“Harry, I can’t see,” I stammered.
And, I swear to God, he shifted to a nearly perfect imitation of Alec Guinness in the original movie. “Your eyes can deceive you,” he said. “Don’t trust them.”
I barked out a laugh that felt like it was going to shatter something in my chest.
Or maybe actually did. Suddenly, I started to get my breath back.
“Butters,” he said. “Look. I know it’s hard. But there’s one way you deal with fear.”
“How?” I asked him.
“You stand up and you kick it in the fucking teeth,” he said, and there was a quiet, certain power in his voice that had nothing to do with magic. “You’ve forgotten the most important thing a Knight needs to remember, Butters.”
“What’s that?” I breathed.
“Knights of the Cross aren’t afraid of monsters,” he said. “Monsters are afraid of you. Act like it. Commit to it, hard. And have faith.”
Act like it. Commit. I could do those things.
Faith was harder. I’d never asked God to help me handle things before.
But I had faith in my friends.
One friend in particular.
“Got it,” I said quietly. “I guess I better go, Harry. Got work to do.”
“Good hunting, Knight.”
“Thank you, wizard.”
WHEN I OPENED the door, things had changed.
I’d taken a white sheet from Stan’s bed, draped it over my shoulders, and tied two corners around my neck. On the part of the sheet that draped over my chest, I’d taken a first-aid sticker from a drawer of supplies beside the bed and stuck the red-cross symbol over my heart.
It wasn’t like Sanya’s or Michael’s cloaks. But it would do.
More important, I’d put my headphones in my ears, plugged the jack into my phone, and blared “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “NOW That’s What I Call Polka!” at full volume on loop.
I could barely see. And I couldn’t hear anything but my goofy, beautiful polka, one of the songs I knew perfectly at that, which was kind of the point.
In the hallway, I could feel the emptiness stretching out around me and the low fear in the air. The baka baku had run everyone off the floor—I could dimly see hollow yellow squares retreating, tracking the workmen and nurses and doctors all leaving the floor by the stairs and elevators, leaving it to just the two of us and the trapped, dreaming victims.
The fluorescent lights were all flickering and flashing as if they needed changing.
I didn’t see the hostile red targeting carat.
But I didn’t need it.
I went to the center of the hall, lifted the Sword to a high guard, and felt it ignite and change the way shadows fell on the hall. As Yankovic translated popular music into polka in my ears, I shouted, “Baka baku! Betrayer of children! You have lost your path! Come and face me!”
And I closed my eyes and waited.
See, magic isn’t really magic. I’ve spent a lot of time studying the theory, and I know that for a fact. I mean, it is magic, obviously, but it doesn’t just happen in a giant vacuum, inexplicably creating miracles. Lots and lots of magic actually follows many of the physical laws of the universe. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, for example.
If the baka baku was sending magical fear into people’s brains, that fear had to be transmitted by something. It can’t just appear magically—poof—in someone else’s head. It’s a kind of broadcast—a signal. And that means that, like other magical broadcasts, such as those used on the communicators I’d designed and built in the past, waves on the EM spectrum were the most likely culprits for those transmissions.
Using those things had a side effect of causing distortions in nearby cell phones. It was even more noticeable in headphones.
So I listened to one of my recent favorites and waited. My inner ten-year-old was screaming at me to run.
I told him to shut his mouth and let me work.
And, sure enough, about the time Al was singing about looking incredible in your granddad’s clothes, I heard the sound distort suddenly in my left ear.
Moving quickly is not about effort. It isn’t about making every muscle explode in an instant in an effort to be fast. It’s about being relaxed, smooth, and certain. The instant I heard the distortion, my body just reacted, turning and sweeping the sword down, all in a single liquid motion.
I felt the Sword hit, and the blade’s hum shifted to a triumphant note. I opened my eyes to see a shape about the size and same general coloring as Miyamune reeling back.
There was a much smaller, flesh-colored shape lying on the floor not far from my feet.
I tugged out the earphones and heard Miyamune let out a moan of pain, and the last of my fear fell away from me.
The baka baku bounced off the wall and fell, and I advanced on it, slow and steady.
The creature’s huge, weird shadow spread onto the wall behind it, even as its human face stared up at me.
“Who are you?” the creature asked.
The words that came out of my mouth only sort of felt like my own. “Ehyeh a?er ehyeh,” I said quietly.
The walls of the empty hallway quivered slightly as the words washed over them, even though I never once raised my voice.
The creature just gaped at me.
“Even now,” I heard myself say, “it isn’t too late for you to turn aside. To be forgiven.”
I couldn’t really see its expression—but I saw the gathering tension in its blurry form, felt the anger in the way it suddenly exhaled and came at me.
And the Sword of Faith swept down one last time and ended it.
WHEN MICHAEL PICKED me up from the hospital in his old white pickup late that night, I was exhausted.
He handed me my spare pair of glasses first thing and I put them on gratefully.
“Have to do something about that,” I said. “Maybe sports goggles.”
“Seems like a good idea,” he said. “How’s Stan?”
“He’ll be fine,” I said. “So will the kids.”
“What was hurting them?”
“Something that should have been protecting them,” I said quietly. I squinted out the window as he pulled away. “Just dissolved into nothing when I took it down.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked me, his deep voice gentle.
“I’m not sure I succeeded at this quest,” I said. “I kept trying to reach out to the creature. To give it a chance to turn away.”
“Sometimes they do,” Michael said. “Mostly, they don’t.”
“It’s just …” I said. “Killing is such a waste. What I did was necessary. But I’m not sure it was good.”
“Killing rarely is,” he said, “at least in my experience. Could you have done any differently?”
“Maybe?” I said. “I don’t know. With what I knew at the time … I don’t know.”
“Would they all be alive if you had done differently? The children? Stan?”
I thought about it for a moment, and then shook my head. “I don’t think so.”
“Then be content, Sir Knight,” he said.
“Didn’t even have to get my hand cut off to get there,” I said, and leaned my head against the truck’s window.
I never knew it when I fell asleep, relaxed and unafraid.
I never really meant for Harry to be a dad.