something too heavy, and even if your muscles can handle it, your bones and joints won’t.”
“What’s that gonna look like?” I wondered aloud.
“An industrial accident,” Butters said. He wiped down my hands one more time, thoroughly, and then began wrapping the injuries. “Okay. So the White Council wants to give you a hard time. So what else is new?”
Butters was not up on the concept of the Black Council, a covert group of wizards who were nebulous and impossible to identify with absolute certainty, working toward goals that seemed nefarious at best. That information was being held under wraps by the wizards dedicated to fighting them. Partly because we had little hard evidence about the Black Council, what they wanted, and who their members were, and partly because the bad guys would have more trouble taking action against us if they couldn’t even be sure who was their enemy.
Butters was trustworthy, but the Black Council was a wizard problem.
“Yeah,” I said. “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”
Butters gave me a look, because I’m not a very good spy, and lying to a friend doesn’t come naturally to me. But he shrugged and let it pass. “Okay.” He yawned. “When you called, you said something about health issues, plural. What else is bothering you?”
I told him about my sneezes and the conjuritis.
His eyes narrowed and he said, “This isn’t some kind of prank you’re playing on the new guy in the game, is it? Cause I’ve sort of been expecting that.”
“What? No, that’s crazy talk,” I said, and tried hard not to think about my “Dino Serenade,” due for his birthday. “This is a real problem, man.”
“Sure,” Butters said, snapping his rubber gloves off and beginning to clean up. “Whatever.”
Augh, of all the crazy things to happen in my life, I wouldn’t think that my randomly involuntarily conjuring objects out of nothing at the drop of a hat would really ping anyone’s radar. All the things happening right now, and this is the point that Butters picks to decide to stonewall me on?
I sneezed again. Hard.
There was an enormous crash as a section of mortared stone wall, maybe four feet square, landed on Butters’s kitchen floor so hard that the tables and chairs jumped off the floor. Butters yelped and fell over backwards out of his chair—into a backwards roll that brought him onto his feet right next to the steak-knife holder on the counter. He had his hand on a knife before I could get all the way to my feet.
Little guy. But fast. Knights of the Sword aren’t ever to be underestimated.
“Dere,” I said, swiping awkwardly at my nose with my forearms. “Dere, do yuh see dow?”
Butters just stared at the stone wall. Then he quivered when it shuddered, went transparent, and then collapsed into gallons and gallons of ectoplasm. The supernatural gelatin kind of spread out slowly over the floor, like a test shot for a remake of The Blob.
“Okay,” Butters said. “ So … that just happened.” He regarded the ectoplasm and then me and shook his head. “Your life, Harry. What the hell?”
“Dod’t asg be,” I said. I sloshed across the kitchen floor, got a paper towel, and started trying to blow my nose clean. It was kind of a mess. It took several paper towels’ worth of expelled ectoplasm to be able to breathe properly again. “Look, I can’t be randomly making things appear out of nowhere.”
“I’m a medical examiner,” Butters wailed. “Christ, Harry! Some kind of virus that has an interaction with your nervous system, or your brain or your freaking subconscious? This is something to take to Mayo or Johns Hopkins. Or maybe Professor Xavier’s school.”
“None of those guys are weird enough. You do weird.”
He put the knife back and threw up his hands. “Augh. Okay. Is there always a sneeze?”
“Yeah, so far,” I said.
“Then go get whatever cold medicine you use when you have a cold. Maybe if you stop the sneezing, you’ll stop the conjuring, too.”
I eyed him blearily and then said, betrayed, “I could have worked that out for myself.”
“Weird,” he said, “it’s almost as if you’re a grown damned man who could make some commonsense health decisions for himself, if he chose to.”
I flipped him a casual bird, idly noting the pain of my wounded hand as I did. “What about the nausea? I feel like I’m stuck on one of those rides where you go in circles.”
“Infrasound is pretty wild and unexplored stuff,” Butters said.