Hounded

Chapter 2

I looked around to see who might have witnessed the fight, but there wasn’t anyone close by—it was lunchtime. My shop is just south of University on Ash Avenue, and all the food places are north of University, up and down both Ash and Mill Avenues.

I collected the weapons off the sidewalk and opened up the shop door, grinning to myself at the OUT TO LUNCH sign. I flipped it around to say OPEN; might as well do some business, since cleaning up would keep me tied down to the shop. Heading over to my tea station, I filled a pitcher with water and checked my arm. It was still red and puffy from the cut but doing well, and I had the pain firmly shut down. Still, I didn’t think I should risk tearing the muscles further by asking them to carry water for me; I’d have to make two trips. I grabbed a jug of bleach from under the sink and went outside with it, leaving the pitcher on the counter. I poured bleach on every bloodstain and then returned for the pitcher to wash it all away.

After I’d satisfactorily washed away the blood, a giant crow flew into the shop behind me as I opened the door to return the pitcher. It perched itself on a bust of Ganesha, spreading its wings and ruffling its feathers in an aggressive display. It was the Morrigan, Celtic Chooser of the Slain and goddess of war, and she called me by my Irish name. “Siodhachan Ó Suileabháin,” she croaked dramatically. “We must talk.”

“Can’t you take the form of a human?” I said, placing the pitcher on a rack to dry. The motion caused me to notice a spot of blood on my amulet, and I removed it from my neck to wash it off. “It’s creepy when you talk to me like that. Bird beaks are incapable of forming fricatives, you know.”

“I did not journey here for a linguistics lesson,” the Morrigan said. “I have come with ill tidings. Aenghus Óg knows you are here.”

“Well, yes, I already knew that. Didn’t you just take care of five dead faeries?” I laid my necklace on the counter and reached for a towel to pat it dry.

“I sent them on to Manannan Mac Lir,” she said, referring to the Celtic god who escorted the living to the land of the dead. “But there is more. Aenghus Óg is coming here himself and may even now be on his way.”

I went still. “Are you quite certain?” I asked. “This is based on solid evidence?”

The crow flapped its wings in irritation and cawed. “If you wait for evidence, it will be too late,” she said.

Relief washed through me, and the tension melted from between my shoulder blades. “Ah, so this is just some vague augury,” I said.

“No, the augury was quite specific,” the Morrigan replied. “A mortal doom gathers about you here, and you must fly if you wish to avoid it.”

“See? There you go again. You get this way every year around Samhain,” I said. “If it isn’t Thor coming to get me, it’s one of the Olympians. Remember that story last year? Apollo was offended by my association with the Arizona State Sun Devils—”

“This is different.”

“—Never mind that I do not even attend the university, I just work nearby. So he was coming in his golden chariot to shoot me full of arrows.”

The crow shuffled on the bust and looked uncomfortable. “It seemed a plausible interpretation at the time.”

“The Greek deity of the sun being offended by an old Druid’s tenuous relationship with a college mascot on the other side of the globe seemed plausible?”

“The basics were accurate, Siodhachan. Missiles were fired at you.”

“Some kids punctured my bike tires with darts, Morrigan. I think you may have exaggerated the threat somewhat.”

“Nevertheless. You cannot stay here any longer. The omens are dire.”

“Very well,” I sighed in resignation. “Tell me what you saw.”

“I was speaking with Aenghus recently—”

“You spoke to him?” If I’d been eating anything, I would have choked. “I thought you hated each other.”

“We do. That does not mean we are incapable of conversing together. I was relaxing in Tír na nÓg, thoroughly sated after a trip to Mesopotamia—have you been there recently? It is magnificent sport.”

“Begging your pardon, but the mortals call it Iraq now, and no, I haven’t been there in centuries.” The Morrigan’s ideas of sport and mine varied widely. As a Chooser of the Slain, she tends to enjoy nothing so much as a protracted war. She hangs out with Kali and the Valkyries and they have a death goddesses’ night out on the battlefield. I, on the other hand, stopped thinking war was glorious after the Crusades. Baseball is more my kind of thing these days. “What did Aenghus say to you?” I prompted.

“He just smiled at me and told me to look to my friends.”

My eyebrows shot up. “You have friends?”

“Of course not.” The crow ruffled its feathers and managed to look aggrieved at the mere suggestion. “Well, Hecate is kind of funny and we have been spending a lot of time together lately. But I think he meant you.”

The Morrigan and I have a certain understanding (though it’s too uncertain for my taste): She will not come for me as long as my existence continues to drive Aenghus Óg into twitching spasms of fury. It’s not exactly a friendship—she’s not the sort of creature that allows it—but we have known each other a long time, and she drops by every so often to keep me out of trouble. “It would be embarrassing for me,” she explained once as she was ushering me out of the Battle of Gabhra, “if you got yourself decapitated and yet you didn’t die. I would have some explaining to do. Dereliction of duty is difficult to justify. So from now on, do not put me in a position where I must take your life to save face.” The bloodlust was still on me at the time, and I could feel the power coursing through my tattoos; I was part of the Fianna during that episode, and there was nothing I wanted more than to have a go at that pompous snot King Cairbre. But the Morrigan had chosen sides, and when a goddess of death says to leave the battle, you leave the battle. Ever since I earned Aenghus Óg’s enmity all those centuries ago, she has tried to warn me of mortal dangers coming my way, and while she occasionally exaggerates the danger, I suppose I should be grateful she never underestimates it or neglects to warn me at all.

“He could have been playing with your mind, Morrigan,” I said. “Aenghus is like that.”

“I am well aware. That is why I consulted the flight of crows and found them ominous regarding your position here.” I made a face, and the Morrigan continued before I could say anything. “I knew that such augury would not be sufficient for you, so, seeking more specifics, I cast the wands.”

“Oh,” I said. She had actually gone to some trouble. There are all sorts of ways to cast lots or runes or otherwise practice divination by interpreting the random as the pattern of the future. I prefer them all to watching the flight of birds or watching clouds, because my involvement in the casting centers the randomness on me. Birds fly because they want to eat or mate or grab something for their nest, and applying that to my future or anyone else’s seems a ludicrous stretch to me. Logically, throwing some sticks on the ground and making predictions is little better, except that I know that my agency and will in the ritual provide enough focus for Fortune to stop and say, “Here’s what’s coming soon to a theatre near you.”

There used to be a class of Druids that practiced animal sacrifice and read the future from entrails, which I kind of thought was messy and a waste of a good chicken or bull or whatever. People today look at those practices and say, “That’s so cruel! Why couldn’t they simply be vegan like me?” But the Druidic faith allows for a pretty happy afterlife and maybe even a return trip or ten to earth. Since the soul never dies, taking a knife to some flesh here and there is never a big deal. Still, I never got into the whole sacrificing thing. There are far cleaner and more reliable ways to peek under Fortune’s skirts. Druids like me use twenty wands in a bag, each marked with Ogham script representing the twenty trees native to Ireland, and each carrying with it a wealth of prophetic meaning. Much like Tarot, these wands are interpreted differently depending on which direction they fall in relation to the diviner; there is a positive set of meanings if they fall upright, a negative set if they fall downward. Without looking, the caster draws five wands from the bag and tosses them on the ground in front of him, then tries to interpret the message represented by their arrangement. “And how did they fall?” I asked the Morrigan.

“Four of them were fell,” she said, and waited for that to sink in. It wasn’t going to be a happy time.

“I see. And which of the trees spoke to you?”

The Morrigan regarded me as if her next words would cause me to swoon like a corseted Jane Austen character. “Fearn. Tinne. Ngetal. Ura. Idho.”

Alder, Holly, Reed, Heather, and Yew. The first represented a warrior and was simultaneously the most clearly interpreted and the most vague. The others all suggested that some pretty dire shit was going to befall said warrior, whoever he was. Holly signaled challenges and ordeals, Reed screamed of fear, Heather warned of surprises, and Yew prophesied death.

“Ah,” I said as nonchalantly as I could. “And how, precisely, did the Alder and the Yew fall in relationship to each other?”

“The Yew crossed the Alder.”

Well, that was fairly clear. The warrior was going to die. He’d be surprised by its arrival, scared witless, and he’d fight maniacally against it, but his death was inevitable. The Morrigan noted my acceptance of the casting and said, “So where will you go?”

“I have not decided yet.”

“There are even more isolated places in the Mojave Desert,” she suggested, with a slight emphasis on the name. I think she was trying to impress me with her knowledge of American geography since she had bungled the Iraq thing. I wondered if she knew about the dissolution of Yugoslavia, or if she even knew that Transylvania was now part of Romania. Immortals don’t always pay much attention to current events.

“I mean, Morrigan, I have not decided to go yet.”

The crow on the bust of Ganesha said nothing, but the eyes flashed red for a brief second, and that, I admit, made me a bit uncomfortable. She really wasn’t my friend. One day—and it could be today—she would decide I’d lived far too long and grown far too cavalier, and that would be it for me.

“Just give me a few minutes to think about the casting,” I said, and realized immediately afterward that I should have chosen my words more carefully.

The red eyes came back and the crow’s voice was pitched lower than before, with minor harmonics in it that raised the hairs on the back of my neck. “You would pit your divination skills against mine?”

“No, no,” I hastened to reassure her. “I’m trying to catch up with you, that’s all. Now, I’m just thinking aloud here, okay? That Alder wand—the warrior—that does not necessarily have to mean me, does it?”

The red eyes faded back to a more natural black, and the Morrigan shifted her weight impatiently on the bust. “Of course not,” she said in her normal tone. The minor harmonics were gone. “It could technically be anyone who fights you, should you prevail. But my focus was on you when I made the casting, and so you are most likely to be the warrior the Alder wand represents. This fight is coming, whether you will or no.”

“But here is my question: You have let me live for centuries because it vexes Aenghus Óg. Aenghus and I are probably linked somewhat in your mind. So when you did the casting, is it not possible that Aenghus Óg was also in your thoughts?”

The Morrigan cawed and hopped onto Ganesha’s trunk, then hopped back up to the top of the head, twitching her wings a bit. She knew the answer, but she didn’t like it because she knew where I was going with this.

“Possible, yes,” she hissed. “But it is unlikely.”

“But you must admit, Morrigan, that it is also unlikely Aenghus Óg would leave Tír na nÓg to hunt me down himself. He is far more likely to employ surrogates, as he has done for centuries now.” Aenghus’s strengths ran to charm and networking—making people love him, in other words, so that they’d offer to do him any little favor, like killing wayward Druids. He’d sent practically every sort of thug and assassin imaginable against me over the years—my favorites were the camel-mounted Egyptian Mamelukes—but he seemed to realize that taking up the chase personally would diminish him, especially since I kept living to escape another day. A hint of smugness might have crept into my tone as I continued, “And I can handle any of the lesser Fae he should choose to send after me, as I proved just moments ago.”

The crow leapt off the bust of Ganesha and flew straight at my face, but before I could get worried about a beak in the eye, the bird sort of melted in midair, reforming into a naked, statuesque woman with milk-white skin and raven hair. It was the Morrigan as seductress, and she caught me rather unprepared. Her scent had me responding before she ever touched me, and by the time she closed the remaining distance between us, I was ready to invite her back to my place. Or here would be fine, right here, right now, by the tea station. She draped an arm around my shoulder and trailed her nails down the back of my neck, causing me to shudder involuntarily. A smile tugged at the corners of her mouth at that, and she pressed her body against mine and leaned forward to whisper in my ear.

“And what if he sends a succubus to slay you, most wise and ancient Druid? You would be dead inside a minute if he knew this weakness of yours.” I heard what she said, and a small corner of my mind realized that it could be of some importance, but the largest part of me could think of nothing except the way she was making me feel. The Morrigan stepped back abruptly and I tried to clutch at her, but she slapped me viciously across the face and told me to snap out of it as I crumpled to the floor.

I snapped out of it. The scent that had so intoxicated me was gone, and the pain spreading across my cheek banished the physical need I had felt.

“Ow,” I said. “Thanks for that. I was about to go into full-on leg-humping mode.”

“This is a serious vulnerability you have, Siodhachan. Aenghus could simply pay a mortal woman to do his work for him.”

“He tried that when I was last in Italy,” I said, as I grabbed the edge of the sink to help myself up. The Morrigan is not the sort to give a man a hand. “And I’ve faced succubi as well. I have an amulet to protect me against such things.”

“Then why aren’t you wearing it?”

“I took it off just a moment ago to wash it. Besides, I am safe inside my store and my home from the Fae.”

“Clearly not, Druid, because here I stand.” Yes, there she stood, naked. That could prove awkward if anyone walked through the door.

“Your pardon, Morrigan; I am safe from all save the Tuatha Dé Danann. If you look carefully, you will notice the bindings I have set about the place. They should hold against the lesser Fae and most anything he could send from hell.”

The Morrigan tilted her head upward and her eyes lost focus for a moment, and it was then that a pair of unfortunate college lads wandered into my shop. I could tell that they were drunk, even though it was only mid-afternoon. Their hair was greasy and they wore concert T-shirts and jeans, and they had not shaved for several days. I knew the type: They were stoners who were wondering if I had anything smokable behind my apothecary counter. Conversations with them usually began with them asking if my herbs had medicinal benefits. After my affirmative response, they would ask me if I had anything with hallucinogenic properties. I usually sold these types a bag of sage and thyme under an exotic name and sent them on their merry way, because I have no scruples about separating idiots from their money. They would get headaches from the experience and never return. What I feared was that these particular lads would see the Morrigan and never leave alive.

Sure enough, one of them, wearing a Meat Loaf shirt, saw the Morrigan standing bare-assed in the middle of my shop, hands on hips, looking like a goddess, and he pointed her out to his friend in the Iron Maiden shirt.

“Dude, that chick is naked!” Meat Loaf exclaimed.

“Whoa,” said Iron Maiden, who pushed his sunglasses down his nose to get a better look. “And she’s hot too.”

“Hey, baby,” Meat Loaf said, taking a couple of steps toward her. “If you need some clothes, I’ll be glad to take off my pants for you.” He and his friend began to laugh as if this was incredibly funny, spitting out “hahaha” like automatic weapons fire. They sounded like goats, only less intelligent.

The Morrigan’s eyes flashed red and I held up my hands. “Morrigan, no, please, not in my shop. Cleaning up afterward would cause me tremendous hardship.”

“They must die for their impertinence,” she said, and those hair-raising minor harmonics were back in her voice. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of mythology knows that it is suicidal to sexually harass a goddess. Look what Artemis did to that guy who stumbled across her bathing.

“I understand that this insult must be redressed,” I said, “but if you could do it elsewhere so that my life is not further complicated, I would appreciate the courtesy very much.”

“Very well,” she muttered to me. “I just ate, in any case.” And then she turned to the stoners and gave them the full frontal view. They were overjoyed at first: They were looking down and so did not see that her eyes were glowing red. But when she spoke, her unearthly voice rattled the windows, and their eyes snapped up to her face and they realized they were not dealing with the average girl gone wild.

“Put your affairs in order, mortals,” she boomed, as a gust of wind—yes, wind inside my shop—blew their hair back. “I will feast on your hearts tonight for the offense you gave me. So swears the Morrigan.” I thought it was a bit melodramatic, but one does not critique a death goddess on her oratory delivery.

“Dude, what the hell?” Iron Maiden squealed in a voice a couple of octaves above his prior register.

“I don’t know, man,” Meat Loaf said, “but my chubby is gone. I’m bailin’.” They tripped over each other in their haste to get out.

The Morrigan watched them go with predatory interest, and I kept silent as her head tracked their flight even through the walls. Finally she turned to me and said, “They are polluted creatures. They have defiled themselves.”

I nodded. “Aye, but they are unlikely to provide you much sport.” I was not about to defend them or beg for a stay of execution; the best I could do was imply that they were not worth the trouble.

“That is true,” she said. “They are pathetic shadows of true men. But they will die tonight nevertheless. I have sworn it.” Oh well, I sighed inwardly. I had tried.

The Morrigan calmed herself and returned her attention to me. “The defenses you have here are surprisingly subtle and unusually strong,” she said, and I nodded my thanks. “But they will not serve you well against the Tuatha Dé Danann. I counsel you to leave immediately.”

I pressed my lips together and took a moment to choose my words carefully. “I appreciate your counsel and I am eternally grateful for your interest in my survival,” I replied, “but I cannot think of a better place to defend myself. I have been running for two millennia, Morrigan, and I am tired. If Aenghus truly means to come for me, then let him come. He will be as weak here as anywhere on earth. It is time we settled this.”

The Morrigan tilted her head at me. “You would truly offer arms against him on this plane?”

“Aye, I am resolved.” I wasn’t. But the Morrigan is not renowned for her bullshit detection. She is more renowned for whimsical slaughter and recreational torture.

The Morrigan sighed. “I think it smacks of foolishness more than courage, but so be it. Let me see this amulet, then, your so-called defense.”

“Gladly. Would you mind clothing yourself, however, so that we may avoid any further shocks to mortal eyes?”

The Morrigan smirked. She was not only built like a Victoria’s Secret model, but the sun streaming through the windows lit up her smooth, flawless skin, which was white as confectioner’s sugar. “It is only this prudish age that makes a vice of nudity. But perhaps it is wiser to bow to local custom for now.” She made a gesture, and a black robe materialized to cloak her form. I smiled my gratitude and picked up my amulet from the counter.

It would perhaps be more accurate to describe it as a charm necklace—not charms like you will find on a Tiffany bracelet, but charms that will quickly execute spells for me that otherwise would take a long time to cast. It took me 750 years to complete the necklace, because it was built around a cold iron amulet in the center designed to protect me against the Fae and other magic users. Aenghus Óg’s constant attempts to kill me had made it necessary. I had bound the amulet to my aura, an excruciating process of my own devising but worth every second in the end. To any of the lesser Fae, it made me an invincible badass, because as beings of pure magic, they cannot abide iron in any form: Iron is the antithesis of magic, which is why magic largely died on this world with the advent of the Iron Age. It had taken me 300 years to bind the amulet to my aura, providing me with tremendous protection and a literal Fist of Death whenever I touched one of the Fae; the remaining 450 were spent constructing the charms and finding a way to make my magic work in such close proximity to the iron and my newly tainted aura.

The problem with the Tuatha Dé Danann was that they were not beings of pure magic, like their descendants born in the land of Faerie: They were beings of this world, who merely used magic better than anyone else, and the Irish had long ago elevated them to gods. So the iron bars around my shop would not bother the Morrigan or any of her kin, and neither would my aura do them any damage. All the iron did was even the odds a bit so that their magic would not overwhelm me: They had to stoop to physical attack if they wished to do me any harm.

That, more than anything else, was the reason I was still breathing. The Morrigan aside, the Tuatha Dé Danann were loath to subject themselves to physical combat, because they were as vulnerable as I to a well-timed sword thrust. Through magic they had prolonged their lives for millennia (just as I had staved off the ravages of aging), but violence could bring an end to them, as it had to Lugh and Nuada and others of their kind. It made them prone to use assassins and poisons and other forms of cowardly attack when their magic would not suffice, and Aenghus Óg had tried most of them already on me.

“Remarkable,” the Morrigan said, fingering the amulet and shaking her head.

“It’s not a universal defense,” I pointed out, “but it’s pretty good, if I do say so myself.”

She looked up at me. “How did you do it?”

I shrugged. “Mostly patience. Iron can be bent to your will, if your will is stronger than the iron. But it is a slow, laborious process of centuries, and you need the help of an elemental.”

“What happens to it when you change your shape?”

“It shrinks or grows to an appropriate size. It was the first thing I learned how to do with it.”

“I have never seen its like.” The Morrigan frowned. “Who taught you this magic?”

“No one. It is my own original craft.”

“Then you will teach me this craft, Druid.” It was not a request.

I did not respond right away but rather looked down at the necklace and grasped a single one of the charms. It was a silver square stamped in bas relief with the likeness of a sea otter, and I held it up for the Morrigan’s inspection.

“This charm, when activated, allows me to breathe underwater and swim like I was native unto the element. It works in conjunction with the iron amulet here in the center, which protects me from the wiles of selkies, sirens, and the like. It makes me second only to Manannan Mac Lir in the sea, and it took me more than two hundred years to perfect it. And that is just one of the many valuable charms on this necklace. What do you offer me in exchange for this knowledge?”

“Your continued existence,” the Morrigan spat.

I thought she would say something like that. The Morrigan has never been noted for her diplomacy.

“That is a good beginning for negotiations,” I replied. “Shall we formalize it? I will teach you this new Druidry, painstakingly formulated over centuries of trial and error, in exchange for your eternal ignorance of my mortality—in other words, you will not take me, ever.”

“You are asking for true immortality.”

“And for this you receive magic that will make you supreme amongst the Tuatha Dé Danann.”

“I am already supreme, Druid,” she growled.

“Some of your cousins may beg to differ,” I replied, thinking of the goddess Brighid, who currently ruled in Tír na nÓg as First among the Fae. “In any case, regardless of your decision, you have my word, freely given, that I will not teach this magic to any of them under any inducement.”

“Fairly spoken,” she said after a pause, and I began breathing again. “Very well. You will teach me how each charm on this necklace was achieved under the terms you described and how you bound the iron to your aura, and I will let you live forever.”

Smiling, I told her to find a lump of cold iron to use as her amulet and then we could begin.

“You should still fly from here now,” she told me when we had sealed the bargain. “Just because I will never take you does not mean you are safe from other gods of death. If Aenghus defeats you, one of them will come eventually.”

“Let me worry about Aenghus,” I said. Worrying about him was my specialty. If love and hate were two sides of the same coin, Aenghus spent an awful lot of time on the hate side for a god of love—especially where I was concerned. I also had to worry about the effects of aging, and if I lost a limb, it wasn’t going to grow back. Being immortal did not make me invincible. Look at what the Bacchants did to that poor Orpheus fella.

“Done,” the Morrigan replied. “But beware the agency of humans first. Working at the behest of Aenghus, one of them found you on some sort of new device called the Internet. Do you know of it?”

“I use it every day,” I said, nodding. If it was less than a century old, then it qualified as new to the Morrigan.

“Based on the word of this human, Aenghus Óg is sending some Fir Bolgs here to confirm that Atticus O’Sullivan is the ancient Druid Siodhachan Ó Suileabháin. You should have used a different name.”

“I’m a stupid git, and no doubt about it,” I said, shaking my head, piecing together how they must have found me.

The Morrigan’s expression softened and she grasped my chin in her fingers, pulling my mouth to hers. Her black robe melted away into nothingness, she stood before me like a Nagel poster come to life, and the heady scent of everything desirable to a man again filled my nostrils, though the effect was muted since I was now wearing my amulet. She kissed me deeply and then pulled away with that same maddening smirk on her face, knowing the effect she had on me, magically assisted or not. “Wear your amulet at all times from now on,” she said. “And call on me, Druid, when you have need. I have some humans to hunt now.”

And with that she turned back into the battle crow and flew out the door of my shop, which opened of its own accord to grant her passage.