“Can…Harry, please.”
“Then do it,” I said. I thought through what I’d need, nodding. “I can have it ready by tonight, and we’ll see if it works.”
“If what works?”
“My idea,” I said. “I don’t want to say anything else until I have a chance to test it on a…live subject. You.”
Lara’s eyes widened. “I…see. Will it be dangerous?”
“Probably? A little?” I guessed. “There’s a lot of things I can’t predict at all until I learn more. But I haven’t had any other ideas as to how to help Thomas, and if this works, I’m going to save his life. You wanted my help for Thomas. This is how you get it.”
Lara studied me quietly for a time before she nodded slowly. “Very well. I’ll begin working on the Etri problem. Let’s see where this goes.” She bowed her head. “Sir Harry. Until this evening.”
“Ms. Raith,” I said, bowing back.
She flexed her legs, leapt weightlessly over the side of the building, and landed below without a sound. Snow was beginning to fall, and her white coat disappeared into it as she walked away.
I stared after Lara for a long moment. I had anticipated a number of possible interactions with her at our meeting, none of which had come anywhere close to the reality. It really forced me to ask the question.
Was Lara playing this straight?
I mean, sure she was a devious, magnificently underhanded operator, but that only meant that she would know that it was certainly the last ploy I would see coming. I mean, I had to assume she was workingan angle somewhere. Only a fool wouldn’t. But what if she was smart enough to see that her best possible angle was sincerity?
Of all the monsters I knew, Lara was the one with both the brains and the intellectual flexibility to be most likely to pull it off.
“Maybe you could fix her, Harry,” I said.
I might possibly have said it with heavy sarcasm—I need to be hit over the head with a shovel to make sure things get through sometimes.
“Maybe instead you should stay alive long enough to save your brother and fix yourself,” I added.
Yeah. Good advice, me.
I left the roof, and the warmth of the castle’s interior felt like a swamp by comparison to the purity of the winter night. I walked briskly toward my lab.
I had work to do.
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
Lara’s New Year’s party was being thrown in the first parts of Chicago to be restored—the Gold Coast. It had suffered, since Ethniu the Titan had apparently taken the opportunity to destroy several towers with the Eye of Balor, but the roads had been reopened specifically to begin the cleanup there first.
Collapsed buildings were a mess, especially the ones that had been built more than forty or fifty years ago. The debris was full of toxic materials of one kind or another and cleaning them up was difficult and painstaking. The roads were open, the lights were on, and if not for the missing spaces in the skyline where towers had once stood, one could have mistaken it for Chicago. Or maybe the city was getting better. Maybe I was just being negative about it because I wasn’t healing as quickly.
Molly had arranged a deep blue limousine to take me and Bear to the party, which was being held at a hotel called the Drake. When we got out of the limo, in the front of the building, I felt self-conscious in my tux. I’d mostly only worn rentals before. This one had been tailored to me and felt strange. I wore my duster over it. Its pockets were stuffed full of what I’d need for the evening.
“Quit fiddling with the cummerbund,” Bear muttered.
“It’s an extra belt,” I said, adjusting the deep blue cloth. “I don’t see the point.”
“Lets you fly matching colors, makes slightly overweight people look better,” she said.
I opened my mouth to reply as we headed for the front doors and then fell silent as I felt some kind of sensation crawl over the back of my neck, and I snapped my head up to look at the skies above. The lights mostly made me blind, as did the steady fall of moderate, fine snow.
Bear frowned at me. “What is it?”
“Every once in a while, the past few months,” I said, “I’ve felt something overhead.”
