asked. “Should? There are more conditionals in that statement than I prefer.”
“That’s magic for you,” I said. “I did say it would probably be dangerous.”
“Probably,” she muttered. “More conditional statements.” She tossed her shoes onto the couch we’d pushed against the wall and delicately stepped into one side of the infinity loop. Her fingernails and toenails, I noted, had been painted a blue that matched the dress.
I stepped out of the circle, checking over everything once more. Then I took a deep breath and irritably removed my tie, opening the shirt at the throat.
“Ready?” I asked.
She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, her eyes closed. Her toes flexed a little and she folded her arms across her stomach. “Very well.”
“Right,” I said. “Here we go.”
I closed my eyes and took several deep, slow breaths, drawing together my concentration and focus. That came together quicker than I had thought it would. Well. I had been meditating every day lately.
And I’d been doing something close to the inverse of this ritual almost every night for months.
I pushed that thought away, too.
First the circle.
I opened my eyes, pointed my finger at the nearest candle and murmured, “Flickum bicus.”
A small surge of power flowed out of me to the candle, and flame kindled upon its wick and flickered to life.
I repeated the spell four more times for the candles, then went about again for the incense, giving the last one a little bit of extra power, which spilled over the cone of incense into the circle and brought it to life.
The air hummed with unseen power as the circle became active, jumping up in an invisible screen around Lara. She shivered as it did, gooseflesh erupting across the skin of her upper arms.
“Steady,” I murmured. “It’s going well so far.”
“Okay,” she breathed. She opened her eyes and they were paler than they’d been when she shut them.