I grabbed Dionysus’s right hand and strapped it tightly to one of the metal struts supporting the bomb. Then I stepped back and assessed the situation.
“Now what?” Morales asked.
I looked up at the moon, which winked mockingly from the ink-stained sky. It loomed so large and bright that I suddenly felt very small and full of shadows. The idea of me being able to stop this runaway locomotive of a clusterfuck was suddenly so inconceivable that I wanted to just jump in the water and let the currents pull me down to the wreckage below.
“Kate.”
“What?”
“What are you thinking?”
I laughed bitterly. “I was thinking I wished Uncle Abe was here to summon the Lake Erie Lizard to eat this fucking thing.” I kicked a metal brace.
“Actually,” Morales said slowly, “that’s not a horrible idea.”
My eyebrows slammed down, worried. “You’ve lost a lot of blood, Morales. Maybe you should sit down.”
He shook his head and stepped toward me. “Sometimes you have to fight magic with magic, right? Abe told you how he did it, didn’t he?”
I shook my head and stared at him like he’d sprouted horns. “That’s ridiculous. He was lying to a little kid, Morales. The monster doesn’t exist.”
He crossed his arms. “How can you be so sure? Every day we see all sorts of inconceivable things.”
Morales’s words came back to me from that day we’d gone to see Abe.
“This lake’s gotta be what—a hundred feet deep?”
“Two hundred in some places.”
“Right. Just saying, maybe there’s things down there we don’t want to believe in.”
I shook my head again, as if doing so might shake some sense into him. “You’re insane. I don’t do magic, remember?”
He raised an ironic brow. “You did it to save Danny? Why wouldn’t you do it to save the entire city?”
“Uncle Abe told me he summoned it using a potion he cooked using blood and water gathered under a full moon.”
“Shh—don’t spoil it,” Dionysus said in a pained voice. “She’s about to give up.”
I rounded on him. The impossibility of the situation mixed with taunting by that sick fuck lit a fire under me. “No, I’m not—” I backhanded Dionysus. The blow forced the side of his head into the metal bar. He slumped over to the side.
I turned back to Morales, who wisely kept his opinions about my abuse of the psycho to himself. “I don’t have any Gideon’s Dew, remember? Dickhead over there threw it over the side.”
“You said he used dew gathered under a full moon, right?”
I nodded sharply, ready to argue with anything he said.
“We’re in the middle of a freshwater lake under a Blue Moon, Kate.” He spread his arms wide. “Look, if you don’t try what will happen?” I remained stonily silent until he answered his own question. “They’ll die,” he said, pointing toward the skyline. “But first they’ll suffer. And it’s up to us to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
All of my excuses dried up and a crystalline silence took their place. My head filled with a pressure that felt like I was swimming through water. The bell on the nearby buoy clanged every few seconds, but otherwise my ears were filled with the bass-drum kick of my heart.
Suddenly Pen’s concerns about the sacrifices I made for this job twisted until I saw them in a new light. Yes, being on the task force had led to me using magic again. But it also had allowed me to use magic for the good of someone besides myself for the first time in my life. While my cooking methods might have been learned the dirty way, I was finally able to use them in a clean way, as far as my conscience was concerned.
“Time’s running out, Cupcake,” Morales said in a quiet tone.
I swallowed hard and looked into his brown eyes. “Shit.”
He smiled and nodded approvingly. “You can do this.”
I chewed on my bottom lip, ignoring the roiling fear in my gut. My brain scrolled through everything I’d need to make this impossible Hail Mary pass. I had plenty of blood and water. I had a Blue Moon offering its powerful energy to the air. What I didn’t have was a heat source.
“I don’t suppose you have a lighter,” I said.
He patted down his pockets and shook his head. “ ’Fraid not.”
I went to the passed-out Dionysus but only discovered that the false god preferred to go commando under his toga. Wiping my hands on my jeans, I looked around for something, anything I could use as a heat source.
The inflatable boat we’d came over on from the skiff bobbed off the edge of the platform. From our ride over, I remembered seeing a small metal box strapped near the back. I leaped into it and started feeling around the edges. When my hand hit the hard-sided case, I whooped in victory. I cracked it open and found two waterproof emergency flares.
I stashed the flares back in the metal box and climbed back on the wooden platform. The whole structure tilted dangerously, but I stilled long enough for it to stabilize before I proceeded.
“Tell me what you need,” Morales said.
“The flare’s potassium nitrate will add some punch to the potion, along with the heat I need to cook the ingredients,” I explained. I handed him the second flare. “Hold on to this in case we survive.”
He frowned.
“To call in the cavalry to come get us,” I explained.
He smiled. “Good thinking, but why not shoot it now?”
“They won’t get here before the bomb goes off, and I don’t want anyone else to get hurt if this monster shows up and I can’t control it.”
His face paled at the thought of me summoning an uncontrollable beast. Ignoring his reaction, I placed the metal box under Dionysus’s bloody hand. When I had a good puddle in the bottom, I stepped away. I didn’t want to risk him gaining consciousness and interrupting me while I cooked.
I handed Morales the box. “Get some water. Equal parts to the blood.”
While he went to do that, I took the flare from my mouth and ripped the plastic top off with my teeth. When he returned, I tapped the flare onto the edge of the box to get a little of the potassium nitrate power mixed in with the blood-and-water mixture. Then I scratched the lid against the tip of the flare to ignite the flame. A loud hiss sounded and the light blazed, illuminating the area in an eerie red glow.
“Ten minutes, Kate.”