She chanted four lines in Polish, and since I was finally in range to hear, I recorded it eidetically for reference. As she reached the end of each line, a booming clap thundered from her palm along with the colors violet, blue, red, and white, swirling around her in sequence like exuberant streamers in a gymnast’s floor exercise:
“Jej miśoć mnie ochrania,
Jej odwaga czyni mnie nieustraszona,
Jej potęga dodaje mi sił,
Dzięki jej mięosierdziu żyję!”
Malina translated them for me later and explained that each line was a spell in itself, affording her “certain strengths and protections” through the benediction of the Zoryas. Her words meant: By her love I am protected, By her courage I am made fearless, By her might I am made strong, By her mercy I am spared.
When Malina finished, there was an impenetrable yet translucent shield around her, and she looked like she was just getting warmed up. It was far beyond the conic wards I’d seen from Bogumila and Klaudia.
Rabbi Yosef’s crazy squid beard had seen enough; the tentacles quailed and would go no further. They started to retreat, rolling up quickly into the rabbi’s face as he considered how to deal with a far more accomplished witch, then he startled and took a step back as he saw me coming, covered in the gore of witches and demons and my own blood, with Fragarach held ready in my hand. I didn’t hesitate, didn’t say hello, just raised my sword to his throat and said, “Freagróidh tú.” He froze up in the blue glow of the spell and started spluttering something at me in Russian. “You will not speak except to answer my questions,” I said, and he promptly shut up.
“Thank you, Atticus, that will make this so much simpler,” Malina said.
“No, stop,” I told her, as she was gearing up to lay him out. “I need to talk to him first.”
“He must pay for Bogumila’s death!” Malina blazed from behind her shield.
“Yes, he must. But first he will speak plainly to me for the first time. What is the name of your organization, sir?”
He fought it, of course, but eventually he said, “The Hammers of God.” Understanding clicked in my head. That stylized P on the hilt of his knife had been a hammer.
“Where is Father Gregory tonight?”
“He is on a plane back to Moscow.”
“How many are in your organization?”
“I do not know the exact number.”
“Give me your best guess. How many might show up to avenge you should you disappear tonight?”
“At least twenty Kabbalist fighters like me. That is standard when one of us disappears. But they may send more if they think the threat warrants it.”
I turned to Malina with a wry grin. “It is prudent that we stopped to chat, is it not?”
“He still must pay,” she insisted, as Klaudia, Kazimiera, Berta, and Roksana raced to join us and surround him.
“You want to face twenty or more of him?” I asked.
“He is lying about that.”
I shook my head. “You’ve experienced this spell yourself, Malina. He cannot lie. Perhaps there is another way we can make him pay yet avoid a confrontation that may lead to more bloodshed on our side.”
Malina clearly found this suggestion distasteful. She wanted to kill his ass right then and there. “What do you propose?”
“Take a few nice locks of his hair while I’ve got him here. He’ll know he’s in your power then. You can send him some explosive diarrhea or something like that, something painful and humiliating yet short of death, and you can also set up a dead man’s enchantment so that if you die, he dies too. And then we’ll explain to him, in small words, how he killed a very nice witch who was trying to help us kill all the evil witches upstairs, and he and his Hammers of God should just leave us the hell alone from now on, because we have the East Valley well under control.”
Malina weighed my words. She knew that she was more than a match for the rabbi, but he’d been stronger than Bogumila. Twenty more of him against the five remaining members of her coven weren’t good odds, and she understood this. She agreed, albeit with great reluctance, and dispelled the light show swirling around her. Her sisters accepted the decision without comment, but I could tell they didn’t like it either.
“There, Rabbi, you see?” I said. “Heinous witches don’t let asspuppets like you live. Only merciful ones who understand, like me, that you’re trying to do the right thing but you’re just too dim to understand what it is. So we’re going to show you. Right after Malina takes some of your hair.”
Malina flipped off his hat and tore a giant handful from his scalp, stuffing it into the pocket of her leather jacket. We all enjoyed his pain. Then I released the rabbi from Fragarach, bound his sleeves firmly behind him in a similar fashion to what I’d done in my shop, and we led him through the building and explained how we’d completely eliminated die Töchter des dritten Hauses, a coven that had hunted Kabbalists like him for centuries. While he was busy fighting Bogumila, Malina had personally taken care of a large demon ram and another in utero. Klaudia had eliminated two more. Leif and I had accounted for the rest between us (I confirmed that we had slain twenty-two), and the vampire disdained demonkind so much that he’d refused to sink his fangs into any of the witches.
To the rabbi’s frothing accusations, I replied that, yes, I tended to enjoy the company of vampires and werewolves and witches, because all the ones I knew were extraordinarily well scrubbed and had fantastic taste in automobiles; but none of us suffered a scrap of hell to dwell in our territory unmolested, and we had, in fact, been far more effective against them than the Hammers of God had been so far. So please you, good rabbi, get the fuck out of our town and stay out.
He agreed to leave, albeit with much grumbling and resentment. I figured it was even money he’d come back with friends. We did not wish him farewell.
I found my missing teeth and felt certain I could heal them back into place with a good night’s sleep on the earth. I recovered Moralltach and its scabbard near the hole in the floor. Of Leif, however, there was no sign.
Malina joined me at the spot where I’d seen him leap from the building. We looked down at the the rocky landscaping below and saw no sign of disturbance there.
“I’m so sorry about Bogumila,” I said to her in low tones. “And Waclawa.” I said nothing about Radomila or Emily or any of the others who’d died in the Superstitions.
“Thank you,” she said, almost too quiet to hear.
“Did you chance to see what happened to Leif?” I asked.
“I saw him fall,” Malina said, sniffling a bit. She wiped at the corner of her eyes and nodded. “He was right between me and Bogumila. I don’t think the rabbi even noticed, though how he could miss a flaming vampire is beyond me. He ran east down Pecos; that was the last I saw of him. I remained at my station in case any more hexen fell down.”
I looked off toward the east. Lights on the north side of the road indicated buildings, but, after a few lots down on our side of the street, there was nothing but darkness.
“East, you say? Is that undeveloped land over there?” I pointed.
“I don’t know,” Malina said. “We should probably check it out.”
Antoine’s refrigerated truck rolled into the parking lot as our small convoy of sports cars pulled out onto Pecos, steering carefully around the golem’s head that Leif had thrown through the roof. Bogumila’s body was bundled gently into Roksana’s Mercedes. We waved and wished Antoine and his ghouls bon appétit. His gang would have the place cleaned up before sunrise, leaving nothing but property damage and a large pile of rocks behind for the police to wonder over.
I was riding with Malina and Klaudia in the Audi. Klaudia sat on my lap, her torso twisted around to face me and a leather-clad arm draped around my shoulder. With her other hand, she was caressing my injured jaw with a delicate tip of a fingernail. She made cooing sounds of sympathy, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her lips.
“Klaudia, stop that,
” Malina said. “Now is not the time to tease Mr. O’Sullivan.”
My head cleared immediately, and I shuddered at Klaudia’s knowing smile. She had enchanted her lips like Malina did her hair.
I was glad the ride would be brief; Klaudia had discovered a loophole in our nonaggression treaty already. It was the second time an attraction charm of the Polish witches had worked on me. My amulet had eventually shut down Malina’s, and I had no doubt it would have done the same to Klaudia’s, but in each case it had worked long enough for them to do me harm if they had wished it.
“It’s all right,” Klaudia said brightly. “I think he and I understand each other.” She patted my chest with the hand that had been caressing my jaw. “Don’t we, Mr. O’Sullivan?”
I nodded and turned my gaze to the darkness outside. She was letting me know for future reference that she was every bit as dangerous as Malina.
A quarter mile east on Pecos, we found a charred and blackened Leif facedown on an empty expanse of gravel, next to a trench of violently churned earth. He’d obviously managed to quench the hellfire engulfing him and drag himself a short distance away, but now it appeared he’d reached the end of his strength.
“He’s not dead,” I said to the witches assembled around his body.
“Yes he is.” Berta begged to differ.
“Well, yes, you have a point, but I mean he’ll be okay. Still dead. But fine.”
“What about you?” Malina asked. “Your face looks like someone took a meat tenderizer to it.”
“I’ll be fine too,” I assured her. I was already feeling marginally better now that I had contact with the earth. “Just help me get Leif back to his car.”
Parts of Leif flaked off and blew away when we moved him. One of his fingers crumbled and fell like the tightly packed ash of a hand-rolled cigar.
“Eep!” Kazimiera cried when she saw this.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’ll grow back. I think.”
We fished Leif’s keys out of his burned jeans and decided, for his own safety and mine, that he should make the return trip to Tempe in the trunk. Klaudia volunteered to run back and get his car. “Don’t ever tell him we did this, though,” I said as we stuffed him into the ass end of his Jaguar. “I don’t think he’d take it well.” Berta tittered.
I bade the witches farewell and expressed my hope they would prosper and grow strong again. It was the language of diplomacy and we all knew it, but it was the proper language in that time and place.
Dr. Snorri Jodursson was already at my house, watching The Fellowship of the Ring with my apprentice, so it wasn’t tough to find someone to take charge of Leif’s recovery. Snorri said he’d simply raid the blood bank, and he was nice enough to put my teeth back in place for me before I lay down to heal in the backyard. Said he wouldn’t even charge me this time.
As I stretched out gratefully on the familiar grass of my lawn with a worried Oberon nestled against my side, I hoped the near future would bring me a small portion of peace. I was tired of these constant distractions and the alarming rate at which I seemed to be losing my ears, and if the chaos would consent to desist for a while, I would heal and mourn and focus properly on what to do next.
There was a parcel of wilderness that needed my attention, which I had neglected for far too long.
Epilogue
It’s rare that I take the form of a stag. Though it’s the largest shape I can take, it’s still a bit lower on the food chain than I would like, and rare is the occasion when one of my other forms will not serve me better. But when the job at hand was lugging fifty-pound bags of topsoil miles across rugged terrain, it was the best option I had.
Granuaile and Oberon followed along and hauled a few things of their own as we hiked out to the blighted zone around Tony Cabin. They were carrying tools, our lunch, a set of clothes for me, and a five-gallon blue agave plant. I had a harness and travois hooked up to my shoulders so that I could drag 450 pounds of rich topsoil, teeming with all sorts of bacteria and nutrients, along the ground.
When we reached the edge of the blighted zone, my heart nearly broke; we were still four miles away from Tony Cabin, and there was so much to heal. If the cabin was at the center of a perfect circle, that meant we had fifty square miles to mend. The trees were little more than standing dead wood, and the cacti were lumps of desiccated tissue stretched over dry wooden ribs. The brush was all kindling now, lifeless and essentially petrified: There were no ants, no beetles, no bacteria or fungi to break down the plants and nourish new growth in the spring. But we had to start somewhere.
I unbound myself from the stag form and put on the clothes we’d brought along. Using the shovels Granuaile had carried, we dug up a few dead plants just off the trail and resolved to compost them. Then we excavated a small trench that led from living land into the drained area, much deeper than it was wide, and filled it with all the soil we’d hauled in. We spread the dead soil we’d dug up across the living, so that leaves and bugs and grasses and so on would fall or crawl upon it and gradually reinvigorate it.
We planted the agave in the trench and had to satisfy ourselves with pouring a couple of bottles of water on it to help it make the transition and take root.
Oberon asked, sniffing at the plant.
“This is just the beginning, Oberon,” I said aloud so that Granuaile could hear. “It’s an important first step.”
“Maybe next time. That might be too much of a shock right now.”
“Eventually I can get the earth’s attention and help it along, but there’s nothing for it to work with right now. Life is its medium, and there’s no life in that area, not even bacteria. We need to keep bringing in the raw material.”
I laughed. “How would I get heavy equipment here? There are no roads to this place. You know what the trail is like. It’s too rough. And most of this land is wilderness—completely untamed bush.”
Oberon looked down the trail toward Tony Cabin, still some four miles distant, then considered the lone agave near his feet.
“Yeah, it’s a big job, but I won’t feel well again until it’s finished. When I stand here and call to the earth, nothing answers.”
Oberon looked up at me.
Thanks, buddy, I said silently as I tried to surreptitiously zip up my jeans.
Acknowledgments
I know not how it goes with other writers, but for me, five months to finish a novel is akin to Maximum Warp, and it would not have been possible without my primary readers: Alan O’Bryan, Andrea Taylor, and Tawnya Graham-Schoolitz took time out of their busy lives to read each chapter as it was produced and give me valuable feedback. Allen Rouser, Mike Ruggiero, and Nick Steinkemper also read the work as early fans and gave me their thumbs-up.
Katarzyna and Leszek Rosinski were invaluable as translators for the Polish and Russian passages, and Andrea Hümer helped me out with the German. Any mistakes are mine, of course, and the accuracies are theirs.
Detective Dana Packer of the Lincoln, Rhode Island, Police Department helped by discussing what police procedures would be in a case like Perry’s. If the fictional Detective Geffert strays in any way from what he should have done, it’s because I didn’t hear Detective Packer correctly.
Evan Goldfried is my agent extraordinaire at JGLM, and I’m always appreciative of his tireless efforts on my behalf.
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My editor at Del Rey, Tricia Pasternak, is undeniably the hoopiest frood in North America—but that’s not all! She’s also brilliant and helpful and I trust her judgment utterly. Her assistant editor, Mike Braff, deserves a proper spangenhelm for enduring the many slings and arrows of my outrageous pranks, and I am thankful for his help as well.
My wife and daughter were extremely supportive during the process, and words cannot express the depths of my gratitude for their love, encouragement, and curiosity about what Atticus and Oberon would do next.
The three-story building described in this book’s climactic battle is actually located on a street in Gilbert called Germann, rather than Pecos. I changed the name of the street because the locals inexplicably pronounce it like the word germane, which bears no phonetic relationship to the spelling, and I also did not wish to suggest, even by implication, that the German witches had chosen it as a forward base because of its seemingly close ties to their nationality. The building will most likely be occupied by the time of publication, but it did spend many months unfinished and unoccupied at the time of this writing, just as described.
You can follow me on Twitter (@kevinhearne) and GoodReads.com, and I have a spiffy website at kevinhearne.com with a link to my blog. Hope to say howdy to you there.
Read on for a preview of the next book in the thrilling Iron Druid Chronicles,
Hammered.
Coming soon from Del Rey Books!