Chapter Forty-Nine #2
“Sure,” I said. “Why burn down the candy store when you can keep getting more treats? Good,” I said. “That’s a human concept, called sustainability. I mean, we’re still working on it, but this conversation is going really well.”
I could hear the hysterical giggle bubbling out of my voice.
I was in direct mental contact with a Lovecraftian horror.
Which probably wouldn’t be recommended by the American Medical Association.
I could feel things shredding inside my head as the Hunger continued to draw energy out of me.
I’d be racking up insanity points with every single exchange with the thing.
“So, here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m going to put you and Thomas back together. And you’re going to help him.”
This portal is failing, the Hunger said, with faint contempt. Body, mind, and spirit. Hollowed out. Ruined.
“He’s human,” I said. “He can be renewed. I’ve seen it. I’ve done it. And you and I are going to fight together again. To heal him. And you get to keep on feeding.”
The Hunger’s eyes flickered and shimmered, mirrors shining more brightly, and I could see my body, clenching my staff, struggling to stay upright in one, and Thomas, eyes beginning to roll back in his head, in the other.
“I mean, what are your options?” I demanded. “He goes, you go. He stays, you stay. What do you say?”
And time almost stopped. Everything depended on this. There’s a rule that applies to just about everything there is: You are what you eat. You eat healthy, you are healthy. You eat junk, sooner or later, you’re living in junk. This Outsider was a primal spirit of pure, devouring hunger.
But it had been feeding on humanity. For years. Humans are weird and complicated and contradictory, but they pretty much all operate under the same drive as every other living thing on the planet.
Survival.
The desire to live. Grow. Reproduce. Protect offspring. Pure, animal, instinct-level drives that sometimes let us do incredible things, go beyond the boundaries we normally face, defy darkness, despair, self-destruction—sometimes even death itself.
If there was some kind of malevolent will driving the Outsiders, it might have made a mistake with the Hungers.
Because ultimately, they needed mortals in order to exist.
And the more of us they ate, the more like us they would become.
The Hunger’s attention focused even more intently upon Thomas.
Done, it purred.
I closed my eyes, especially the third one, breaking the mental connection. Withdrew back entirely into my physical form.
Exhaustion hammered into me, weariness as thorough and nauseating as anything I had ever experienced. I staggered forward to a knee, my head spinning. Dropped my staff. Started crawling for the nearest edge of the greater circle.
And then my arms failed, too weak to keep holding me up, and I dropped onto my face on the green crystal.
My body didn’t want to do it, but I forced it to extend one arm, slapping my palm down on the stone floor. I dragged myself a few inches closer to the circle’s edge. And I did it again. And again. My whole world became that single, driving purpose. Get closer. And closer. While my strength faded.
And then Lara was there, blood slightly too pale to be human on her lower lip, one eye swollen from her impact with the chamber’s walls, hauling me up and getting a shoulder under mine.
“What do I do?” she demanded.
“Circle,” I gasped. “Get me to it.”
Lara dragged me the last six feet without hesitation, and I summoned up enough of my will to slam my hand down across the outside of the circle, shattering its containment.
There was a howl of energy unleashed, a wild torrent of wind.
The expensive ritual candles were consumed utterly in a flash of flame that whirled and spilled up into the green crystal ceiling in a column of blazing light, disappearing into the stone with a thunderclap of cracking rock and a rattle of falling bits of broken crystal.
The white shape of the demon on one side of the infinity symbol vanished, blurring back toward Thomas’s fallen, still form.
I didn’t know what was going on anywhere else. I didn’t have the energy to care.
“Thomas!” I sputtered.
Lara dragged me to him, set me down briskly but not roughly, flipped my brother onto his back, and felt for a pulse.
“Hunger is back in him, healing,” I gasped.
“No pulse,” Lara reported harshly. “He isn’t breathing.”
“Buy him time,” I said. “CPR.”
Before I’d finished saying it, Lara was checking his airway, tilting back his head, and started going to work on him, pinching his nose shut, sealing her mouth on his, exhaling heavily, then leaning back up and placing the stacked heels of her hands in the center of his chest. She did twenty or thirty solid compressions, then began again at giving him more breath.
CPR is physically demanding to do. Like, really, really demanding.
You have to be in shape yourself to breathe and pump blood for two.
You have to push not quite hard enough to break ribs, but hard enough to compress the heart and lungs beneath them and get blood oxidized and moving.
For a minute, then two, then three, Lara kept it up like a machine.
Mab’s voice rang from the stone walls, sharp and clear, “Thomas Raith! Choose! Live for them or die with them!”
Tears started from my brother’s eyes.
He didn’t move, didn’t draw breath, but he could hear. He was exhausted and broken and dying, but he could still hear her.
“Thomas,” I said. “It’s me, man. It’s me.” I collapsed beside my brother and forced myself to place my right hand on the crown of his head while Lara kept working. God, I wanted to collapse. I wanted to sleep.
But not yet.
“Thomas,” I breathed, gathering up the scraps of my will, focusing them together, reaching out to make the mental connection with my dying brother. “Thomas,” I repeated. “Thomas.”
I felt a dizzying sensation as I reached out to bridge the space between Thomas’s mind and my own and found myself in near darkness, lit from above as if by a single, distant star, upon a surface of cold black stone.
Steady, rhythmic thunder came from some unimaginable distance. Then a faint rush of warm wind.
Lara.
Thomas lay beneath me on his back, naked, wracked, withered. Tears streamed from his unfocused, deep blue eyes.
“Harry,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, man,” I said. I knelt next to him, sliding a hand beneath his head and tilting his face toward mine. “Don’t be.”
“I just wanted to protect her. Protect the baby,” he said. “I should have come to you. Now it’s too late. Even if we get out of today, Etri will hunt us down.”
“Thomas,” I said, gently and warmly. “You knob. You sack of blunt instruments. You crayon-chewing pretty boy. Even you can’t be airhead enough to think you’re the only one in this fight.”
I leaned down and put my forehead against his.
“Remember,” I breathed.
And I brought up my memories of my brother and me.
The first time I’d met him, dressed as a goddamned butterfly.
Our time living together in my tiny basement apartment, the frustrations and the laughter and the arguments and the peace.
I shared with him my memories of him with Justine, their joy in each other, their quiet love, the peaceful home they shared.
I called up my memories of him and me building the Whatsup Dock on Demonreach, listening to an ancient AM/FM radio while eating chips and sandwiches for lunch while we cooled our feet in the waters of Lake Michigan and randomly pushed each other into the water during the labor.
And then I brought out the real magic.
I showed him his courage, his heroism, from my point of view, battling literal forces of darkness with sword and pistol and courage and skill, laughter on his lips and a snarling smile on his face.
I showed him what I saw when I looked at him, a man of deep bravery and conviction, who fought demons within and without with equal courage.
I showed him his strength, his courage, his kindness to me and to my Maggie.
I showed him who he was in my eyes. The one I depended on.
The one I could always go to for help. My brother the hero. My brother.
My brother.
“Thomas,” I said, and the sheer will in my voice made the empty space shake. “This isn’t your time. This isn’t your place. This isn’t your end.
“Get up,” I breathed.
He started to twitch, convulse, his chest spasming, spine and abs flexing weakly.
“Get up,” I called quietly.
His mouth gaped open and closed again like a landed fish.
Like he was trying to remember how to breathe.
“Get up!” I cried.
There was a sudden rush of wind, then a torrent, then a gale, and I was suddenly back on the floor of the summoning chamber on Demonreach, my hand coming off of Thomas’s head as his body arched into a bow and he gasped and thrashed and began dragging in ragged breaths.
“Thomas!” Lara cried.
His eyes flew open, blue, then light blue, then pale grey.
His withered skin smoothed. Ragged hair grew lustrous.
Pale muscle swelled slightly over his bony frame as he kept breathing, as his Hunger translated the energy I’d fed it into physical restoration.
He gasped, still starving-thin, though he looked less like something out of a World War II film, opened his eyes, and looked wildly around, barely strong enough to move his head, trying to focus his gaze.
“Harry?” he gasped. “Lara?”
“Here,” we both said at the same time.
Lara’s eyes were filled with tears. They spilled down her cheeks. Her voice throbbed with intensity. “You stupid, romantic, ridiculous boy,” she said. She cupped his face between her hands. “You scared the hell out of me. You’ve given me so many headaches. I should strangle you.”
And then she leaned down and clasped him close to her, sobbing.
“Wow,” Thomas croaked weakly. He lifted an arm and patted Lara’s back clumsily. He met my eyes and smiled, mostly with his eyes, as I took his hand. “With family like this, who needs enemies, right?”
I laughed. Harder than I should have. And with the laughter, I felt some of my weariness fall away. I felt strength coming back into me. I felt my chest heave and draw in a deep, clean breath and felt tears blur my eyes for a moment, and then clear my vision.
I put a fist on the ground. Levered a knee under me. Shoved myself up to my feet.
And then I faced the Queens of Winter.