“It’s been centuries since you felt awkward?” I asked.
She lifted her brows and spread her pale hands. Her nails were silver. “When you…fed me, it was intense. As if…what I felt before when feeding had been coming through a filter. Or as if I’d been sipping through a tiny straw. And suddenly there were no restraints and…” She stared at the table for a moment, her eyes flickering brighter. “It was a formidable experience. I am not sure in his condition that such a thing would be good for him.”
“Why do you say that?”
“This process, the transfer of energy, is more complicated than providing someone with food, at the end of the day. If it was a simple transference, I would have been able to help him on the boat on the way to the island.”
“Explain it to me,” I said quietly. Lara as a cool and remote icon was attractive to a distracting degree. Lara feeling awkward and struggling to communicate made her…
Much, much more…dangerous.
I should always bear that in mind.
I folded my hands to keep them from doing anything inadvisable.
Lara thought about it for a moment, then said, “Imagine the prisoners from concentration camps in the Second World War. Emaciated. Starving. Dying. Barely living skeletons. You couldn’t just drop a five-course meal in front of them after so much time with so little food. The shock to their system could kill them. That’s the situation Thomas and his Hunger are in. Even if you could feed them, it might do tremendous harm to Thomas. Or to the Hunger.”
“I don’t care about his demon,” I said. “I care about Thomas. If I gotta pick one over the other, that’s easy.”
“Thomas’s life experience without his Hunger is that of a fourteen-year-old boy,” Lara replied intently. “Whatever you think about that symbiosis, it is a significant portion of his life, his philosophy, his method of thought. Cut it out, and you’ll be doing something at least as significant as removing his arms or eyes. Do that, and you may be destroying the man you know as well.”
I rolled my thumbs over each other and frowned. “Damn,” I said quietly.
“This isn’t your choice to make,” Lara said, after a moment. “Or mine.”
“It’s Thomas’s,” I said, nodding. “We’ll have to talk to him. Boats are iced in. We’ll have to go through the Nevernever to get to the island. Which is going to be dangerous, in ways I can’t predict. We’ll have to—”
“Go on my helicopter,” Lara said firmly. “Which seems simpler.”
I blinked. “Um. Yes. Oh.” I frowned. “Not sure you want me mixing with a modern helicopter.”
Lara looked at me with pale, gorgeous eyes over her glass of water, sensual mouth quirked into a tiny smirk at one corner. “Honestly, Harry. Give me some credit.”
The waiter arrived with dinner under silver and swept the covers off of the food with a dramatic flourish.
Steak. And some kind of fancy-spiced potatoes. Some green stuff and some dark brown sauce were spread about decoratively. The scent of it hit my nose and my stomach gurgled with primal enthusiasm.
Lara arched a brow at me over her own fancy fish dish.
“Huh,” I said, trying not to stare at the food like a starving wolf, hunger hitting me like after a day at the pool. “When you wanna go?”
“Sooner is better,” she said. “After dinner?”
I wondered how I was going to keep the food off my shirt and chin, it smelled so good. “Definitely after.”
—
I had dinner, and then a second steak. I suspected I was sublimating one kind of hunger into another, being in Lara’s company the way I was, but I’d probably lost too much weight anyway. Probably wasn’t anything to worry about. Probably.
Then Lara got in her car with Freydis and I got in the back of the Munstermobile while Bear drove, and we went down to the Chicago Executive Airport. Freydis spoke to a guard at a gate, and we were waved through, straight out onto some tarmac and over to a hangar where a chopper was being rolled out.
It was a helicopter, technically. It looked like a glass ball and a bunch of metal wire around an engine and a couple of spinning blades.
“What, is this da Vinci’s personal chopper?” I asked.
“Please,” Lara said. “It’s a Bell Sioux. Developed just before the Korean War. Didn’t you ever watch that show about the military hospital? You wouldn’t believe how much trouble it was getting the pontoon landers installed.”
I whistled the opening bars of theM*A*S*Htheme song. “Going old-school?”
