Hexed

Chapter 16

“Those two guys are already more annoying than the police,” I said to Hal after I assured Granuaile I’d be right there.

“What two guys?”

I quickly related to him all the details I knew, which were few, and that I needed assistance in gathering intelligence on them. “Do you have a super-sneaky way of siccing a private investigator on these guys so that it can’t be traced back to you? I definitely don’t want any member of the Pack or friend of the Pack to get involved. I’ll pay for the investigator.”

“Absolutely,” he said as he watched me leap onto my bike. “Mind if I drop in to take a look at them in a couple minutes, pretend to be a customer?”

“Um. Well. If you want.”

“You think I shouldn’t?”

“It’s just that I seriously have no idea what these guys are, except strange. I don’t want to put you at risk.”

Hal snorted. “Whatever. I’ll follow along in case you need my giant hairy muscles to throw them out.” He pressed the fob on his keys to make his car alarm chirp.

“All right,” I said, unwilling to argue about it. I sent a mental farewell to Oberon as I pedaled away, pumping my legs as fast as they could go. I’d be there in less than five minutes—plenty of time for me to think about what I was heading into.

For the same two men to return twice in the same day looking for me at my place of business told me that they didn’t know where I lived, and that was perplexing considering how much else they seemed to know about my whereabouts. And the urgency with which they wanted to see me indicated that they’d completely exploded my dumb-college-boy façade. The rabbi had already seemed to know it when they left the first time, but somehow between then and now they must have obtained proof of my magical mojo, which meant they probably realized how rare those books in my bookcase truly were. Whatever they wanted, I was already feeling like I wanted the opposite.

It was three in the afternoon, that dead time of day, and no one was in the store besides Granuaile, Rebecca, Father Gregory, and Rabbi Yosef. It was Perry’s day off.

“Mr. O’Sullivan, we have been waiting—” Father Gregory began, but I let him talk to the hand as I addressed my employees.

“Both of you scoot for the rest of the day—on full pay, of course. And, Granuaile, don’t forget to stop by Target before you go home. Sporting goods, you know,” I said as a reminder. We needed to follow through on the alibi right away, since Geffert was pursuing it.

“Got it, sensei.” Granuaile winked at me, and she quickly gathered her things and jangled out the door, a worried-looking Rebecca close on her heels.

“What do you want?” I asked the rabbi when the door had closed. He was clearly the boss and the badass of the two; the priest was a Public Relations man.

“We want to examine your rare books,” he said in his clipped Russian accent.

I shook my head. “They’re not for sale.”

“For research purposes,” Father Gregory interjected.

“What kind of research?”

“Magic and the occult.”

“I’d suggest a library for that kind of thing.”

The rabbi was about to respond when his eyes shifted to the door. Hal walked in, and the rabbi’s eyes bulged and his face twisted into a snarl. It seemed something malodorous was about to hit the fan, and I’d already had enough of that. I quickly confirmed that the rabbi was wearing natural fibers and crafted a binding between his jacket sleeves and his sides, so that his arms would be frozen in place. The rabbi was fast, though: As I was speaking the binding, he whipped a silver throwing knife out of his jacket and shouted, “Die, wolf!” in Russian. The binding took effect as he reared back his arm to throw, and the result was that he abruptly sank the knife into the carpet by his foot and Hal didn’t die.

Lots of snarling and spitting ensued, but I wasn’t finished. I needed to talk to these guys without weapons being thrown, so I bound the priest in the same way I did the rabbi. After that I doubled down and went to work on their legs, as they shrilly demanded that I desist. I bound the fabric of their pants from their knees to the tight weave of my store’s carpet, which had the effect of dragging them abruptly to a kneeling position somewhat painfully. They let me hear all about it.

Hal was understandably upset that a complete stranger had been ready to kill him on sight, but I really didn’t want him to get more involved. Gunnar was already steamed at me, and if I got Hal killed, he’d probably eat me like a Lunchable. I stepped between Hal and the two shouting, kneeling men and held up my hands. “I’m sorry, sir, but we’re closed for the rest of the day. If you’d just come back tomorrow, I’m sure I’ll be able to help you then.” If I could make the men believe I didn’t know Hal or what he was, so much the better. I nodded at Hal and tried to reassure him with my eyes that I had this. He nodded reluctantly back at me, his eyes a bit yellow, and left the shop without a word. No doubt there would be a quick investigation into these men now.

As Father Gregory and Rabbi Yosef loudly insisted that I release them or face dire consequences, I turned to them and said, “You know, I think you guys might be the worst customers ever. Not only do you badger my employees and force me to interrupt an incredibly relaxing day to come deal with you, but you try to murder another customer when he walks through the door and then complain when I prevent you from committing a capital crime. Come on, Padre,” I said to Father Gregory. “What would Jesus do?”

Quivering impotently and with flecks of spittle forming on his lips, he bellowed, “He’d rain fire down upon you for consorting with minions of hell!”

“Whoa, slow down, there, Father. I think you’ve made several giant leaps of logic and faith and I’m not following. First, I don’t know any minions of hell. Second, I don’t consort with anyone, because I’m not fond of that word. And, third, have you ever actually talked to Jesus? Because I have, and he’s not really a rain-fire-down-upon-bookstores kind of guy, just so you know. Now, who are you guys, really?”

“You have no idea who you’re dealing with,” the rabbi seethed.

“Well, yeah, hence the nature of my query.” His beard seemed to be unusually active for a collection of facial hair. When a fully bearded man is talking, you expect a certain amount of twitching about the edges as his jaw moves around. But when the rabbi stopped talking, his personal topiary kept moving. “Hey, do you have some roaches living in your beard, or what?” The movement stopped as soon as I mentioned it. I turned on my faerie specs and it looked like a normal beard. The silver knife, though, thrust into the carpet, drew my attention. It was glowing with some extra juju but, oddly enough, only on the hilt, not the blade itself.

“Nice knife you got there, Rabbi,” I said, squatting down to examine the juju a bit more closely. The red pattern it made connected ten dots in a familiar sequence, then repeated as it wrapped around the hilt. It was the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

“You may have it if you let us go,” the voice said from the vicinity of the beard.

“Wow, no shit?” I said. The rabbi didn’t strike me as the negotiating type, so he must have hoped I’d just pick it up and say it was mine. The spell on the handle must do something nasty if anyone but the rabbi touched it.

“Yes, think of it as a gift.”

“My mom told me to beware of hairy men bearing gifts.”

Father Gregory said at his stuffy English best, “It’s supposed to be Greeks bearing gifts.”

I paused to regard him coolly. He was an odd fellow, considering he was clearly a British native and at least partially successful in the Catholic hierarchy yet also fluent in Russian and playing second violin to a Jewish guy who treated him like a trained show dog. Perhaps because of that, he demonstrated a desperate need to be right. Or righteous. Or both.

“My mom didn’t know the Greeks existed,” I told him. “She was worried about cattle raiders coming out of what is now County Tipperary.”

“Cattle raiders? But that was before St. Patrick’s time. How old are you?”

“Don’t you know already? You pretend to know everything else about me,” I replied. “Shut up for a second while I check this out.”

I wondered if the magical wards in my shop could snuff this Kabbalistic enchantment without much fuss. I’d never had the opportunity to test them against this kind of magic before, because they were designed to protect the place against spells from the Fae and from hell, as well as some of the more common forms of witchcraft. I’d run into a few Kabbalists here and there over the centuries, but they’d always been amiable sorts and I’d never had cause to think of them as antagonists, until now. This enchantment was still active because, essentially, it didn’t meet the definition of magic according to my existing wards. I was near certain it was naughty, especially if this would-be killer rabbi wanted me to touch it, so I directed the attention of my standing wards to the knife hilt and expanded my definition of magic to include the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The enchantment broke under the attack of my wards, and the red tracery of the juju faded. I flipped off my faerie specs and examined the hilt in normal vision. It was smooth black onyx inlaid with two sets of gold filigree characters. At the top, near the blade, were three Hebrew letters that spelled Netzakh, or victory, the seventh Sephirot in the Kabbalah. Underneath that, at the base of the hilt, was a curious logo that looked like a stylized capital P with a halo.

“I’m confiscating this,” I announced, plucking it out of the carpet with no ill effect, much to the rabbi’s shock. “I accept no gift from you. When it comes to knives in my shop, I maintain a use-it-and-lose-it policy.” I twirled it in front of the rabbi’s face a couple of times to make sure he saw that his magic knife didn’t hurt me, then I walked calmly behind the counter of my tea station.

“So how about it, Father, feel like making nice? If I was as evil as you seem to think I am, wouldn’t I be sucking the marrow from your bones right now or something colorful like that? Why don’t I brew us a cup of tea, I’ll release you guys, and we’ll just sit down and talk things over calmly?”

“Ne doveryaite emu!” the rabbi spat in Russian. Don’t trust him. I still didn’t want to give away the fact that I understood everything he said, but maybe the priest would respond to a general plea.

“Look, Father,” I said, “I don’t know what this guy is saying, but if he’s coaching you on manners or diplomacy, I think he’s shown definitively by now that he doesn’t know much about either one.”

“His temper may be short,” the priest admitted, “but he was right to attack the wolf.”

“What wolf?”

“That man who entered the store was a werewolf. You cannot pretend you didn’t know this.”

I wondered how they knew so quickly Hal was a werewolf, but I suspected that challenging them on the righteousness of their actions would get me closer to information about who they were. “Well, so what if he was? He was in human form and he wanted to buy a book. That’s no reason to kill him.”

“Werewolves must be slain on sight!”

“Says who?”

The rabbi was thrashing about in his jacket, trying to get his arms free by pulling the whole cloth of the fabric over his head or … something. His hat fell off and his face was flushed, and his beard began to move again. I could have bound the bottom of his coat to the top of his pants and that would have stopped it, but his contortions were mildly entertaining, and I wanted to see what he would do if he worked himself free. I stayed behind my tea counter and made no threatening moves.

“Werewolves are abominations of nature. Nearly every religion acknowledges this.”

“Ah, now I see. Do you guys also have a thing about vampires?”

“If by a ‘thing’ you mean a predisposition to kill them, then, yes, we do.”

“How do you feel about witches?”

“We do not suffer them to live!” The priest flushed again, and I decided witches were a touchy subject with him.

“Right. You couldn’t possibly have said anything else. So what about me, then? What do you think you’ve been talking to?”

“You are a holy man, like us.”

That was a surprising answer. “Um, didn’t you just say a couple minutes ago that Jesus was going to rain fire down upon me?”

He answered me in one of those condescending this-is-for-your own-good voices. “There will be a reckoning for the time you have spent associating with infernal powers, but we recognize that you follow the old path of the Druids.”

My eyebrows shot up. They knew what I was after all. “And where does it say that Druids associate with infernal powers? Because we don’t.”

“It was Druidic magic that opened a portal to hell in the Superstition Mountains,” Father Gregory asserted. “And you were there.”

Bloody Aenghus Óg. “Yeah, and I killed most everything that came out of that portal. That was my only association with those powers, okay? I destroyed them.”

“And the demon at Skyline High School?”

“That was the fallen angel Basasael. Also slain by yours truly.”

The priest paled even faster than he blushed, demonstrating remarkable facility in cutaneous blood flow and its constriction. “You slew a fallen angel?” he nearly whispered.

“On ne takoi sil’ny!” Rabbi Yosef growled from underneath his jacket. He is not that strong. Well, I’m strong enough to make you look like an idiot, I thought. He looked close to getting himself free.

“Yes, I did, Father. So, look, I’m willing to let you guys walk out the door with nothing lost but a knife and a little bit of dignity, but I don’t want to see you again. You’re not welcome here, and I’m never going to show you my books. I don’t sell them to fanatics of any stripe. Let’s just live and let live. When it comes to hell, we’re on the same side, anyway. Can we agree to that?”

“I cannot speak for everyone,” Gregory said, casting a meaningful glance at the rabbi squirming in front of him. “But for my part I am satisfied.”

The rabbi finally got one arm free of his jacket, and the other quickly followed. He immediately began to chant in Hebrew and trace a pattern in the air with his hands. I flipped on my faerie specs to watch. As he spoke and moved his fingers, tiny points of light in various colors hovered and then connected themselves in a gossamer threadwork. I saw already that it would be a spell based on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, so I let him proceed. As soon as he finished and tried to execute it, the shop’s wards would recognize it and shut it down. The priest glanced at me nervously as his colleague chanted, wondering if I was going to do anything, but all he saw was my air of unconcern.

“Ha!” the rabbi cried when he finished. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back, fists clenched and held out at nine and three like he was driving a big rig, waiting for something to happen. Maybe he thought an angel would appear and kick my ass, or grant him strength, or give him a special brownie. After a couple of seconds of expectant heaving of the breast, he opened his eyes, turned his head, and saw me smirking at him.

“Nice try, Rabbi Yosef.” I released the binding on the priest’s clothes and said, “You’re free to go, Father Gregory. If you ever return, I will not be so polite or forgiving. This is your only warning.”

“Understood,” the priest said, clambering creakily to his feet. He shook out his arms and then took a few uncertain steps toward the door. “Come on, Yosef,” he said.

“Oh, the rabbi will join you outside in a few moments.” I smiled. “We have something to discuss in private, if you wouldn’t mind.”

Father Gregory checked with the rabbi to make sure this was okay with him. The beard nodded first, and then the rest of the head followed. The priest stepped out, and the bells above the door jangled noisily in the silence.

“The father seems like a forgiving man,” I said once we were alone, “but somehow I get the impression that you’re the sort to carry around a grudge. Am I right, Rabbi Yosef?”

“If you have no traffic with hell or other abominations, then I will have no traffic with you,” he grumbled through a jaw clenched in anger. “But I have taken your measure, Druid man. You traffic with these things all the time. You are unconcerned by werewolves. I am sure that bookcase is full of unholy works. And I would not be surprised to find you acquainted with witches and vampires. It will not be long before I am duty-bound to confront you. But it will be my job, not a grudge, that brings the hammer down.”

“Ah, it’s your job that makes you act like such an asskitten. I get it now. You think you’re one of the good guys and I’m one of the bad guys. That’s okay, I’m used to it. But remember that I have your number, Rabbi—it’s ten—and the height of my ambition for many years has been to be left alone. Please do not disturb my peace again.” I released the binding on his pant legs and gestured to the door. “You’re free to leave now.”

He leapt to his feet and leered at me, then took his time about brushing off his knees and picking up his coat and hat, just to demonstrate that he wasn’t scared of me at all. Still, he said nothing more, and his beard remained motionless as he pushed open the shop door violently and exited into the late-afternoon sun.

I locked the door behind him and flipped the OPEN sign to say CLOSED. First I gathered three pounds of yarrow, packaged it for Malina, and called a courier to come pick it up outside and deliver it as soon as possible. Then I turned off the shop lights and retreated to the Eastern Philosophy stacks, out of sight of the windows. I sat on the ground and crossed my legs underneath me, resting my hands on my knees. There I spent a good three hours laboriously updating my personal wards to defend against Kabbalistic magic—something I never thought I’d need to worry about—and also reinforcing the quick protection I’d tied to my shop’s interior wards and copying them into my exterior defenses.

There were still many unanswered questions about those two—primarily regarding their shadowy organization and how they knew anything about my activities out here—but at least I had some solid leads now. They were religious zealots out to save the world from evil as they defined it; one of them had something living on his face; and I had a very interesting knife to give to the Tempe Pack.

I strongly suspected that the rabbi would be watching my store, either to follow me home or to attempt some sort of skulduggery, so I had plans to foil him.

My shop, to all appearances, has only the single entrance. There is no back door, no fire exit, no other means of visible egress than the single glass door with a dead-bolt on it. That would never satisfy a paranoid sort like me. I needed an escape route in case something big and nasty or official arrived. In a closet marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, next to the bathroom, I had a steel-rung ladder bolted into the wall that led to a trapdoor in the roof. Said trapdoor couldn’t be opened from the outside, in both practical and magical terms. I was the only one who could budge it.

To give the rabbi the slip, I climbed the ladder with the silver knife between my teeth, pirate style, and crept out onto the roof, staying low in the early-evening shadows. I cast camouflage on myself and shed my clothes, regretting the necessity of leaving my cell phone behind. I tied one end of a piece of string around my key ring and the other end around the hilt of the knife. That done, I bound my form to the shape of a great horned owl and firmly gripped the string in my talons. I then cast camouflage on it, the keys, and the knife and lifted off, silently, invisibly, into the Tempe night. I didn’t fly straight home but rather lit high up in the branches of a large eucalyptus tree near Mitchell Park. I spent a good quarter hour just looking around to see if anything had followed me, on both the mundane and the magical planes. How the rabbi could have possibly followed an invisible bird he didn’t know to look for was beyond me, but paranoia was my standard operating procedure.

Finally satisfied, I glided home and spiraled down into my backyard, where I released the binding and returned to my human form. Oberon was very happy to see me.

he said.

I cooked dinner for us, then gave Hal a call from my home phone to suggest he pick up the silver knife to aid in the investigation of Father Gregory and Rabbi Yosef. I left it on the front porch for him, the blade carefully wrapped in oilskin for his protection, then immediately began to work on shielding my house from Kabbalists. Once I finished, hours later, I felt mentally drained from the exertions of the day, but I crashed gratefully on my bed and counted myself lucky that I didn’t need to spend another night healing outside.