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“No!” I shouted, and lurched toward him.
He spun, eyes surrounded by white, his face scarlet, his teeth bared in a snarl, snapping his staff out …
And what looked like a comet about the size of a quarter, blazing like a star, leapt from the staff, like some kind of bizarre random static spark, and plunged into my ribs and out my spine.
I tumbled down to the dock on my back, the stars suddenly unusually bright above me.
I tried to breathe.
Nothing much happened.
“Ach, God,” the old man whispered, his breath creaking.
His staff clattered to the dock. It sounded like it came from very far away.
“Harry?” he said. “Harry?”
His face appeared at the end of a little black tunnel.
“Oh, lad,” he said, tears in his eyes. “Oh, lad. Didn’t think you were going to come at me again. Didn’t think it would trigger.”
I could feel his hands on my face, distantly.
“That’s why you were so big on teaching me control,” I slurred dully. “You’re barely holding it together yourself.”
“I’m a hotheaded fool,” he said. “I’m trying to help you.”
“You knew you were losing it,” I said weakly. “And you kept going anyway. You could have backed me up.” Blood came out of the hole in my chest in rhythmic little spurts. “And instead it ends like this.”
Shame touched his eyes.
And he looked away from mine.
The pain we feel in life always grows. When we’re little, little pains hurt us. When we get bigger, we learn to handle more and more pain and carry on regardless.
Old people are the hands-down champions of enduring pain.
And my grandfather was centuries old.
This pain, though.
This hurt him.
This broke him.
He bowed his head. His tears fell to the dock.
Then he paused.
Then his expression changed.
He looked up at me. His eyes widened, and then his face twisted into rage and disbelief. “Why, you sneaky—”
“Good talk,” I said, “Wizard McCoy.”
And I let go of the Winter glamour Lady Molly had crafted for me.
I felt my consciousness retreating back down that black tunnel, down to where I had laid Molly’s opal pinky ring on the dock, while I felt the ultimate construct of glamour, my doppelgänger, collapsing and deflating into ectoplasm behind me. My awareness rushed into the stone in the ring, found the thread of my consciousness I’d bound to it, and then went rushing swiftly back toward my body.
My eyes flew open and I was on the deck of the Water Beetle, on the far side of the cabin from where Ebenezar had been, where I’d taken cover after dropping the ring and beginning the illusion. Once I’d activated the ring, the veil around me had let me slip aboard the Water Beetle, take cover, and then project my consciousness back into the construct.
I’d blown up my relationship with my grandfather by remote control.
But at least I hadn’t taken a comet to the lung.
As I came all the way back into my body, I was gripped by a weariness so intense that it was its own entirely new form of pain. I could feel myself thrashing in spasms. Murphy had one of those face masks with a rubber pump over my mouth and was forcing air in. Freydis was trying to hold me down.
I fought for control of my body and eventually reasserted it, sagging down to the deck in utter weariness. Freydis lay half across me, panting. Murphy, all business, peeled back one of my eyelids and shone a light on my eye. “Harry? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” I said, and brushed the mask off my face. “Ugh.”
“Od’s bodkin, seidermadr,” Freydis breathed. She rose off me wearily. “You cut that one close.”
“What the hell is she talking about?” Murphy asked.
“A construct,” I said. “For the illusion. Um. Molly made a really, really good ectoplasmic body for me, stored the pattern for it in the ring, and linked it to me. Everything you need to drop a fake double of yourself in place as a decoy and simultaneously make yourself unseen. Then I … kind of possessed the construct. Projected my awareness into it. Sent all that energy into it, all the way from here, which is exhausting as hell. Had a wonderful chat with McCoy.”
Murphy helped me sit up, staring at my face intently. “What happened?” she asked.
I looked at her and said in a lifeless voice, “I won.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “Is he …”
“Pissed,” I said, with drawn-out, heavy emphasis.
She frowned and touched my temple with one hand for a moment. “He hurt you.”
I closed my eyes. “You should see the other guy.”
“You two are just precious,” the Valkyrie quipped.
“Freydis,” Murphy said, not unkindly, “fuck off.”
Freydis looked back and forth between us, frowned, and said, “Fucking off, ma’am.” And she left us as much privacy as she could on the little ship as the Water Beetle chugged forward.
“Harry,” Murph said gently.
I kept my eyes closed. They were overflowing anyway.
“He’s … he’s not …”
“Not quite the hero you thought he was?”
I pressed my lips together.
“Yeah,” she said. She leaned down and lifted my head into her lap. “He’s human. What a shock.”
“I told him,” I said. “About Thomas.”
“Seems like he reacted a little,” she said.
“He killed me,” I said quietly. “The fake me, I mean. If the fake me had been me me, I would now be dead me. He didn’t mean to do it. But it happened. And he’s not who I thought he was. He was out of control.”
My voice kind of choked on the last sentence. My chest felt like it should have had knives sticking out of it. I leaned my shoulders back against the bulkhead of the wheelhouse and clamped my left hand over my eyes while I sat on the deck. “He was out of control.”
“Oh God, Harry,” Murphy said, her voice full of pain.
“It hurts,” I said quietly. “Oh God. It hurts.”
She put her hand on my forehead, stroking. I lowered my hand and leaned down toward her. And I cried.
That went on until it was quiet.
Then she said, “I heard the beginning of the conversation. And you’re both wrong about each other, you know. You don’t really know who he is. Not yet. And he doesn’t know you. And you both hurt each other terribly, because you’re family. Because what you say and do matters so much more than anyone else.” She leaned down and put her cheek against my forehead. “Listen to me. I know it hurts right now. But the reason it hurts so much is because you care about each other so much. And that pain will eventually fade. But you’ll both still care.”
She was right. I did hurt. The kind of pain a magical mantle can’t do jack about. The real pain, of the heart, the kind that can kill you in about a million ways.
Damn the stubborn old fool.
“I know this is hard, Harry. I remember when I first realized my dad was just human,” she said. “When he shot himself.”
She let that hang in the air for a while.
Then she straightened, framed my face with her hands, and stared out over the darkened lake, her eyes filled with tears. “You can still talk to him, Harry. Something I never got to do. I want you to promise me, for my sake, that you’ll talk to him when tempers have cooled.”
