“Osseous!”
Nothing.
“Calceous!”
“Um… Calcifer?”
“Ossifer?”
Instantly a ragged pain shot through my right arm. Twice in the same day: that feeling of terrible pain, married to an instant swell of relief. I gave a cry of agony and triumph. This was answered by a fresh wave of excitement from my captors.
“Juice! Juice!”
“Sustenance!”
“Preview!”
I didn’t care; there in my palm sat the irregular white rod. I threw myself against Magerzart’s door and thrust it into the lock.
“Eek! What is that?” I heard her shout.
I could feel the tumblers in there. A strong lock, I thought, but not an overly complex one. That was good. I was bent double now. Still a few feet to go before the corrugated ceiling crushed me to death. Yet only a few inches before it closed down past the level of the keyhole, and what hope would there be for me then?
Suddenly—oh, most blessed of sounds!—a click. With a final push, the door burst open and I was out, into the light, into safety!
Well… partial safety. Before me stood Magerzart, wielding a cricket bat.
“Madam,” I said in my most warning tone, holding Ossifer in the guard position in front of me, “don’t.”
“Eeeeeeeeeeeahhhh!” she replied, throwing herself forward and swinging the cricket bat at my face.
I ducked under the blow and scuttled towards one corner of the room, crying, “No! Really! Don’t!”
But she came at me again, forcing me to dodge back against the wall.
“Look here, if you hit me with that thing—” I started to tell her, but was interrupted by another onslaught.
“Yaaaaah!”
“—you’re going to break my face and both of your wrists!”
“Rhaaaaaah!”
“I don’t mean to be rude, madam, but you are exceedingly frail and I don’t believe such an act could go well for either of us.”
“Hyaaaaah!”
“Very well! If you will not listen to reason…”
And I did it. For the first time, I willingly unleashed the power of my soul-blade on a living creature. Casting my Hippocratic oath aside, I ducked back from her next attack, then sprang forward behind it and struck forth with the physical embodiment of all my rage, anger and hate.
It poked a small hole in her, just near the wrist.
Magerzart froze where she was and stared at me, aghast, as if I had wounded her. And I suppose, technically, I had. Mostly though, she just looked like I’d hurt her feelings—as if she found my conduct rather un-juicemanly. We stood, facing each other in silence. I cleared my throat. I think I was just about to form some kind of apology when the air was rent by a terrible howling and a purple bolt of demon-fire smashed through the wall behind Magerzart, streaked over her shoulder, across the room and through the wall behind me.
Azazel’s fire! I had seen Holmes summon it time and again!
“Holmes!” I shouted, “It’s me! I’m here!”
A second bolt came through the wall, screamed just past my left leg, blew the door off the pressing room behind me and buried itself in the foot-thick crushing-plate ceiling (which was, I could not help but note, just eight or nine inches from the floor now). The purple flame hissed out, leaving a black and melted crater in the side of the plate. Molten metal dripped down onto the floor.
“Er… yes… by which, I sort of meant, ‘Holmes, I’m here, so please stop shooting.’”
But those things always seemed to come in threes. The final blast came high, passing above Magerzart’s head and my shoulder and arcing all the way through the juice press to the room beyond. From within came a horrible, shrieking boom and Stark and Ferguson met a fate nearly as horrible as the one they had inflicted on so many others. It seems the room on the far side of the juice chamber was the machine room. Holmes’s final bolt had holed the boiler, filling the room with scalding steam. As I stood there, listening to my antagonists’ mortal screams, well…
It is hard to pity such men, I know.
But I tell you this, dear reader: for anyone standing just a few feet away, listening to it happen, it is impossible not to.
Magerzart’s eyes went wide with horror.
Or… wider.
And finally, the belabored wall behind her met its match as Torg Grogsson—eyes alight with rage—tore away the door and its frame. Behind him stood Holmes with the green fires burning in his eyes and his left fingers still smoking from Azazel’s onslaught. Then Inspector Lestrade ducked under one of Torg’s massive arms, stepped into the room, and announced, “Miss Magerzart Stark? It should not surprise you to hear: you are under arrest.”
But the next figure disagreed. Victor Hatherley flung himself into the room, wrapped protective arms around Magerzart, and insisted, “You can’t! She must come and be my bride. I shall feed her crumpets every day and call her Maggie.”
“Of course you will,” said Holmes. “Because engineers solve problems.”
“But… no,” Lestrade stammered. “She drinks people. Her whole life she has subsisted by drinking person after person and—though I am aware of a certain level of hypocrisy inherent in the fact that it is me saying this—that is not okay.”
“Ohhhhhh, are you sure, Lestrade?” Holmes asked. “I mean, it’s not her fault what her father fed her, is it? And she seems so nice.”
“But… drinking people…” Lestrade protested. “That is not acceptable, or I’d have been doing it this whole time. Really, does… um… does anybody else wish to weigh in on the subject? Given my extraordinary self-control all these years, I feel like I should have the moral high ground here. Yet… somehow, I also feel like I sort of don’t. Anybody else? Anybody?”
“Pick fast,” Grogsson urged. “Da house on fire.”
“Purpul fire,” he added.
Then, “Pretty.”
He wasn’t wrong. Holmes and Azazel’s mutual contribution seemed to have had a greater effect than any of us had at first realized. The destruction of the house on the hill was the talk of Eyford for years to come, mostly because of the beauty of the blaze. The death of Colonel Stark (or Dr. Becher, or any
