“Mouse will let me know if there’s a problem,” I said.
“Good dog, there,” Thomas said.
“You want,” I said, “I could write to Brother Wang. Tell him you want a puppy.”
“You already stole that one from him.” Thomas snorted.
“Accidentally,” I said. “Plus I think the furball stowed away on purpose. Even if Brother Wang doesn’t like it, I figure he won’t gainsay the dog.”
“Well,” Thomas mused, “he is a pretty good dog.”
“Damned right he is,” I said.
“Let me think about it,” Thomas said. “There’s a lot going on.”
He still hadn’t taken his eyes off Maggie.
“Hey, man,” I said. “You okay?”
He glanced aside at me and offered me a faint smile. “ Just … thinking real hard about the future.”
“Well,” I said. “That’s understandable.” I closed my eyes and felt my limbs aching in dull, steady throbs that kept time with my heartbeat. Suddenly, I sneezed, hard.
“God bless you,” Maggie said promptly from the kitchen.
“Nnngh,” I called. “Thank you.” The sneeze had sent a surge of aching sensation through my limbs that took several seconds to fade. I opened one eye. That wasn’t right.
The mantle of power of the Winter Knight was what let me keep pace with my brother the vampire while running in sand and wearing two hundred pounds of extra weight. One of the things the mantle did was to dull pain, to the point where I experienced it only as a kind of tense, silvery sensation. Broken bones were sort of annoying. A bleeding wound was something of a distraction—but I didn’t ever, ever just ache.
Except now I was.
Stupid Winter mantle. It kept up a constant assault of primal, feral emotions and desires that were like supercharged versions of my own instincts. I didn’t go out for intense exercise every morning because I enjoyed it. I did it because discipline and routine helped me keep the more primal instincts in check. Daily intense exercise forced the mantle to expend energy in keeping my body going—on my schedule, at my will—and as a result reduced the amount of pressure it could apply to my conscious thoughts. And while it did make me able to ignore pain and to push my body well beyond the normal limits of human endurance, the mantle’s influence was a steady nuisance that required constant effort to keep buttoned up.
“Whoa,” Thomas said. “You okay there, nerd?”
“That was weird,” I said.
Mister prowled up onto the couch and settled on my lap, thrusting his head beneath my hand. I petted him automatically, and his body rumbled with a purr that sounded like a pot of boiling water.
A second or two after that thought, I sneezed again, harder, and this time the aching surge sent a wave of exhaustion flooding through me, so hard that I nearly fell over onto my side.
Also, there was a clang and a splashing sound. Mister leapt out of my lap and bolted. It took me a couple of tries to get my eyes to focus, but when I did, I saw that a metal pot with a black plastic handle was lying on its side on the carpet in front of me. Little wisps of steam rose from the soaking carpet next to the pot.
I blinked up at Thomas and traded a look with him. His face told me that he had no idea what had just happened. We both looked back at the pot.
I frowned and leaned down to touch it. It wasn’t quite hot enough to burn me, but it was close. I blinked at it and reached for the handle. I picked up the pot. The handle felt oddly squishy for a couple of seconds—and then suddenly, plastic and metal and water alike shuddered and melted into a clear gelatinous fluid that fell out of my fingers to splat on the carpet. Ectoplasm, the raw matter of the spirit world.
What the hell?
Ectoplasm was a strange substance. It could be shaped by magic and fed energy, and as long as the energy kept pouring in, it would hold its form. Spirits from the Nevernever could forge bodies to be used in the material world and run around in them like their own version of going on a spacewalk. But once the energy stopped pouring in, the construct body would revert to its original form—mucus-like ectoplasm, which would itself sublimate from the material world and back to the Nevernever within moments.
So where the hell had the pot come from?
The Guard? The little faeries who loitered about my home certainly had a mischievous streak a mile wide. Could one of them have played a prank on me?
Maybe. But if so, how had the prankster known what I was thinking about?
It was damned peculiar.
“Harry?” Thomas asked.
“Damned peculiar,” I said, and swiped at my nose, which was suddenly all but overflowing. “Even for me.”
“Dad?” Maggie called.
“Hmmm?”
“I’m not supposed to flip the pancake until it’s golden brown, Bonnie says. But I can’t see the cooked part. How do I know?”
I pushed myself up off the couch, grabbed a handful of tissues, and headed for the kitchen. “It’s a little tricky,” I said. “You can tell from what the batter on the uncooked side looks like. I’ll show you.”
“Okay.”
I started instructing my daughter in the fine art of pancake flipping. We had just gotten the second one started when a tiny bell began to ring very rapidly from somewhere in one of the walls—the apartment’s security alarm.
Mouse whipped his head around to the source of the sound and let out a low growl. Maggie blinked and then looked at me uncertainly.
Thomas came off the wall in a tense little bound of tightly leashed energy. He glanced at me and then went to the kitchen and took one of the big chef knives from the block.
“Someone’s coming,” I said. “Let’s see what’s happening first. Now, just like we practiced. Take Bonnie, go to my room, and put her in her box. Stay in there with her, stay low to the ground, and keep quiet. Okay?”
Maggie looked uncertain but she nodded. “Okay.”
“Go on.”
I shut the bedroom door behind her and picked up my wizard’s staff from its spot near the fireplace. I suddenly wished that I’d found a way to spend more hours on my personal magical arsenal. I hadn’t, because I’d been busy being a father, which took up way more time than I had believed possible. There’d been very little time to actively work on my gear—a very wizard-hours-intensive endeavor. All I had was the staff I’d carved out on the lost island of Demonreach in the middle of Lake Michigan, my blasting rod, and a slapdash version of my old shield bracelet—but they would have to do.
Whatever had set off the alarm, it seemed unlikely that it could march all the way through the svartalves’ security—but if it hadn’t done so, then why was my security alarm ringing?
“What do you think?” Thomas asked.
“I think anything that goes through svartalf security to get here has me a little edgy,” I said.
“Oh, so it’s not just me. That’s nice.”
A few seconds later, a heavy hand rapped hard on the door to the apartment.
I checked to make absolutely sure that the door to the room with my daughter inside was firmly shut. And then, gripping my staff much like a rifle, I paced silently forward to answer the door, my brother falling into step beside me.