“You’re right,” said Carter. “It’s a set-up. I’d go in intending to pretend to attack them, and Balin would cast some spell to throw off my aim or make me bite down a little too hard. I can’t risk it.”
She gave a sharp nod, her dark eyes intent on him. “So, what next?”
“Welcome, guests,” said Jeeves.
The front door opened, and Eunice and Balin came back in.
“Time’s up,” said Balin.
“That was not even close to an hour,” said Fen, aggravated. “You two are the worst!”
“Silence, female,” snapped Balin. “What do you say, Dark Knight? Join with me and gain your heart’s desire? Or be a monster in the company of monsters?”
“They’re not monsters.” Carter could hardly believe those words were coming out of his mouth. “They’re a part of me. I didn’t choose them, but I didn’t choose my snow leopard either. And they love Fen, so I guess I love them too. A bit.”
“Are you telling me you’re turning me down?” Balin sounded so outraged that it was almost comical.
“That’s right,” Carter said with satisfaction. “I’m telling you to take your Dark Knighthood and shove it up your scrawny ass.”
Balin’s jaw dropped, making his scraggly gray beard waggle. Then, enraged, he raised his hands.
Carter didn’t wait around to find out what spell he was going to cast. He grabbed Fen’s hand and bolted into the kitchen. Slamming the door behind him, he shouted, “Jeeves! Lock the door!”
He’d finished speaking before he realized what a horrible mistake he’d made. He waited for the door to explode or the lights to go out or—
“It’s already locked,” replied Jeeves.
Carter’s hand was still on the door. He hadn’t needed Jeeves to tell him it was locked; he could feel it, the same way he could feel Fen pulling out of his grip. When she ran to the knife block and started taking knives out of it, discarding the bread knife and selecting the chef’s knife and the filleting knife, he could feel that, too.
He’d modified the knife block to make it childproof, putting in a locking function that made him and the caretaker the only ones who could remove the knives. But when he’d seen Fen go for it, he’d wanted her to get all the knives she wanted. That intention had traveled from his mind to his hands to the door to the floor to the counter to the knife block, quick as thought. It had happened so naturally that, like the door locking, he’d only realized he’d done it in retrospect.
His senses spread throughout the house. Wherever there were cameras, he could see. Wherever there were microphones, he could hear. He felt Balin and Eunice’s feet on the temperature-controlled floor, and heard their shrieks as he heated the part beneath their feet until their shoes began to melt.
“GET OUT!” His voice boomed through the speakers.
They ran for the door. It swung open before them. His teeth bared in a fierce grin as he made it hit their asses on the way out.
Through the lenses of the security cameras, he watched Eunice shift into her gargoyle form, grab Balin under the armpits, and flap off with him. A moment later, they vanished into the clouds.
“Carter?”
It was Fen’s voice, echoing strangely as he heard it with both his own ears and the microphones in the room. When he turned to look at her, he saw her with the double vision of his own eyes and the kitchen cameras. She stood fierce and fearless, gripping a chef’s knife in her right hand and a filleting knife in her left, ready to defend him. Sugar was perched on her shoulder, his tiny teeth bared.
The doubled sensory inputs made his head ache. He took his hand off the wall. With the loss of contact of his bare palm to the house, his control and sense of it instantly cut off. The next thing he knew, he’d sat down hard on the floor, disoriented and dizzy.
Fen put down the knives, grabbed his shoulders, and peered into his eyes. “Carter! What happened? Are you okay?”
Her touch restored his strength and cleared his head. “Yeah. I’m fine. I’m better than fine. Look.”
He got to his feet, swaying slightly, and touched the wall with his index finger. This time he tried to limit his sphere of influence to the one thing he wanted to do. The machinery and electronics of the house obeyed him like his own hands obeyed him. A hidden panel slid aside, revealing a bank of monitors.
“Is that safe?” Fen asked. “They’re not going to explode?”
“Nope.” He still had the doubled vision, so he tried mentally cutting himself off from it, imagining his finger as a closed eye. It worked. Now he had control, but only saw with his human eyes. “This isn’t a touchpad control panel you could use. Well—I could build it for you, if you liked. But I’m doing it myself. It’s like the house is part of my body. I can see through the cameras. I can hear through the microphones. I can feel the people inside it. And it does what I want. All I have to do is touch it.”
“Whoa.”
“Whoa, indeed.” He began to laugh, giddy with happiness and relief. “Watch this. I did this!”
