“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?”
