Chapter Ten

I finished the spell that I thought would keep the gruffs busy and climbed wearily out of my lab to find Thomas sitting by the fireplace. My big grey dog, Mouse, lay beside him, his fur reflecting highlights of reddened silver in the firelight, watching Thomas’s work with interest.

My brother sat cross-legged on the floor, with my gun lying disassembled on a soft leather cloth upon the hearth. He frowned in concentration as he cleaned the pieces of the weapon with a brush, a soft cloth, and a small bottle of oil.

Mister, my hyperthyroid tomcat, bounded over the minute I opened the trapdoor to the lab, and hurried down the folding staircase into the subbasement.

“Go get ’em, tiger,” I muttered after him by way of encouragement. “Make them run their little hooves off.”

I left the door open, heaved myself to the couch, and collapsed. Mouse’s tail thumped the floor gently.

“You all right?” Thomas asked.

“Tired,” I said. “Big spell.”

“Uh-huh,” he said, working industriously on the weapon’s barrel. “What building did you burn down?”

“Your apartment, if you don’t lay off the wiseass commentary,” I said. “Give me a minute and we’ll get moving.”

Thomas gave me a sidelong, calculating look. “I needed another minute or two anyway. When’s the last time you cleaned this thing?”

“Uh. Who’s the president now?”

Thomas clucked his teeth in disapproval and returned to the gun. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

“Just give me a minute to catch my breath,” I said.

When I woke up there was dim light coming from my mostly buried basement windows, and my neck felt like the bones had been welded together by a badly trained contractor. The various beatings I’d received the night before had formed a corporation and were attempting a hostile takeover of my nervous system. I groaned and looked around.

Thomas was sitting with his back against the wall beside the fireplace, as relaxed and patient as any tiger. His gun, mine, and the bent-bladed kukri knife he’d favored lately lay close at hand.

Down in my lab something clattered to the floor from one of the shelves or tables. I heard Mister’s paws scampering over the metal surface of the center table.

“What are you grinning at?” my brother asked.

“Mister,” I said.

“He’s been knocking around down there all morning,” Thomas said. “I was going to go round him up before he broke something, but the skull told me to leave him alone.”

“Yeah,” I said. I creaked to my feet and shuffled to my little alcove with delusions of kitchenhood. I got out the bottle of aspirin and downed them with a glass of water. “For your own safety. Mister gets upset when someone gets between him and his packet of catnip.”

I shuffled over to the lab and peered down. Sure enough, the little cloth bag containing catnip and the silver oak leaf pin still hung from the extra-large rubber band I’d snipped and fixed to the ceiling directly over Little Chicago. As I watched, Mister hopped up onto a worktable, then bounded into the air to bat at the cloth bag. He dragged it down to the table with him, claws hooked in the fabric, and landed on the model of Lincoln Park. My cat rubbed his face ecstatically against the bag for a moment, then released it and batted playfully at it as the rubber band sent it rebounding back and forth near him.