“Well,” the hell hound said, “you can’t be sure. Maybe you love him just enough to make it work.”
“I already touched him,” Helena pointed out, “and nothing happened.” Her golden hair had fallen across her face, and she pushed it behind her ears with her left hand.
“You didn’t exactly touch him,” Brutus corrected her. “You rapped on him.”
“Same thing.”
“A rap isn’t the same as a touch,” the hound persisted. “So why don’t you try touching him. I mean, for Christ’s sake, what have you got to lose?”
She looked up at the stone Jessie, down at the hell hound again, and she said, “Well, I guess it can’t hurt anything…”
“Of course it can’t.”
“I’ll just touch him.”
“Go on,” the hound urged.
Gingerly, Helena reached up and placed the palm of her hand on the statue’s leg.
Nothing happened.
“Touch him with both hands,” Brutus said.
“Why?”
“Look, Blue Eyes, maybe if you don’t love him enough to bring him around with one hand, you love him enough to bring him around with both hands. You dig it?”
She touched the statue’s leg with both hands.
Jessie was not returned to flesh.
“Well, what’s number five in the book?” Brutus asked, wearily.
“Wait a minute?” Helena said, her bright eyes adance with some clever thought or other.
“What is it?”
She said, “Why don’t you touch him, Brutus?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
“I don’t truly love him!”
“Don’t you love him a little?” she asked, kneeling down, taking the hound’s head in both her hands.
“He’s a man, and I was once a man,” the hound said. “Or at least I think I was once a man.”
She said, “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Well—true love, the book said. That would be a woman who loved him.”
“Doesn’t a father love his son, and the son his father?”
He looked away from her face, found himself staring down her cleavage which was handsomely revealed in her low-cut sweater. But that wasn’t what he needed now. He looked up again and said, “Well, I’m not his son or his father, am I?”
Overhead, another shattering streak of lightning, as white as snow against the blue-black night, pierced a powder keg and brought a long roll of thunder across Millennium City like the volley of an ancient cannon, a battle in the clouds.
“It’s going to rain, soon,” Helena said. “Let’s not waste any more time, Brutus. You jump right up there on that pedestal and touch him; see what may happen.”
“This is silly.”
“You’ve known him seven years longer than I have,” she observed. “You must have strong feelings about him, after all that time.”
“The book says one must truly love…”
She stood up and stamped her foot, a gesture which made her unconfined breasts bounce wildly up and down. “Brutus, if you don’t do your part, if you don’t jump up there this minute and touch Jessie, you can forget about me, you can forget about that day bed— whether or not you shorten your claws!”
“But—”
“And that’s final.”
More thunder; more lightning, a single fat droplet of rain…
“Very well,” the hell hound said.
“Good boy,” Helena said.
Brutus tensed and leaped, scrambled on the pedestal and stood beside the granite Jessie Blake. He looked down at Helena and said, “How should I touch him—with a paw?”
“Try that.”
He lifted one paw and brushed it sheepishly against the stone leg, yipped when the statue seemed to move.
“It’s working, Brute!”
“Yeah,” the hound said, amazed.
“Keep it up, Brute!”
The hound brushed the statue again, pushed his paw back and forth against the granite. Magically, the gray stone gradually began to fade away, to take on the color and texture of leather and cloth and flesh and hair, until Jessie Blake stood before them again, just as he had been earlier in the night before Medusa had frozen him with her gaze.
Dramatically, at that moment, the biggest flash of lightning yet scored the sky, from horizon to horizon, and the clap of thunder was like a thousand cymbals meeting with force.
“Jessie, are you all right?” Helena asked, raising her hands to him, to help him down.