Hexed

Chapter 17

The Morrigan tried to wake me up gently this time, but she still managed to startle me into a waking nightmare.

“Gah! Please tell me you’re not horny,” I begged, clutching the sheets and trying to hide behind a pillow.

“No,” she replied, smirking, even though she was sitting naked on the edge of my bed, raven hair falling on alabaster skin. “I have returned with the amulets.” Four black droplets of cold iron shifted with the percussive clack of rocks in the palm of her hand. “Goibhniu was quick.”

“Ah, that’s great.” I lowered the pillow and sighed in relief. “Very good. Because I don’t think I could take another day like yesterday.”

The Morrigan laughed, genuinely amused, and it did not sound remotely malicious to me. “You look well, Siodhachan. You are completely recovered.”

“Physically, yes. But you left me in an awkward position with Brighid, and you know you did.”

The goddess of death snorted. “I saw that she redecorated your kitchen.”

“She tried to kill me, Morrigan. She could have killed my hound.”

“I felt no danger for you at any time.” Her head shook slowly and a tiny smile stretched across her face.

“Will you ever feel that danger again, now that you’ve agreed not to take me?”

“Oh, yes, I know I will, because I already have. It’s coming.”

“It is? When?”

“Very soon. Today or tomorrow. You battle with shadowy figures.”

I was bemused. “That … kind of sounds like a horoscope.”

The Morrigan laughed again. She was in an extraordinarily good mood. “I suggest you perform your own divination. Soon. But for now I come bearing gifts. These three extra amulets are yours to dispose of as you wish. And there is a package of fresh sausage in the kitchen.”

“Thank you, Morrigan,” I said, taking the three amulets from her. They were teardrop shaped, with a loop at the top to string on a necklace. “Oberon’s going to love the sausage. Shall I cook breakfast for us? Are you hungry?”

“Yes, I’m rather famished. And you make such excellent omelets.”

“Okay,” I said, whipping off the bedspread and padding barefoot toward the kitchen. I had to go to the bathroom, but I was putting that off until I had the Morrigan settled. I didn’t want a repeat of what happened the last time.

Some watchdog you are, I told Oberon, who was sitting meekly by the refrigerator.

What? I’ve never seen her in such a good mood. I gave him an affectionate scratch under the chin and got out the makings for coffee.

I don’t think that’s it, buddy. I think she’s happy because she feels she’s beaten Brighid somehow.

You must proceed on the expectation of good manners, both yours and hers. That is the essence of hospitality.

The Morrigan walked into the kitchen and took a seat at the table. “Good morning, Oberon,” she said with a smile.

So go over there and wag your tail. She won’t hurt you, I promise.

Oberon got to his feet, kept his head low, and wagged his tail slowly, half expecting to die.

“Oh, you’re actually coming to see me? I’m honored,” the Morrigan said. Oberon’s tail wagged a bit faster. “This is quite a feather in my cap, to be acknowledged by the great Druid’s hound,” she added. Oberon bumped his snout under her arm, flopping her hand expertly onto the back of his neck. She immediately began to pet him with a series of massaging squeezes, chuckling softly as she did so.

Oberon said, his tail wagging enthusiastically now.

Breakfast was pleasant. The Morrigan asked for advice on what to do next with the amulet, and I advised her to wear it as a talisman for now and cast spells with it off and on to discover what difference there was. She had to discover a way to cast spells without any interference whatsoever from the iron. In the meantime, she should introduce herself to an iron elemental and give it a few faeries, asking nothing in return. Repeat as necessary until the elemental asked if it could do anything for her. “That might take years,” I warned. “It took me three years to get to that point, and I’m a friendly guy. Never betray a moment’s impatience.”

“Where did you get the faeries to feed it?”

“Aenghus Óg kept sending them after me.”

“Ha!” the Morrigan barked. “So in a way he was helping you all along to build the defense that enabled you to stand up to him.”

When the Morrigan left, I finally relieved my grateful bladder, then discovered I was only mildly late to get on the road with Granuaile. My cell was still on top of my shop’s roof, so I used the phone in the kitchen to call her to come pick me up. After that, I got my wands out of the garage to perform a long-overdue divination.

My wands are twenty sticks with Ogham script carved into one end. Each of the sticks stands for a different letter of the Ogham alphabet, and these in turn are associated with the trees of Ireland, together with a host of prophetic meanings.

I took my wands out to the backyard and cleared my mind. I focused on my friends and their safety, then, without looking, I withdrew five sticks from the bag and threw them gently into the air, letting them fall in front of me. How they fell—and how I interpreted them—would hopefully give me a glimpse of the future.

I saw willow, alder, hawthorn, blackthorn, and yew. The latter chilled me quickly; it prophesied death. Fortunately it did not definitively cross the alder or willow—which I took to mean both male and female friends—yet it threatened both, lying between them, as a stark possibility, a possible outcome. Hawthorn and blackthorn—magic guardianship and danger. My friends needed magical protection: The German hexen would attack again soon, perhaps at any moment.

“Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune!” I cried with all the venom of Charlton Heston.

Oberon asked.

“It’s a Shakespearean word for whore.”

trumpet. And pump it. Why didn’t the Black Eyed Peas use it in their song? Aren’t rappers always looking for cool new rhymes? They should kick it old school with the Bard.>

I snorted. “Indeed.”

“Fortune. It’s a quote from Hamlet. The idea is that Fortune is fickle or unfaithful, like a whore. The character who says it continues, ‘All you gods, in general synod take away her power;’ because he doesn’t like what Fortune has in store for him. Well, I’m not a god, nor am I in general synod with anyone, but perhaps I have a way to take away Fortune’s power to do you harm.” I had three amulets of cold iron that I could use like talismans—three people I could protect. “Come here, Oberon. Let me see your collar.”

“Not this time. This is a special magical talisman to protect you from the Man.”

“You’re going to need to hold still for a few minutes while I activate it. We have to make sure the Man can’t get past all the juju to grind you down, you know?”

“Excellent.” Protective talismans are fairly simple to construct from most objects, but they vary in strength depending on the base material and the skill of the caster. Cold iron naturally provides the strongest protection, but its magic-negating properties also make it tremendously difficult to twist to one’s own purposes—unless you’ve been watching how iron elementals do it. Like wards, you have to be specific about what you want the talisman to protect against—you can’t simply say, “Protect me against everything,” because absolutes are not only impossible to empower but dangerous in practice. Cold iron is almost an absolute in itself, but I specifically crafted Oberon’s talisman to watch for Fae magic, infernal hexes, several forms of old craft from Europe that the hexen might employ, and Kabbalistic spells. He’d be at least partially open to Obeah, Voudoun, and Wiccan craft, as well as most anything from the Indian and Asian traditions and the vast sea of shamanistic practice, but I had to put my money down somewhere.

Granuaile was knocking on the door as we finished up, and after she confirmed that she’d picked up some bats and baseballs for my Satyrn Massacre alibi, I got to repeat the practice on her.

“Aw, sensei, you shouldn’t have,” she said, as I presented her with the amulet. She was wearing a gold chain already, and the amulet was a bit heavy-looking once she had strung it up. She had a couple of freckles near her collarbones, and I resolutely kept my eyes up there.

“I hope it won’t throw off your wardrobe too much,” I said. “But you should wear this from now on. If you’re not wearing it, then it’s doing nothing for you. Eventually you’ll bind this to your aura as I’ve done with mine, but until then it’ll just be a talisman for you. I’m going to empower it for you now. Want to see what it looks like?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’ll turn on my faerie specs to make the magic visible and then bind your sight to mine so you see what I see.”

“You’re going to let me watch you do some cool Druid shit?”

“Yep. But you should always remember to speak of such things with reverence and awe.”

She didn’t miss a beat. “You mean you’re going to initiate me into the sacred mysteries of Druidic craft?”

“That’s much better; well done.” I turned on my faerie specs, found the threads of Granuaile’s awareness, and bound them to mine. She gasped when the knot was completed and her point of view wrenched outside her own head.

“Whoa!” Her arms splayed out, searching for balance. “My first out-of-body experience.”

“Don’t move or you’ll probably fall over. Shut your own eyes.”

“Okay, okay. That’s better. Hey. Where’s the magic? You said there’d be magic.”

“Patience. I haven’t started yet. But look here.” I raised the back of my right hand into my sight and examined the power glowing white through the loop of my tattoo. In the visible spectrum my tattoos did nothing, but the strength of the earth shone underneath them like a back-lit neon sign when I looked at the truth of things. It appeared that I had an indigo racing stripe down my right side with a pulsing white halo.

“Wow! You’re lit up like Vegas! How does it glow under the tattoos? Never mind, tell me what all these threads and knots are—Wait. No. What the hell are all those knots coming out of my head? They’re really intricate.”

“You’re looking at the binding of your sight to mine.”

“No way! You can see spells? They just hang around in the air like Celtic artwork?”

I laughed softly. “Most Celtic works of art are spells, or at least they were at one time. The bonds between all living things are there for Druids to witness and manipulate as we choose. There are so many bindings that choosing what to see and focusing on it will become your most treasured skill.”

“Really? I’m having no trouble focusing.”

“That’s because you’re using my eyes,” I reminded her.

“Oh yeah. Dunce cap for me. So all spells look like this?”

“No, just Druidic ones. Some spells I cannot see very well or even identify, but you can always tell that something is wrong when parts of people are cut off from the world, when their ties are smothered or altered somehow. I will show you what other spells look like as the occasion arises.”

“Cool. This is so fucking cool.”

“Reverence and awe?” I prodded her gently.

“I meant to say this blessed mystery fills my soul with light.”

“Heh! That’s excellent. All right, now I need to concentrate, and you should probably keep your exclamations to yourself while I’m doing this,” I said, as I refocused on the amulet. “Don’t move either.”

“Okay.”

I gave Granuaile the same protections I had given to Oberon. Though she kept quiet as she saw the dim green web of protection spread out across her body from the amulet, she gasped when the binding was complete and energized, since the threads flashed and shimmered briefly with white light before fading back to a soft green.

“All right, that’s finished. You’re protected from line-of-sight magical attacks only. If someone gets hold of your hair or blood, this won’t do you a lick of good, because they can then cast a spell that attacks you from within, underneath this shell of protection.”

“You mean the kind of stuff Laksha can do.”

“Precisely. And the coven living on the floor above you. Now watch what happens when you remove the amulet from around your neck—can you take off that necklace using my eyes?”

“I think so. Hold on.” She reached behind her neck and loosed the clasp of the chain, removing the amulet and holding it in her right hand, which she dropped to her side. The gossamer threads of my binding sloughed off, retracting like a tape measure into the amulet in her hand.

“See that?” I said. “If you don’t wear it, it’s useless.”

“So I have to wear it all the time?”

“That would be safest, but you can remove it when you know you’re secure in a warded room. Your condo counts, because I’ve warded it.”

“So if I looked at my door through your sight, I would see the wards you’ve put there?”

“Yep. You can see the wards on my house here if you’d like. I can lead you outside to check them out.”

“How bitchin’ would that—I mean, you honor me, sensei.”

I chuckled. “Put the amulet back on first, and watch yourself armor up.” She did so, and it was a serendipitous bit of caution. Hands on my shoulders, she followed me out front to the edge of my lawn, commenting as she went on the network of bindings all across the porch and the grass and the mesquite tree that had helped me fight off the wheel bug demon. Then, as we were about to turn around to appreciate the wards on the house itself, I heard a sharp thumping noise behind me, as though someone had slapped their hand down onto the cushion of a couch. Granuaile grunted, and I felt her fingers clutch desperately at my shoulders before they tore away. I whirled around to see her falling backward onto the lawn. Before I could discern what had happened or even ask her if she was all right, my amulet punched me in the chest, knocking me backward until I was staggering into the street. I realized this had happened to me before, but it had been during World War II in the southwest of France. And between one awkward step back and the next, I had one of those singular moments of gestalt, where the synapses of several memories and the clues lying idle in my subconscious connected and delivered a single word to my frontal lobe, loaded with anger and revulsion and a bitter kernel of vengeance long denied: them.

A flicker of movement in my peripheral vision drew my head to the right, and I caught a glimpse of a slim woman drenched in hellish juju fleeing around the corner toward Mitchell Park. If I hadn’t been using my faerie specs, I wouldn’t have seen her at all; she was probably cloaked or camouflaged in the normal spectrum, and she was definitely one of them—and now I had a name for an old enemy that I’d longed to meet again since the early 1940s. There was not a doubt in my mind that the witches who’d attacked me and my charges during World War II were the same ones attacking me now, and they called themselves die Töchter des dritten Hauses.