The bloody broken bat suddenly became a wooden stave thrown at my heart, as she turned and chucked it uncannily in my direction. I had to drop to the ground to avoid it, and before I could roll away, she was on me. Quickly, I thrust the second bat up crosswise toward her throat, dismissing its camouflage too, hoping she’d take hold of it rather than groping for my neck. If she got hold of my head, she could tear it clean off. She took the bait, grasping the bat at either end and trying to wrench it free from my grasp. I held on for the first spastic attempt, but just barely. Her blood was dripping steadily down on me, ruining my camouflage and supposedly sapping her strength, but I could tell she was still a couple of oxen ahead of me in the muscle department. She gathered herself for a truly mighty yank, and as she did I knew I had to end this before she could use it against me. So when she yanked a second time, I didn’t even try to hold on but rather let go, which caused her to throw her hands up over her head as she unexpectedly met no resistance. That left her completely unguarded, as I intended, so I drained the last of the power stored in my bear charm and channeled it all into my left shoulder and arm. I rose in a stomach crunch and plowed my fist hard into her chin. The impact broke the first joints of my index and middle fingers, but it also snapped her neck.
That solved my immediate crisis but left me with several others. Completely drained of magical energy, I couldn’t begin to heal or shut down the pain. And all the weariness of my earlier casting of Cold Fire came back to settle heavily on my frame, even as the shag-haired Bacchant settled heavily astride my hips. There were still panicked clubgoers streaming out of Satyrn, and Frank and Eric, the broken-nosed cops, were heading my way with guns drawn. To top it off, I was so drained that I couldn’t maintain the camouflage spell any longer, and I became clearly visible to them. This just wasn’t the right time or place to have this fight, and that’s why I lost it.
Oh, were they happy to see me again. Not only was I visible, but so was my sword that had disappeared earlier, and a woman with a giant bloody wound was lying on top of me. Never mind that the sword was still in its scabbard and I was lying on top of it; never mind that a cursory forensics inspection would reveal that the wound wasn’t a sword wound; in their minds I had just about decapitated the poor woman with a bad hairdo.
So it was hands up, roll over facedown away from that woman, spread your legs, take off that weapon, and then a pair of cuffs around my wrists as half-naked people continued to run away, not from me, but from whatever horror awaited inside. Once I was subdued, it gradually dawned on them that I wasn’t much of a threat to the public: The public was freaking out about something else. Frank thought he should maybe take a peek inside.
“Don’t do it, Frank. One of them is still in there.”
“You shut up,” Eric said, poking me in the ribs with his gun. Authority established, he asked, “One of what?”
“These ladies in white that have been killing people. If you have to go, use your baton, not your gun.”
“Right,” Frank said sarcastically. “Ladies in white killing people. Like this very dead lady in white right here. We’ll be sure to follow your advice.”
Frank went into the club gun first, while Eric tried to take Fragarach away from me, which was resting by my side on the asphalt. It was bound so that it couldn’t be moved more than five feet away from my body, and, unlike camouflage, it wasn’t a spell that depended on my current power level to be maintained. It would stay bound to me until I dispelled the binding, so Eric was about to lose a fight with an inanimate object. He was so surprised by it pulling away from him the first time that he dropped it. He tried again, and dropped it again.
“What the hell is going on? Are you doing that?” he asked.
“Doing what, Officer? I’m facedown in the parking lot with my hands cuffed behind my back. What kind of bullets do you use?”
“Shut up. Full metal jacket.”
“Please tell me they’re copper jackets.”
“I said shut up. They’re steel.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“Shut up.”
Eric was about to pick up my sword again, but he was distracted by the sound of shots being fired in the club. Nine of them, out of those modern guns the police carry, at a Bacchant with immunity to iron. And then we heard a man screaming horribly over the techno thrum.
“Frank!” Eric cried.
“Don’t go. Wait for your backup,” I said.
“Shut up, damn it! That’s my partner in there!”
Not anymore. His partner was already in pieces. “Well, use your baton, then! Your gun won’t work!”
“Just shut up and stay there! I’ll be right back.”
I sighed. No, he wouldn’t. There weren’t any more people coming out of the building. The clubbers were all scrambling for their cars and trying to get the hell out of there, honking horns and telling everyone else to get out of their way. I struggled to my feet and staggered to the back of the parking lot, hoping I wouldn’t get run over by a turbocharged Audi. Fragarach obediently trailed five feet behind me, since I couldn’t pick it up.
More shots rang out from the club, but Eric didn’t get as many off as Frank did before his screaming began, then ended. Sirens wailed in the night, all converging on the club, and I knew I didn’t have much time to make myself scarce.
There was a thin strip of landscaping between the sidewalk and the parking lot, where a couple of palo verdes grew alongside some blue agave plants. As soon as I reached it, I drew power to dampen the throbbing pain in my fingers and start knitting the bones back together. Then I cast camouflage again and started to recharge my bear charm. The handcuffs were next. Concentrating on the molecular bonds in two of the links between the cuffs, I weakened them until I could pull the cuffs apart, grateful that they were still made of natural ores from the earth. The parking lot was quickly emptying and the sirens were getting louder. Laksha was nowhere in sight; her end of the bargain finished, she was probably on her way to the airport in a taxi.
As I slung Fragarach across my back once again, I saw the last of the Bacchants emerge from Satyrn. Her white sheath was stained almost completely red with the blood of the police officers and who knew how many other victims, and she carried her thyrsus in her right hand. I had no practical weapon to use against her except my sheathed sword, so it would have to be hand-to-hand martial arts, with one of mine already broken.
She wasn’t interested in fighting, though. She walked straight toward me after taking a deep breath of the night air. I smelled another storm coming, but she apparently smelled me, and accurately enough that I might as well have not been wearing camouflage. She stopped about ten yards away as I crouched into a defensive stance.
“What are you?” she hissed. “I know you are there. I smell magic. Are you a witch? One of the Polish ones?” She was taller than the other Bacchants and built for pleasure. When she wasn’t covered in gore, I’m sure she was quite fetching—as long as she didn’t show her pointy teeth.
“Nope,” I said. “Two more guesses.”
“Are you the vampire Helgarson?” Now, that was an interesting guess. Besides revealing that she knew who Leif was, she must have thought him capable of something approaching invisibility and capable of caring whether some Bacchants partied in Scottsdale or not.
“Nope. I can still walk in the sunshine.”
“Then you are the Druid O’Sullivan.”
She could have knocked me over with a marshmallow, I was so surprised. But I couldn’t let her know that.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said politely, then ruined it by saying, “But not really.”
“Lord Bacchus must hear of this,” she muttered, and then she turned and sprinted inhumanly fast toward the club. She didn’t go back in but ducked up an alley on the side of the building.
“Oh, bugger,” I breathed. There was nothing I could do. No roots to tie her up with in a parking lot. No earth to hold her fast. And I couldn’t hope to match her
speed, pumped up with power as she was right now and as depleted as I was.
I spat thickly on the sidewalk, delivering my self-evaluation for the evening. I’d managed to make a bollocks out of the whole situation. Most of the Bacchants were dead, true, but the one who got away would bring more, and perhaps Bacchus himself, to get revenge. Two cops were dead, as were at least two civilians I’d seen outside and who knew how many more in the club. This would be major news. It might even go national.
Malina was going to be pissed, and she had every right to be. Fights in the paranormal community were not supposed to be seen by the general public. If this did go national, anyone who knew how things really worked would read between the lines and see that the East Valley was dangerously unstable.
Police cars and fire trucks screeched to a halt nearby, and one of them blocked the exit from the parking lot, corralling the last few witnesses. I wouldn’t have time to conduct my own investigation inside the club; all I could do was remove my fingerprints from the bats by unbinding the oils, go home, and recuperate.
I jogged wearily south, leaving the carnage behind, and got rained on again when I reached Shea Boulevard. There was a commercial center there on the southeast corner, and I called a taxi from Oregano’s Pizza Bistro to take me home.
The driver looked doubtfully at my sword and the cuffs on my wrists, but I paid him cash up front so he didn’t say anything. Just to be safe in case the police questioned him later, I had him drop me off near Starbucks on Mill Avenue, then cast camouflage again and jogged the rest of the way home in the rain.
I left Fragarach on my bedroom dresser after drying it off and dissolving the bond to my body. I bound it to the dresser instead. I had a whole lot of mending to do overnight, whether it was raining or not, so I shucked off my clothes and stretched myself out in the backyard to heal properly, tattoos in touch with the earth, with a sheet of oilskin thrown over me as a makeshift shelter. I contacted the iron elemental who lurked around my shop to come eat away the cuffs on my wrists, and after the rain finally quit, my mind found rest on Lethe’s shore.
Chapter 13
I confess to feeling a sense of entitlement at times. After living for so long—after earning my senior citizen’s discount many times over—I feel I should be able to wake up in peace and enjoy a few simple pleasures. Oberon’s tail thumping a greeting, for example. Sunlight in the kitchen as I make coffee. Some classical guitar playing softly as I whip up an omelet and some sausages. And when I have to wake up from spending a cold night on the wet earth, a hot shower would be lovely. If the day wants to turn to shit after that, then that’s all right, but give me a few minutes’ harmony at the outset so I can remember what it was like to be at peace. When my eyes blink open at the dawn, don’t greet me with a giant bloody crow that’s forever branded in my cultural memory as a harbinger of death.
“Caw!” it barked at me, right in my face, and I startled backward and probably made an undignified squealing noise as I rolled away frantically from that sharp beak, leaving the oilskin behind, getting cold dew and wet grass all over me.
The crow threw back its head and laughed at me. Not avian laughter, but human laughter, a throaty contralto coming out of a bloody bird’s throat. “Lugh’s golden stones, Druid,” the crow said, “have you been lying here all this time? I left you here weeks ago, and it’s like nothing’s changed.”
“Good morning, Morrigan,” I said sourly as I heaved myself up off the ground and brushed some grass off my torso. Before it got any worse, I ameliorated my tone. “And no, I haven’t been lying here all this time. It’s just that yesterday was particularly taxing. If you’ll give me a few moments to clean up, I’ll be able to receive you properly.”
“Of course. Take your time, Siodhachan,” she said, calling me by my original Irish name. She flapped noisily over to my patio table, where rested a small black leather pouch closed with a drawstring of rawhide. She probably wanted me to ask her about it, but I wasn’t going to start talking until I’d cleaned up. I strode right past it as if it weren’t there.
Oberon asked sleepily from the couch as I came in through the back door.
“Yeah, that giant crow in the backyard,” I replied, waving my hand at the window. “Don’t mess with it—that’s the Morrigan.”
“Good call.”
I shook my head and sighed as I turned on the shower, waiting a minute for the water to heat up. If the Morrigan had come to warn me about another one of her auguries, I’d have a hard time containing my scorn. But perhaps she’d come to tell me where she’d been for the last three weeks. Or maybe she was ready to work on her own version of my protective amulet, and the bag contained her cold iron.
The Morrigan slid into the bathroom in her human form just as I was about to step into the shower. She was naked and beautiful, and her eyes were half lidded with desire, and I thought, ohhhh, crap.
After I killed Aenghus Óg, the Morrigan had graphically communicated that the entire episode had turned her on, and she promised to “take me” soon. People like her from the Bronze Age weren’t shy about sex and never felt they had to pretend they didn’t want it. As a child of the Iron Age, I was only marginally less wanton, if at all, but the Morrigan, for all her beauty, wasn’t my top choice of bedmates. She might look like a fantasy pinup now, but when in her crow form, she ate dead people, and that made me throw up a little bit when I thought about it. I’d been hoping she’d forgotten all about her declaration of desire, but apparently she was determined to make a conquest of me.
It’s difficult to say no to the Morrigan when she really wants something. Next to impossible, really. And it’s never a good idea to offend a Chooser of the Slain. The politic thing to do—the safe thing to do—would be to give her what she wanted and try to enjoy it. And once the Morrigan decided she wanted to seduce a lad, she could turn on all the wiles of a succubus without that bothersome business of being damned in the bargain. I confess to not putting up much of a fight. I think I might have said, “Hey!”
The Morrigan is not a creature to take you down slow and easy, though. Over the next few hours, I think I had one moment where I wasn’t at least partially in pain. It was the first kiss—soft and tender and delicious to the point where I thought I might enjoy this after all. But then her nails were scratching me, I got slapped a few times, there was a whole lot more biting than I’ve ever endured, and I lost a handful of hair at one point. And if I wasn’t doing what I was supposed to—like the several times when my phone rang and I wanted to answer it, thinking it was Granuaile calling to ask why I hadn’t shown up for work—her eyes glowed red and she spoke like Sigourney Weaver telling Bill Murray, “There is no Dana, only Zuul.” There’s just no arguing with that tone of voice. In other words, I was fucking scared, and that’s the way the Morrigan liked it.
In the last hour she began to speak in a tongue older than I was: I think it was Proto-Celtic, a couple of vowel shifts and aspirated consonants away from anything I recognized, and since she didn’t seem to expect me to respond, I let her babble away. It sounded ritualistic, and it gradually dawned on me that we were performing sex magic of some kind, though I had no idea what she was trying to accomplish. She eventually declared herself satisfied and gave me permission to stop. We’d long since moved to the bedroom, and I collapsed, gasping, onto the sheets.
There really isn’t any postcoital afterglow to speak of after that kind of sex: There’s just a sense of relief that you survived without disfigurement, plus a dire need for Gatorade.
“Oww,” I whispered.
“You’re welcome,” the Morrigan chuckled.
“For the pain?”
“No, for the ear.”
“What?” I reached up my hand to where my cartilage niblets had been and pinched my fingers around something there that felt remarkably ear-shaped. “Is this real?”
“Of course it is.”
/> “Is that what you were doing with that chanting and, uh, stuff?”
“Yes.”
I was overwhelmed with gratitude. Regenerating my demon-chewed ear had proven to be far beyond my abilities, and now I felt whole again. “Morrigan, thank you so much! That was so nice of you—”
The breath whuffed out of me as the Morrigan’s fist slammed down onto my stomach and pushed up on my diaphragm. “What did you just say to me?” She grabbed my jaw and yanked it to face her, so that I saw her eyes glowing red as I fought to recover my breath.
“Ca—cuh—curse your meddling,” I managed to wheeze.
“That’s better,” she said, and released me. I guessed there would be no cuddling session.
Oh, Oberon, I’m so sorry. She wouldn’t let me go.
Yeah, I bet you never had a French poodle treat you like that.
I turned to the Morrigan and remembered my duties as host. “May I offer you any refreshment?” I asked. “Perhaps a meal within the compass of my limited pantry?”
“I will accept whatever you see fit to offer me,” she said.
Statements like that cannot be taken at face value. It sounded like she’d be happy with a sardine sitting on a Ritz, but, in truth, if I offered her anything but the very best in my house, I’d be insulting her.
I tiptoed gingerly out of bed, bruised and bleeding and stinging where sweat had trickled into the wounds. Everything hurt because I was completely drained of power. I’d have to go back outside and draw some strength from the earth to begin healing, and I felt as if all I did anymore was spend my time fixing up my damaged body.