Hexed

  “An apology wrung from me at the point of a sword would be worthless.”

  “I beg to differ. At the point of this particular sword it would have to be heartfelt, or else you wouldn’t be able to say it. So this is a fundamental test of your constitution. Can you admit that you were wrong? Most deities can’t; it’s simply impossible for them. But you were human once, before we Irish made you gods. Take your time and think about it.”

  Brighid’s eyes flashed with a blue flame, and I wondered if she had learned to do that just so she could compete with the Morrigan’s red flashes. Maybe I should try to figure out how to make my eyes flash green so I could freak out the baristas at Starbucks. “No, you foolish mortal,” I’d say as my eyes glowed, “I ordered a nonfat latte.”

  The goddess broke eye contact and focused on emptiness, pressing her lips together, her jaw muscles visibly flexing. She clenched her fists and her entire body began to smoke, with isolated flames erupting here and there on her skin. I assumed she was dealing with anger issues.

  Keep quiet while she’s doing this, okay? She’s forgotten you’re there and I don’t want to remind her. Oberon nodded that he heard and understood.

  At length the fires went out and she relaxed, her muscles unclenching and the tension sloughing off her shoulders. She took several deep, shuddering breaths but eventually sighed deeply, placed her hands flat on the table, and looked down at her lap.

  “Siodhachan, I have breached hospitality with you in an egregious manner. Please accept my sincerest apologies for my behavior.”

  “Fairly spoken, Brighid. I accept your apology. But let us discuss the future now. If I release you from Fragarach’s spell, will you attempt to harm me or my hound?”

  “No. Nor will I ever seek vengeance for the humiliation I have suffered. However, I cannot promise we will never come into conflict over other matters.”

  “That’s understandable, but perhaps we could avoid unpleasantness by discussing other matters now. What do you think might bring us into conflict in the future?”

  “Any liaison you have with the Morrigan.”

  “Why? Should I not be able to liaise with whomever I wish?”

  “Couple with her all you like,” Brighid sneered, “though I suspect there is more pain than pleasure in the act.” She jerked her chin significantly at the scratches on my torso. “What I mean is any sort of alliance that will threaten my position in Tír na nÓg.”

  “All right, explain to me what it is you fear. You think I might help the Morrigan usurp you?”

  “Yes, that is precisely what I think.”

  “Well, I freely tell you that I do not want that to happen any more than you do. I’d much rather have you running things than her.”

  “Thank you,” Brighid said warily after a pause to judge my sincerity.

  “But I feel it only fair to tell you that I have sworn to teach the Morrigan, and no other, the secret of my amulet.”

  Brighid’s eyes flared blue. “That is what I am talking about! With that as her defense, she could slay me easily!”

  “Relax. You have plenty of time to make your own. The Morrigan will not be making one of these overnight. It takes centuries. And while I feel at this time that I must turn down your generous offer of becoming your consort, you are still welcome to come here and study the amulet whenever you wish.”

  “What did she promise you in return for teaching her about the amulet?”

  “Nothing that need concern you. It has nothing to do with supplanting your position.”

  “Be careful, Druid. She is treacherous.”

  “She has been more straightforward with me than you have, Brighid. And she has taken an interest in my life for the vast majority of it. It is no wonder that she has beaten you to discovering this new Druidry of mine. You, on the other hand, have ignored me until just recently, now that I have something you want. So if you find yourself at a disadvantage, you have no one to blame except yourself.”

  Brighid closed her eyes and took a deep breath, determined not to lose her temper again. “Yes, this has been a day for my inadequacies to be made plain. Are you finished?”

  “Just about. Will you agree to leave in peace and inform me in advance of your visits in the future?”

  “Yes.”

  “And my promised reward for killing Aenghus Óg? Rather than becoming your consort, I would like your forgiveness for today.” I released her from Fragarach and lowered the sword to the table but kept my hand on the hilt. “I look forward to your next visit and hope it will be much more congenial than this one.”

  “I shall not break hospitality again,” Brighid said as she rose to her feet. “But neither shall you hear again an offer like you heard today. All of this,” she cupped her breasts briefly, “could have been yours, Druid, but no more. Think on that the next time the Morrigan is gouging out pieces of your flesh.”

  She made sure I saw plenty of what I’d be missing on her way out the door. Damn, damn, damn.

 

  Sure, Oberon. What’s up?

  He reared up and put both his paws on my shoulders and gave me a sloppy lick in the face.

  Chapter 15

  There were multiple missed calls on my cell phone. Some were from Granuaile, some from Malina, and a couple from Hal Hauk, my lawyer. I called my lawyer first.

  “Atticus! Tell me you weren’t involved in this Satyrn Massacre business,” he said without preamble.

  “Satyrn massacre?”

  “That’s what the papers are calling it. Capital M.”

  “Oh. Well, look, why don’t you come over,” I said, because anyone could be listening.

  “Gods of light and darkness preserve us. Don’t move, I’ll be right there,” he growled, and then hung up.

  Granuaile was next. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to define your terms.”

  “You’re still in one piece and everything still works.”

  “Then yes, I’m all right.”

  “Good. Thought you’d like to know that priest and rabbi came in again.”

  “They did?” I frowned. “What did they want?”

  “They asked me to open the rare-book case. I told them I couldn’t.”

  “Right, because you can’t.”

  “Right. They looked pretty pissed. And then they asked all these questions about you. Religious stuff, like whether you were a Christian or a Jew or a pagan, and whether you practiced your religion faithfully.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I said those were questions better answered by yourself. They wanted to know when you’d be back, and I had to tell them I really didn’t know.”

  “Well, hopefully I’ll be in before the day is through. Can Perry and Rebecca run things tomorrow?”

  “Sure. What do you want me to do?”

  “Latin, of course, and get your job back at Rúla Búla.”

  “Already got it. All it took was a phone call and some groveling to Liam.”

  “Excellent! I want you to come over in the morning so I can see about doing something for your personal protection. I haven’t done a divination recently, but I’m getting one of those hunches.”

  “The paranoid kind?”

  “What other kind is there? Hey,” I said, my voice dropping and lilting with dulcet, honey-bunny tones, “can I tell you one of the many reasons I love you?” This wasn’t an abrupt flowering of love between us. It was a code phrase, one that Granuaile herself had suggested.

  “Look, sensei,” she’d said upon her return from North Carolina. “I don’t know if things are going to get crazy again like they did with Aenghus Óg, but if they do, we need a way to communicate alibis successfully over the phone. You can’t just send your lawyer over every time you need to wor
k something out. You might not always have time. The cops might get to me before he does. I might be out of town when you need me. And that whole business was so messy, so much could have gone wrong. So we should plan ahead and Be Prepared, you know, like the Boy Scouts.”

  “Fuck the Boy Scouts,” I’d said. “Be Prepared was my motto before there were any streets to help little old ladies across.”

  “Oh. Right.” Granuaile had paused, and when I failed to fill the silence, she asked, “Does that mean you already have a plan, sensei?”

  “No, I’m just establishing my primacy over the Boy Scouts.”

  Granuaile’s lips quirked upward. “Duly noted. I have a plan, sensei, if you’d like to hear it.”

  “Of course I would. Thinking ahead like this is why you’ll make a good Druid. Seriously,” I added, because we were still too unfamiliar with each other for her to see through my customary curtain of wit.

  “Thank you.” Her cheeks had colored faintly at the praise. “Well, you have to assume these days that all your cell-phone calls are being listened to, and maybe your home and business phones too. That means you have to say what you mean in code. But if the code is too obscure or in a foreign language, they’ll flag your ass for suspicious activity and put you on a no-fly list—”

  “Beg your pardon,” I interrupted. “Who are they?”

  “The government. The cops. The Men in Black. Maybe even the Boy Scouts. Them.”

  “Ah. Please continue.”

  “So we need a simple code, and I was thinking that since we’ve already pretended that we’re romantically involved in one alibi, we should stick with that concept in future situations.”

  “We should, eh?” The beginnings of a smile played at the corners of my mouth.

  “Just pretending,” she’d emphasized, her cheeks flushing more hotly. “Then we can call each other as necessary, throw out a code phrase, and then lay the alibi down.”

  “What’s the code phrase?”

  “Oh. Um. Well, it’s a question in keeping with the pretense of our relationship. It’s ‘Can I tell you one of the many reasons I love you?’ And then the other person says, ‘Sure,’ and then you just explain what we did last night and where and so on, putting in something cute or lovey-dovey for verisimilitude, and bam! You’ve slipped an alibi right past the ears of the military-industrial-authoritarian-douche-canoe complex.”

  I had raised my eyebrows and nodded appreciatively. “Hey, that’s not bad,” I told her. “It’s even a turnoff to eavesdroppers when you get all sickeningly sweet with your voice. Listening to other people be ooey-gooey with each other is a guaranteed recipe for nausea. So let’s call it a plan and hope we never have to use it.”

  Now that we had to use it, only a week after she’d brilliantly made the suggestion, Granuaile picked it up with only the slightest of pauses. “Sure you can, Atticus,” she said, her voice turning syrupy. “Anytime you want to tell me why you love me, I’m all ears, baby.”

  “Well, you know how last night we went out to that park north of Indian Bend Road that has the lights on all night, and we hit baseballs for Oberon to chase? I just thought it was special how you picked up the baseballs all covered in drool and bite marks when I know you hate that kind of thing.”

  “Well, Oberon’s sweet,” Granuaile replied. “We were out there a long time. How many balls do you think we hit?”

  I was so proud I could have popped. Such a clever mind. “We had a dozen,” I replied. “And don’t forget, those two bats are still in the trunk of your car.”

  “Oh, they are? I don’t remember, are those yours or do I need to return them to someone?”

  So quick. She knew precisely what to ask. When I’d first agreed to make her my apprentice, it was partially under duress, but now I could see that I was wildly fortunate. “Those are mine. The wooden ones are mine, the Wilsons. The aluminum bats were the borrowed ones; I’ve already returned them.”

  “Oh. Is that all?”

  “That’s it. The balls and bats are in your trunk, and you’re my snookie-wookie marshmallow fudge love pie.”

  “Aw … wait. Did you just call me a Wookiee?”

  I chuckled. “Caught that, did you?” I ended my conversation with her and then made my last call from my home phone. I’d saved it for last because I knew I’d be getting scolded. Lambasted. Reamed, even, in a Polish accent.

  “That was poorly handled last night, Mr. O’Sullivan,” Malina said immediately.

  “Those kinds of opponents aren’t my specialty,” I replied, wary of using the word Bacchant on a phone, untapped or not. “And I got most of them.”

  “What do you mean, most of them?”

  “There were fifteen, not twelve, as your divination foretold, so that was poorly handled, Ms. Sokolowski.” Talking about divinations and spells on the phone never worried me. Anyone listening from the government would dismiss us as fruity New Age hippies.

  “How many got away?” Malina asked.

  “Just one.”

  “Ah, she will return to Las Vegas, then. But she may bring more next time.”

  “Well, I can’t help next time. If that last one had wanted to fight, I’m not sure I could have taken her. What news of the hexen?”

  “We have managed to bid farewell to two of them.”

  “From your condo?”

  “Even so.” She sounded a bit smug.

  “You knew them previously?”

  “No, these were younger members, not so well protected and not so wise about masking their true nature.”

  That told me that Malina didn’t necessarily need hair or blood to deliver a lethal attack from afar. And she knew how to pick magic users out of a crowd. Good to know. “Well done,” I said. “Does that mean you know where the rest of them are?”

  “Unfortunately not. We are getting closer, however. We’ve narrowed it down to Gilbert. But we need more bloodwort.”

  “All right, I’ll send over a courier with three more pounds. No one’s going to be asking about the two you bid farewell to, are they?”

  “You mean the way people are asking about what you did last night? No, there was nothing suspicious in their leave-taking.”

  “Oh. I see.” Accidents happen.

  “You should try subtlety sometime. But, look, they’re going to know they didn’t succeed in getting us their first time around, so you should prepare for more attacks, however it is that you do that.”

  “Attacks like the first one?”

  “No, I imagine they’ll try something different. It probably won’t be as flashy, but the result will leave you just as dead if you’re not protected.”

  “Okay, thanks for the warning.”

  A car screeched to a halt outside. Oberon said.

  I bet it’s vanilla.

  I quickly said farewell to Malina and opened the front door to see Hal stalking up my front steps, a scowl on his face and a newspaper in his hand. “Good afternoon, sir! My, what impeccable tailoring you have.”

  Hal stopped in his tracks and eyed me warily. “What the hell happened to you?” he said, taking in my shirtless and heavily bruised and scratched form. He gestured at my wounds and asked, “Is that from last night?”

  “No, it’s from the rough sex this morning.”

  “Smart ass. Sorry I asked. Hey, did you get your ear back?”

  “Yep. That was definitely the best part of my day so far.”

  Hal sighed in relief and waved the newspaper significantly. “I’ll say, you lucky bastard. Police are looking for a guy that matches your description with a missing right ear. I thought they had your number on that one.”

  I threw up my hands, perplexed. “How do police even know what to look for? The only two cops who saw me got killed.”

  “Well, some of the modern-day fops fleeing the club saw you handcuffed on the ground in custody of the now-deceased police, so naturally the living police are an
xious to figure out what happened to said suspect. They have your clothes and hair color along with the missing ear to go on, and that’s it. No descriptions of your face, since you were sucking asphalt.”

  “Any mention of my tattoos?”

  “Happily not. Your tats must have been facedown because of the way they had you cuffed, so they’re searching for a tatless, earless guy.” Hal sniffed the air speculatively and frowned. “Is something burning?”

  “My house was for a while, but not anymore.”

  “Oh,” he said, and the fires of his curiosity were extinguished, just like that. “Well, it’s kind of irritating even out here, so would you mind if we sat on the porch?”

  “Not at all.” I gestured to a chair and Hal handed me the newspaper as he took it. Oberon thumped his tail against the chair and pushed his head under Hal’s hand.

  “Hey, pooch,” Hal said, obligingly giving Oberon’s head a scratch.

 

  Did it ever occur to you that maybe he’s trying to mask the wet dog smell with the citrus?

 

  SATYRN MASSACRE, the newspaper screamed at me; 25 dead including two officers in nightclub nightmare. The photo showed body bags lined up outside the club.

  SCOTTSDALE: Police are still searching for suspects in the aftermath of the city’s worst mass murder, which occurred last night in the Satyrn nightclub on Scottsdale Road. Witnesses were unsure exactly how the killings began, but the deaths of two Scottsdale police officers ended the carnage.

  I scanned the rest of the article quickly. “Huh. They mention the broken bats, but they don’t mention my sword in here,” I said.

  “You were whipping your sword around in front of all those witnesses?”

  “No, no,” I said. I explained what happened last night and the alibi I’d cooked up with Granuaile via lovey-dovey code. “I still have my receipt from Target,” I pointed out, “and chances are good they’ll find that security tape anyway, if they’re any good at their jobs. So we’ll just say Granuaile’s bats are my bats, slightly scuffed and used from a night of baseball chasing with my dog.”