Lara calmly removed her skirt and stepped out of her heels. I blinked, stared for a second at pale, athletic, stunning legs, then cleared my throat and calmly turned away. Freydis hurried over with a pilot’s jumpsuit and a pair of boots. Lara stepped into them, fastened and zipped and buckled with calm precision, and then stepped up to the old helicopter.
Bear came over to me with my duster and blasting rod. “She’s wearing armor now, and there was a weapon inside it, too,” she said quietly, glancing over at Freydis. “Gotta keep things even.”
“Yeah, thanks,” I said, and slid into the duster. The defensive spells were fresher now, if maybe not up to full strength yet. I didn’t yet have quite the same depth and duration of focus as I normally would. The spells on the blasting rod were getting fairly stale. If I had to use it, I’d have to be careful how much power I ran through it or it would shiver apart. I’d have to attend to that soon. I hung it from its tie inside the duster’s lining under my left arm, wrapped the coat around me with a flap of heavy leather, and stalked over to the Sioux’s passenger side.
Fitting all six feet nine inches of me inside the passenger seat of the helicopter was a brief logistics puzzle, but I got buckled in and shut the door without needing anyone to tell me how to work any of the levers or anything. From enough distance, I might have seemed suave.
Lara ran through her preflight checks, visually ensured that my belt was secure, I think, flashed me a quick smile, and started the thing up. The roaring machine lifted gracefully into the cold winter air, gained altitude, then started forward. Within moments, we were sailing high over the city and out to Lake Michigan.
And then she set course for Demonreach.
In about a quarter of an hour, she frowned and began to turn. I reached out and touched her cool hand with mine. The island itself exerted a subtle influence to turn away those who had no business there, operating on an extremely powerful but subliminal level. Lara could have briefly lost track of her thought and flown away from the island over and over again. I tugged her hand gently the other way, then tapped the side of my head with one finger.
Lara was pretty sharp. She blinked for a moment and then gave me a nod of comprehension, banking the aircraft the other way. I felt it when we flew over the island, and a murmur, a flick of my hand, and a whisper of will was enough to send a subtle green werelight flooding out from the nearest point of the island, spreading over snow and frost, stone and rock, branch and bough, in rippling curls of illumination until the whole of the island was lit in a low, quiet green-gold glow.
She stared down at it, her brow furrowed in concentration, her eyes gleaming more pale. Now that we were over the island proper, it was already putting psychic pressure on her again. She’d been ready for it this time, and her expression was steady.
I directed her down to the landing, where Thomas and I had spent a summer building the Whatsup Dock, from spare wood and blocks of foam and empty barrels. She brought the Sioux down gently onto the water and floating ice beside the dock. This side of the island got steady wind most of the time, and ice formed only thinly. The chopper sank through it, though its pontoon landing gear took up its weight readily enough once it reached the liquid beneath the thin crust.
We tied the Sioux up there and made the hike up the hill to the long stairs down to the tunnels far beneath the island and the lake. We went at a steady pace, without resting, down to the tunnel with Thomas’s coffin-sized green crystal.
It took me a few moments of concentration and mental effort in the greenly lit, root-worried tunnels to commune with Alfred, the island’s genius loci, and have it access Thomas’s crystalline prison cell and begin to rouse my brother from his torpor. The crystal began to glow a bit more brightly, become more translucent, and in a moment I could see my brother’s peaceful sleeping expression. Then a faint glowing image formed over his unmoving features, and the image’s face twisted up and yawned, then slowly blinked its eyes open.
Thomas’s image looked up at me, blinked a few more times, and said, “I thought you were going to leave.”
“We did,” I said. “It’s been a while.”
Thomas’s handsome face creased into a frown of confusion. “You were just here—” He cut himself off and frowned more deeply. “Oh. Different clothes. You cut your hair.”
Somewhere in the vaults of my mind, a sound like a hungry, predatory growl rolled out of the darkness.
Thomas had heard it. His eyes widened.
“It’s your Hunger,” I said. “We don’t have much time. I need you to listen up. Okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
I nodded and gave him the short and dirty version of what we had in mind. “So. I think I can get you out of there. The question is whether or not you want the Hunger to come with you.”
Thomas stared at me, his expression stunned.
“Lara,” he said, looking over at her.
Lara shook her head. “Brother mine, I can’t make this choice for you.”
Thomas grimaced and nodded. “But…you think he can do it? Get rid of my Hunger?”
Lara frowned and hesitated before she answered. “He’s confident he can. My…instincts say he’s right.”
“Empty night,” Thomas breathed. He shook his head. “Justine. What does she think?”
“Neither of us has been able to locate her,” Lara said. “My people caught up to her at one point, but they were ambushed and killed by elements of Russian organized crime.”
“She’s still out there?” Thomas asked. “The baby. When?”
“Several weeks,” she told him. “Gestation runs a little longer for our kind on average. Ten months, give or take. It’s a week from your birthday.”
Thomas’s image twisted its face up in consternation. “Then that thing inside her. It’s still got her and the baby in danger.”
