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“Sure,” Butters said, snapping his rubber gloves off and beginning to clean up. “Whatever.”
Augh, of all the crazy things to happen in my life, I wouldn’t think that my randomly involuntarily conjuring objects out of nothing at the drop of a hat would really ping anyone’s radar. All the things happening right now, and this is the point that Butters picks to decide to stonewall me on?
I sneezed again. Hard.
There was an enormous crash as a section of mortared stone wall, maybe four feet square, landed on Butters’s kitchen floor so hard that the tables and chairs jumped off the floor. Butters yelped and fell over backwards out of his chair—into a backwards roll that brought him onto his feet right next to the steak-knife holder on the counter. He had his hand on a knife before I could get all the way to my feet.
Little guy. But fast. Knights of the Sword aren’t ever to be underestimated.
“Dere,” I said, swiping awkwardly at my nose with my forearms. “Dere, do yuh see dow?”
Butters just stared at the stone wall. Then he quivered when it shuddered, went transparent, and then collapsed into gallons and gallons of ectoplasm. The supernatural gelatin kind of spread out slowly over the floor, like a test shot for a remake of The Blob.
“Okay,” Butters said. “ So … that just happened.” He regarded the ectoplasm and then me and shook his head. “Your life, Harry. What the hell?”
“Dod’t asg be,” I said. I sloshed across the kitchen floor, got a paper towel, and started trying to blow my nose clean. It was kind of a mess. It took several paper towels’ worth of expelled ectoplasm to be able to breathe properly again. “Look, I can’t be randomly making things appear out of nowhere.”
“I’m a medical examiner,” Butters wailed. “Christ, Harry! Some kind of virus that has an interaction with your nervous system, or your brain or your freaking subconscious? This is something to take to Mayo or Johns Hopkins. Or maybe Professor Xavier’s school.”
“None of those guys are weird enough. You do weird.”
He put the knife back and threw up his hands. “Augh. Okay. Is there always a sneeze?”
“Yeah, so far,” I said.
“Then go get whatever cold medicine you use when you have a cold. Maybe if you stop the sneezing, you’ll stop the conjuring, too.”
I eyed him blearily and then said, betrayed, “I could have worked that out for myself.”
“Weird,” he said, “it’s almost as if you’re a grown damned man who could make some commonsense health decisions for himself, if he chose to.”
I flipped him a casual bird, idly noting the pain of my wounded hand as I did. “What about the nausea? I feel like I’m stuck on one of those rides where you go in circles.”
“Infrasound is pretty wild and unexplored stuff,” Butters said. “There’s too many potential weapon and military communication applications for it, and it’s hard to measure, so there hasn’t been a ton of publicly available research. But, the Paranet being the Paranet, I found some Bigfoot researchers who say that the Bigfoot use it all the time to encourage people to leave the area. Tigers and other large predators use it, too, as part of the roar. You know when you hear stories about people freezing when a tiger roars? That’s infrasound, having an effect on the parasympathetic nervous system.”
“Thank you for confirming that infrasound is real and has real effects on people,” I said, “but I sort of worked that one out for myself. How do we fix it?”
“According to the Bigfoot guys, mostly what it takes to recover is a solid sleep cycle. So if you’re going to insist on treating me like your personal physician, here: Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”
I grimaced. “Yeah, sleep probably isn’t an option, either.”
“Course not.” Butters sighed. He went to a cabinet, got a plastic bottle out, and tossed it to me.
“Allergy meds?” I asked skeptically.
“Are you a doctor now?” Butters went to the sink and filled a cup of water.
“Maybe I’m only a medical examiner.”
Butters dipped a finger in the water and flicked it at me, then sloshed carefully through the slime and put the cup down on the table in front of me. “Diphenhydramine,” he said. “Sneezing is usually a histamine reaction. This is an antihistamine. Should help. Take two.”
I did as I was told without uttering any intelligible complaints, thus proving that I am not a contrary, obstreperous stiff neck who resents any authority figure telling him what to do. I mean, it’s documented now. So that’s settled.
I heard a soft sound and looked up at the doorway to the kitchen as a young woman appeared in it. Andi had long, wavy red hair and bombshell curves. She wore an emerald green terry-cloth robe, which she held closed with one hand, her eyes were sleepy, and she was possibly the most adorable werewolf I knew. “Waldo? What was that bang? What happened to the floor? Oh, Harry.” She gathered the robe closed a little more closely and belted it. “I didn’t realize you were here.”
“Andi,” I said. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you up.”
She gave me a tired smile. “Word is that things are getting tense out there.”
“Word’s right,” I said. “Be a good idea for you to get as much sleep as possible, in case you’re needed.”
“And yet,” Butters protested, “here you are waking me up, I notice.”
“For you, sleep time was yesterday,” I said. “You’re needed now.”
There were soft footsteps and a second female voice said, “Is everything okay?”
Another young woman appeared, built slim but strong, legs like a long-distance runner’s beneath an Avengers T-shirt big enough to serve her as a dress. She had very fine mousy brown hair to her shoulders, and she was squinting her large brown eyes against her lack of glasses, her narrow face disrupted by sleep marks on one cheek. “Oh,” she said. “My goodness. Hello, Harry. I’m, um, sleeping over. After the LAN party. Oh, did you hurt your hands?”
“Marci,” I said, to possibly the second-cutest werewolf I knew. “Um, hello. Yeah, just having ol’ Doc Butters take a look and make sure I didn’t void the warranty.”
“Oh,” Marci said. “Oh. I see.”
There followed a long, awkward silence, in which Butters turned a sufficient shade of pink to advertise for breast cancer awareness and in which Marci looked at everything in the apartment except me.
“Oh for God’s sake,” Andi said. “He’s an adult human being, guys. And I’m tired. Draw conclusions, Harry. You won’t be far off. And I’m not cleaning this mess up.” She turned, took Marci’s hand, and walked firmly back toward the bedroom. Marci’s cheeks flushed bright red, but she went with Andi.
I looked at Butters, whose earlobes could have been mistaken for tamales, and arched an eyebrow.
The little guy took a deep breath. Then he said, in a calm and sincere tone, “Harry, tease me about this or screw it up for me and I’ll knock your teeth out.”
And he said it right.
I mean, there’s a way to convey your sincere willingness to commit violence. Most people seem to think it involves a lot of screaming and waving your arms. It doesn’t. Really dangerous people don’t feel a need to shout about it. Delivering that kind of warning, sincerely, takes mostly the sort of confidence that only comes from experience.
