Read Online Shattered: The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Seven by Kevin Hearne - Free Book Online Page B

out of bed and support him as we stagger into the bathroom. He’s wearing a pair of shorts, and we just leave those on as we try to tumble him gently into the tub. He’s so out of it, he can barely function.
    Laksha kneels next to the tub and turns on the water. The boy jerks and then spasms intermittently, whimpers once, but his eyes don’t open. The mother and I hover behind, and the helplessness I feel in this situation can be only a fraction of what she must be going through.
    While the tub fills, Laksha begins to pull out all the items she stowed in her sari. She has the mother light incense and rests the miniature gongs and mallets on the side of the tub. Her voice rolls out of her in a chant as she removes the lid from a small jar with a sweet-smelling unguent in it—sweet, but so powerful and cloying that it makes me cough. Laksha dips a finger in the paste. While the water rises to cover the boy’s abdomen, she writes on his forehead and continues to chant. That causes a convulsion and elicits a little cry of alarm from the mother. Laksha frowns,as if the boy’s reaction disappoints her. Perhaps she had been expecting something more; regardless, she keeps chanting, then picks up one of the miniature gongs and indicates through gesture that the mother should do the same. They start to bang the crap out of them, and the din is enough to set my teeth on edge.
    And that, of course, is the point. The noise, the smells, the rising water—all of it is supposed to force the rakshasa to leave the boy. But this particular rakshasa is strong and doesn’t want to let go. Still, the clamor of gongs and chanting has its effect: The boy shudders, seizes up, and his eyes snap open, except the pupils have rolled up into his head and all we see are the whites. An inchoate roar surges out of his throat, and it’s not merely the sound of a teenage meltdown. His arms, suddenly imbued with strength, grip the sides of the tub, and he attempts to get out. Laksha pushes him back down and flicks a glance at me, suggesting that keeping him in there is now my job. She has a gong to bang and chants to yell. She can’t do it all.
    
    I’m okay. Stay in there no matter what you hear
.
    
    Stealing a glance at the mother as I kneel down and set Scáthmhaide aside, I see that she’s crying. I would be too. And I remember that the thing that has my father is much worse than what has the boy. If we can’t handle this rakshasa, how can we hope to prevail against the raksoyuj?
    Keeping the boy in there is more challenging than I thought it would be. He fights me actively, and I get slapped as well as splashed. The water level is up to his chest now, and he doesn’t like it at all. Laksha interrupts her chant to explain why he’s suddenly so animated when he was such a dead fish before.
    “The rakshasa was attacking his heart chakra and slowly divorcing him from life. We have forced it up into the head. It’s now possessed the boy. It’s here, at the sixth chakra,” she says, pointing at the bindi placed just slightly above the spot between her eyebrows.
    We couldn’t very well submerge the boy up to that point. Wehad annoyed the rakshasa significantly, but it wasn’t sufficient to drive it out.
    “See what you can do to heal him now,” Laksha says, but I am unsure how to proceed. I have not done much direct healing of others, and I am cut off from the earth here. Healing his symptoms would not cure him of the possession, in any case. Anything I did to help his body now would simply be undone by the rakshasa as soon as I stopped, and I would have to stop soon without an energy source. I have some stored in the silver end of Scáthmhaide, and I use that in an attempt to relieve him directly. His breathing clears up, but that’s about all. He’s still very much in the grip of the rakshasa. We need something more to address the possession, and I realize it is hanging from my neck. Cold iron is