Hounded

That’s exactly what I feel too, Oberon.

He turned his head toward Snorri and pricked up his ears.

She’s my new apprentice. Well, half of her is, anyway.

Not sure about that yet. Let’s go meet her. I waved good-bye to Greta the werewolf, who was out of danger now, and Oberon barked a farewell. We loped over to where Dr. Jodursson was healing—he looked as if he wanted to sleep, but that was doubtless impossible with the pack link overflowing with bloodlust at the moment.

“Thanks for taking one for the team, Snorri,” I said. Oberon chimed in with a sort of rolling bark—roo-woo-wooof.

Snorri snorted his acknowledgment but otherwise didn’t move.

Laksha walked up behind Snorri, holding her nose. “Smells like demons,” she complained.

“Nice job on Radomila,” I said.

“Did she have the necklace?”

“Yes, she did.” I held it up so she could see her bloody treasure. “The rest of the coven is just about finished off, so you won’t need to use its power on them. Here you go, as promised.”

She took the necklace from me and smiled. “Thank you. It is a pleasure to work with a man who keeps his word.”

“I am actually going to help you keep the remaining part of your bargain,” I said.

“Oh?” Her eyes narrowed. “How so?”

“I’m giving Granuaile thirty thousand dollars to fly back east and find you a suitable host. Once you wake up in your new body, she’ll give you the rest to get yourself set up somewhere, minus her airfare home.”

“You have this kind of money to give away?”

I shrugged. “Ten grand just came from the coven. As for the rest, I live simply and I make a killing on long-term investments. Send me a postcard when you get settled; let me know how the karma rehab is going.”

Laksha chuckled and shoved the bloody necklace into Granuaile’s pocket. “I have no problem with this. Thank you for your consideration.”

“Thank you for taking care of Granuaile.”

“She is a sweet child, and very bright. She will make a good Druid.”

“I agree. May I speak with her now?”

“Certainly. Farewell.” Granuaile’s head drooped, and when it came back up she staggered backward and covered her face with her hands.

“Fauggh! What is that fucking smell? Oh my God, it reeks! I can’t—can’t—” She couldn’t finish her sentence because she was too busy vomiting on the side of the trail.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot about that,” I said. “Sorry. You kind of get used to it after a while.” Granuaile vomited again by way of reply, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually answered her question, and she might jump to the wrong conclusion if I didn’t say something soon. “It wasn’t me,” I assured her. “I swear it wasn’t me. That’s demons you’re smelling.”

“Whatever it is,” she gasped, “do we have to stay here for long? Because I don’t think—” She retched again, but now it was dry heaves. Part of me was finding this very interesting. Laksha had obviously been using the same nose as Granuaile, so the two had been exposed to the exact same stimuli, but Laksha had shown no urge to vomit so violently. It suggested that the physical reaction was even more psychologically based than I had previously supposed.

“Well, I have to stay and wait for the pack to return, but you could go back up the trail a little way until you can stand it. There’s nothing pretty to see here.”

“Then why did you have me come back here?”

“Precisely because there’s nothing pretty to see here. I wanted to give you a last chance to back out of our arrangement. You’re about to become an initiate in the world of magic, and that world can sometimes be brutally violent and smell as evil as it actually is. Breathe through your mouth and look around.”

“It’s all dark.”

Oh, duh. My binding had snapped when I lost my energy and Aenghus Óg had drained the earth. Laksha clearly had used her own methods of seeing in the dark to get here. Using some more of the Morrigan’s power, I gave Granuaile night vision again, and she looked at the meadow full of corpses.

“My God,” she said. “Did you do all of this?”

“Everything except the witches and the two werewolves. But I had lots of help staying alive tonight. By rights I should be dead. And you should know that magic users rarely die peacefully in their sleep. So I want you to think about what you’re looking at and what you smelled as you take Laksha back east. I don’t want you entering into this with any romanticized ideals. And if you’d rather not be my apprentice when you come back, I will understand, no hard feelings, and I’ll make sure you get a good job to replace the one you quit today.”

“But what happened here? How did you manage this?”

“Whoa, hold that thought,” I said, hearing yips from the opposite side of the meadow and seeing Snorri lift his head off the ground. “It sounds like the Pack is returning. We may be able to leave sooner than I thought.”

Their arrival punctuated my point perfectly: Granuaile clutched my shoulder when she saw Emily’s head dangling from Gunnar’s jaws, and when he dropped it at my feet faceup, she hid behind my back.

“No, Granuaile, what are you hiding from? You need to see this too. This is part of it. This woman here looked about twenty before she died, and now we see her true age was closer to ninety. There are seven more witches who are older than she was and who think they’re wiser, so they might get ideas about trying to succeed where this one failed. Maybe seeing the head of their youngest will drive home the point that it’s not wise to tangle with me. When you cannot reason with people, you have to try scaring them. If that doesn’t work, then you either run or you kill them. Or set your lawyers on them.”

“Is that what you’re doing? Trying to scare me?”

“Think of it as full disclosure.”

“Okay. Thank you. I will think about it.” She turned and started back up the trail. “I’m just going to go far enough ahead to where I can breathe normally again.”

Gunnar and Hal sloughed off their fur and put their human skin on so they could carry their two fallen pack mates out of the wilderness. They didn’t want to talk, and I figured they were probably calculating the costs of having me as a client. Snorri moved slowly and Greta trotted on three legs, but they were able to make it out without help now that the silver was out of their system.

Before I left, I made sure to pick up Aenghus Óg’s sword, Moralltach, since it now belonged to me by virtue of my victory. The hike out took much longer than the trip in, and we were a weary, silent lot, but we were back to the cars well before dawn. About two miles away from the trailhead, I could feel the earth again, and I wept as I walked.

Hal and I dropped Granuaile off at her apartment, and I told her to pack her bags for the trip east the next day. I didn’t know if I would see her again or not.

We made a call to Leif, who had woken up too late to join in the fun, and asked him to get his ghoul friends out there to clean up the mess.

Hal took me to a twenty-four-hour Walmart, and we bought gauze and tape to wrap around my chest where Fagles’s bullet hole used to be; we also fabricated a story to tell the police when I got home. I had been so traumatized by the attempt on my life by a police detective that I spent a couple of days incommunicado at my girlfriend’s house—and that would be Granuaile, for the purposes of the story. Hal said he’d straighten it out with her, then he drove me to my house and delivered me to the Tempe police, who were still staked out there, awaiting my statement. Hal was going to keep Oberon—and Emily’s head—until they left.

When they were finally satisfied with my story of a nervous breakdown, I called Hal to bring Oberon (and Emily) over, and then every other thought was of collapsing into the backyard to begin my true recovery from using Cold Fire.

That had to wait: too many things to do first.

I made a special point of calling Malina Sokolowski to tell her I had seen the sunrise but Radomila had most definitely not.

“I know you fully expected me to die, Malina, but don’t you think perhaps you underestimated me?”

“Perhaps I did,” she admitted. “There is so little available literature about the powers of Druids, and it is difficult to judge. But I hope you recognize that you underestimated me as well, Mr. O’Sullivan.”

“How so?” A thrill of panic shot down my spine. Did she get something of mine after all? Was I about to get magically squished?

“You thought me a liar and that I was somehow involved in this abhorrent plot to make bargains with hell and the Tuatha Dé Danann. I can understand why, because members of a coven tend to get painted with the same brush, often justifiably so. But looking back now, can you not see that I had only the best intentions?”

“You told me the truth about there being only six witches at Tony Cabin, and for that I thank you,” I said. “But when I asked you at my shop how many of your coven were plotting to take the sword from me, you refused to answer.”

“That is because I had no answer. At the time I had only suspicions, not confirmed evidence, and I could not share those with you and turn you against certain members of my coven without firm proof. Surely you understand this.”

She was pretty smooth, and I found myself flirting with the idea that she might actually be an honest witch—as rare as an honest politician, if not more so. My prejudice would not allow me to trust her, but perhaps I did not need to send her Emily’s head in a box as I had planned. Despite what I had told Granuaile at the meadow, frightening people only pushes back the date of an inevitable fight. Cooperation makes fighting unnecessary—or, as Abraham Lincoln once said, “I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends.”

“What has your coven decided to do now?” I asked. “Hunt down the Druid that killed your sisters?”

“Of course not,” Malina scolded. “They clearly gave you just cause, and they got their just deserts. I told them it might not turn out well.”

“What are your plans, then?”

Malina sighed. “That actually depends quite a bit on your plans, Mr. O’Sullivan. If you are planning some sort of pogrom against Polish witches, then I suppose we would prefer to flee rather than fight. But if I can convince you that we mean you no harm, then we would much rather stay in Tempe in a state of mutual nonaggression.”

“Having you leave town sounds pretty good to me. Not much of a downside there, in my view.”

“I respectfully suggest there might be. Our coven has kept undesirables out of the East Valley for many years now. We have chased off innumerable brujas over the years and a spate of voodoo priests after Katrina hit New Orleans. Last year we quietly took care of a Kali death cult. I also know that there is a group of Bacchants in Vegas that would love to expand here, but we have repulsed every foray into our territory. If you would like to deal with these problems in our absence, so be it.”

“No, I had no idea that you were so active or so territorial.”

“This is a nice place to live. We would like to keep it that way.”

“I like it here too,” I admitted. “Very well. Convince me that you mean me no harm.”

“Are you willing to give us equal assurance?”

“I suppose that depends on what sort of assurance you seek.”

“Let us have your lawyer draw up a treaty. We can spend as much time on the wording as you wish. When all parties are satisfied, we will sign in blood and the lawyer will keep it.”

A nonaggression treaty signed in blood? Something about that struck me as oxymoronic. “I will begin the process with you in good faith,” I said, “and see where negotiations lead us. What I want you to understand—what Emily and Radomila did not understand—is that though I avoid conflict where I can, it should never be misinterpreted as weakness. You expressed disbelief earlier that a member of the Tuatha Dé Danann should be afraid of me. But last night I killed him, and on top of that I took care of a horde of demons and your former sisters.” I left out all the help I had. I didn’t actually kill a single member of her coven, but she didn’t need to know that. “It should be clear to you that Wikipedia knows nothing about what a real Druid can do.”

“Crystal clear, Mr. O’Sullivan.”

“Very well. My lawyer will contact you in a week or so.”

That left me with a wizened witch’s head to dispose of, but I was glad that I wouldn’t need to use it after all. I knew precisely what to do with it. I cast camouflage on it and myself and crossed the street to Mr. Semerdjian’s house. With some patient coaxing, the earth underneath his eucalyptus tree opened up and I tumbled her head into a hole beneath its roots, then closed the earth over it and dispelled the camouflage.

After that, I sent a courier over to Granuaile’s place with a check for the money I’d promised and wished her a safe journey.

Perry got an early-morning call asking him to keep the store running, and in return he’d get a week’s paid vacation in a few days. The widow MacDonagh also received a call, reassuring her that her favorite Irish lad was still alive and planned to have that long talk with her soon. And then, finally, I went to take my rest.

I shucked my clothes and lay down on my right side so that my tattoos got maximum contact with the earth. I sighed in relief as I felt the first comforting wave of energy fill my cells. I must have fallen asleep inside of ten seconds, only to be rudely awakened ten seconds after that. The Morrigan flew into the yard, cawing loudly, and changed into her human form.

“Now that you are in a position to recharge yourself, Druid, I would like my energy returned to me.”

Well, hello to you too, Morrigan. Yeesh.

“Thank you very much for the use of it,” I told her diplomatically, and offered her my left hand. “Please take it back.”

She grasped my hand, and when she was finished draining what was hers, my arm dropped to my side like a dead fish. I couldn’t move again.

“You used way too much Cold Fire,” the Morrigan said. “You should plan on being immobile for a couple of days. I hope you put on some of that lotion the mortals are so infatuated with. Can’t have you dying of skin cancer.”

The Morrigan laughed mockingly and then squawked harshly as she changed into a crow and flew away. And she wondered why she didn’t have any friends.