"Uh-huh," Bob scoffed. "Because everyone knows how honorable the naagloshii are."
"He's alive," I said quietly. "Or at least I'm going to proceed on that assumption."
Bob somehow managed to look baffled. "Why?"
Because you need your brother to be all right, whispered a quiet voice in my head. "Because anything else isn't particularly useful toward resolving this situation," I said aloud. "Whoever is behind the curtains is using the skinwalker and probably Madeline Raith, too. So if I find Thomas, I find Shagnasty and Madeline, and I'll be able to start pulling threads until this entire mess unravels."
"Yeah," Bob said, drawing out the word. "Do you think it'll take long to pull all those threads? Because the naagloshii is going to be doing something similar to your intestines."
I made a growling sound in my throat. "Yeah. I think I got its number."
"Really?"
"I keep trying to punch Shagnasty out myself," I said. "But its defenses are too good-and it's fast as hell."
"He's an immortal semidivine being," Bob said. "Of course he's good."
I waved a hand. "My point is that I've been trying to lay the beating on it myself. Next time I see it, I'm going to start throwing bindings on it, just to trip it up and slow it down, so whoever is with me can get a clean shot."
"It might work..." Bob admitted.
"Thank you."
"... if he's such an idiot that he only bothered to learn to defend himself from violent-energy attacks," Bob continued, as if I hadn't spoken. "Which I think is almost as likely as you getting one of those tracking spells to work. He'll know how to defend himself from bindings, Harry."
I sighed. "I've got gender issues."
Bob blinked slowly. "Uh. Wow. I'd love to say something to make that more embarrassing for you, boss, but I'm not sure how."
"Not my... augh." I threw another pencil. It missed Bob and bounced off the wall behind him. "With the skinwalker. Is it actually a male? Do I call it a he?"
Bob rolled his eyelights. "It's a semidivine immortal, Harry. It doesn't procreate. It has no need to recombine DNA. That means that gender simply doesn't apply. That's something only you meat sacks worry about."
"Then why is it that you stare at naked girls every chance you get," I said, "but not naked men?"
"It's an aesthetic choice," Bob said loftily. "As a gender, women exist on a plane far beyond men when it comes to the artistic appreciation of their external beauty."
"And they have boobs," I said.
"And they have boobs!" Bob agreed with a leer.
I sighed and rubbed at my temples, closing my eyes. "You said the skinwalkers were semidivine?"
"You're using the English word, which doesn't really describe them very precisely. Most skinwalkers are just people-powerful, dangerous, and often psychotic people, but people. They're successors to the traditions and skills taught to avaricious mortals by the originals. The naagloshii."
"Originals like Shagnasty," I said.
"He's the real deal, all right," Bob replied, his quiet voice growing more serious. "According to some of the stories of the Navajo, the naagloshii were originally messengers for the Holy People, when they were first teaching humans the Blessing Way."
"Messengers?" I said. "Like angels?"
"Or like those guys on bikes in New York, maybe?" Bob said. "Not all couriers are created identical, Mr. Lowest-Common-Denominator. Anyway, the original messengers, the naagloshii, were supposed to go with the Holy People when they departed the mortal world. But some of them didn't. They stayed here, and their selfishness corrupted the power the Holy People gave them. Voila, Shagnasty."
I grunted. Bob's information was anecdotal, which meant it could well be distorted by time and by generations of retelling. There probably wasn't any way to know the objective truth of it-but a surprising amount of that kind of lore remained fundamentally sound in oral tradition societies like those of the American Southwest. "When did this happen?"
"Tough to say," Bob said. "The traditional Navajo don't see time the way most mortals do, which makes them arguably smarter than the rest of you monkeys. But it's safe to assume prehistory. Several millennia."
Yikes.
Thousands of years of survival meant thousands of years of accumulated experience. It meant that Shagnasty was smart and adaptable. The old skinwalker wouldn't still be around if it wasn't. I upgraded the creature, in my thoughts, from "very tough" to "damned near impossibly tough."
But since it still had my brother, that didn't change anything.
"Don't suppose there's a silver bullet we can use?" I asked.
"No, boss," Bob said quietly. "Sorry."
I grimaced, did a half-assed job of cleaning up the mess I'd made, and began to leave the lab. I paused before I left and said, "Hey, Bob."
"Yeah?"
"Any thoughts as to why, when LaFortier was being murdered by a wizard, no one threw any magic around?"
"People are morons?"
"It's damned peculiar," I said.
"Irrationality isn't." Bob said. "Wizards just aren't all that stable to begin with."
Given what I had done with my life lately, I could hardly argue with him. "It means something," I said.
"Yeah?" Bob asked. "What?"
I shook my head. "Tell you when I figure it out."
I went back up into my living room through the trapdoor in its floor. The door was a thick one. Sound didn't readily travel up from the lab when it was closed. Luccio was loaded with narcotics and asleep on my couch, lying flat on her back with no pillow, and covered with a light blanket. Her face was slack, her mouth slightly open. It made her look vulnerable, and even younger than she already appeared. Molly sat in one of the recliners with several candles burning beside her. She was reading a paperback, carefully not opening the thing all the way to avoid creasing the spine. Pansy.
I went to the kitchen and made myself a sandwich. As I did, I reflected that I was getting really tired of sandwiches. Maybe I ought to learn to cook or something.
I stood there munching, and Molly came to join me.
"Hey," she said in muted tones. "How are you?"
She'd helped me bandage the fairly minor cut on my scalp when I had returned. Strips of white gauze bandage were wound around my head to form a lopsided, off-kilter halo. I felt like the fife player in Willard's iconic Spirit of '76.