I said, trying to keep my voice calm, “you have a second grandson.”
If I’d punched him, I don’t think I could have staggered him more. He fell back a step. He started shaking his head.
I sat up. “Look, whatever happened, it’s over now. Thomas didn’t have anything to do with that. But he has saved my life on multiple occasions. He is not your enemy, sir.” I blinked my eyes a couple of times. “He’s family.”
And the night went still.
“Family,” came the old man’s voice, a primordial growl lurking in it. “One. Of those things.”
He whirled toward the retreating boat, barely visible from the shore by now, and his staff burst into incandescent blue flame as he lifted it in his right hand, the hand that projects energy, drawing it back.
“No!” I shouted, and lurched toward him.
He spun, eyes surrounded by white, his face scarlet, his teeth bared in a snarl, snapping his staff out …
And what looked like a comet about the size of a quarter, blazing like a star, leapt from the staff, like some kind of bizarre random static spark, and plunged into my ribs and out my spine.
I tumbled down to the dock on my back, the stars suddenly unusually bright above me.
I tried to breathe.
Nothing much happened.
“Ach, God,” the old man whispered, his breath creaking.
His staff clattered to the dock. It sounded like it came from very far away.
“Harry?” he said. “Harry?”
His face appeared at the end of a little black tunnel.
“Oh, lad,” he said, tears in his eyes. “Oh, lad. Didn’t think you were going to come at me again. Didn’t think it would trigger.”
I could feel his hands on my face, distantly.
“That’s why you were so big on teaching me control,” I slurred dully. “You’re barely holding it together yourself.”
“I’m a hotheaded fool,” he said. “I’m trying to help you.”
“You knew you were losing it,” I said weakly. “And you kept going anyway. You could have backed me up.” Blood came out of the hole in my chest in rhythmic little spurts. “And instead it ends like this.”
Shame touched his eyes.
And he looked away from mine.
The pain we feel in life always grows. When we’re little, little pains hurt us. When we get bigger, we learn to handle more and more pain and carry on regardless.
Old people are the hands-down champions of enduring pain.
And my grandfather was centuries old.
This pain, though.
This hurt him.
This broke him.
He bowed his head. His tears fell to the dock.
Then he paused.
Then his expression changed.
He looked up at me. His eyes widened, and then his face twisted into rage and disbelief. “Why, you sneaky—”
“Good talk,” I said, “Wizard McCoy.”
And I let go of the Winter glamour Lady Molly had crafted for me.
I felt my consciousness retreating back down that black tunnel, down to where I had laid Molly’s opal pinky ring on the dock, while I felt the ultimate construct of glamour, my doppelgänger, collapsing and deflating into ectoplasm behind me. My awareness rushed into the stone in the ring, found the thread of my consciousness I’d bound to it, and then went rushing swiftly back toward my body.
My eyes flew open and I was on the deck of the Water Beetle, on the far side of the cabin from where Ebenezar had been, where I’d taken cover after dropping the ring and beginning the illusion. Once I’d activated the ring, the veil around me had let me slip aboard the Water Beetle, take cover, and then project my consciousness back into the construct.
I’d blown up my relationship with my grandfather by remote control.
But at least I hadn’t taken a comet to the lung.
As I came all the way back into my body, I was gripped by a weariness so intense that it was its own entirely new form of pain. I could feel myself thrashing in spasms. Murphy had one of those face masks with a rubber pump over my mouth and was forcing air in. Freydis was trying to hold me down.
I fought for control of my body and eventually reasserted it, sagging down to the deck in utter weariness. Freydis lay half across me, panting. Murphy, all business, peeled back one of my eyelids and shone a light on my eye. “Harry? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” I said, and brushed the mask off my face. “Ugh.”
“Od’s bodkin, seidermadr,” Freydis breathed. She rose off me wearily. “You cut that one close.”
“What the hell is she talking about?” Murphy asked.
“A construct,” I said. “For the illusion. Um. Molly