Hexed

Chapter 10

I spent most of the cab ride home muttering about thrice-cursed trickster gods, but by the end of it I was smiling in spite of myself. I wasn’t the first guy who’d been tricked by Coyote, and I wouldn’t be the last. I’d actually gotten off pretty lightly, walking away with nothing more than a flesh wound.

Lunch with Oberon was unusually relaxing, perhaps because I’d rid myself of a large piece of unfinished business. My hound had five Weisswurst sausages, and I had peanut butter and orange marmalade on wheat with a glass of milk. Oberon wanted to discuss what he’d seen in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, how Nurse Ratched was really the Man and how Wavy Gravy would have shown her a thing or two if he’d been there. He wanted to talk about where Chief Bromden went at the end, whether I thought he went back to the Columbia River or whether he might have gone out to fight against the Combine. He also, very somberly, wanted to talk about end-of-life decisions.

he said,

I didn’t know what to say. Chief had smothered McMurphy with a pillow. I unexpectedly teared up just thinking about it and scratched him behind the ears. Then that wasn’t enough, so I squatted down and gave him a hug. Oberon didn’t know it, but he had already outlived every Irish wolfhound that had ever walked the earth. The tragedy of his magnificent breed is their fairly short life span, only six or seven years. But I’d been giving Oberon the same blend of herbs and magic that kept me looking and feeling twenty-one instead of twenty-one hundred, a brew I jokingly called Immortali-Tea. Oberon was now fifteen and had no idea that he should have been dead years ago, not running around with the energy and strength of a three-year-old adult. Okay, buddy, I finally said.

Before I could descend further into maudlin sentiment, my cell phone began to play “Witchy Woman,” an Eagles ringtone I’d downloaded especially for Malina’s calls.

I walked out to my backyard before answering it, deciding to recharge a bit while I spoke with her. She thanked me for the shipment of bloodwort and made polite noises about its superior quality; I made polite noises back, thanking her for her business; and I thought all the while that it was good to be back to our formal relationship. Then she got down to the business I wanted to hear.

“We were able to confirm in last night’s ritual that die Töchter des dritten Hauses are here in the East Valley, but we were sadly unable to pinpoint their precise location.”

“Then you have both my congratulations and condolences. Any ideas on why you couldn’t get a clearer picture?”

“Perhaps our effectiveness is reduced with only six of us left. Perhaps they have cast some sort of cloak about themselves that we are unable to penetrate. Most likely it is a little bit of both,” she said. “We will try again tonight. Did you try divining their location yourself?”

“No, I haven’t had the time to use my own methods,” I said. “Kind of had a busy morning. I ought to have some time to try after work.”

“I doubt you will have any time at all. We also performed our divination ritual to locate the Bacchants and had much more success. They are here—twelve of them, to be exact—and they plan to begin causing mischief in Scottsdale this evening. Saturnalian orgies will ensue unless you intervene.”

“Is it truly important I intervene tonight?” I hadn’t heard anything more from Laksha, and I might not have an effective way of doing so. “What lasting damage could one night of true bacchanalia really do to Scottsdale?”

“Mr. O’Sullivan. Bacchanalia will spread disease. It will ruin marriages and other relationships, causing untold emotional distress and greater economic damage through divorce. It encourages a lifestyle of reckless behavior and moral turpitude, and participants often become criminals in short order.”

“That sounds like a weekend at the Phoenix Open.”

“I am not joking. People occasionally die from their exertions, which we clearly cannot allow. And, besides that, the Bacchants will significantly increase their numbers if unchecked, and you will have a bigger problem the longer you wait.”

“Well, wait a second, you said before that these Bacchants have been in Las Vegas for years.”

“That is correct.”

“Well then, why isn’t Vegas all jacked up? Oh.”

“Yes?”

“I think the question answered itself. I beg your pardon.”

“Granted. They will be at a nightclub called Satyrn on Scottsdale Road. It’s fairly upscale. You will need to make an effort to appear a little less scruffy.”

She was baiting me, but I wasn’t going to bite. “Will you say scruffy one more time for me, please?”

“Scruffy. Why?”

“I’m trying to learn your accent.”

Her voice grew chilly and her accent became more pronounced. “I’m sure you have much more important things to do, as do I. Good day.”

I grinned as I put away my phone. She was funny when she got herself in a snit.

Biking to work actually took some effort on my part, drained as I was from using Cold Fire. I’d have to spend the night recuperating in the backyard to recharge my depleted cells.

The widow waved to me as I trundled past.

“Did ye see Mary, then?” she called.

“Sure did!” I gave her a thumbs-up. “I’ll come sit with you after work and tell you all about it.”

“Ah, that’ll be grand!”

The book side of Third Eye Books and Herbs doesn’t need much of my personal attention anymore. With automated inventory control, the computer orders another copy for me whenever I sell something. Perry Thomas, my employee for more than two years and the cheeriest Goth kid I’ve ever met, could almost run the whole thing for me. He was always restocking Karen Armstrong’s books, because they tended to move pretty well, along with books about Wicca and primers on Taoism or Zen Buddhism.

What Perry cannot do is run the apothecary side of things, except on the most basic level: If I point to pre-made sachets of certain proprietary blended teas and say, “Add hot water,” he’s all over it, and he happily serves my arthritic customers who come in every day for a shot of Mobili-Tea. But he cannot mix herbs on his own, cannot recognize when we’re low on one herb or have too much of another, and he’s simply not allowed to sell bulk herbs to anyone, because he’s incapable of warning them about the herbs’ dangerous properties.

He greeted me with a wave and a “ ’Sup, Atticus,” when I jangled the bells above my door. He was restocking some books that predicted the end of the world based on what loinclothed Mayan mystics said fourteen centuries ago.

Granuaile was sitting behind the apothecary counter, headphones jacked into a laptop and practicing her Latin as I had asked. Only at it for a week, she was already able to trade basic sentences with me. She didn’t hear the bells tingle due to the headphones, but she saw me peripherally after a moment and flashed me a smile of about 1.21 gigawatts.

I quickly reflected that the Diamondbacks’ bullpen had been remarkably shoddy last season and they had better find a solution before spring training began. Brighid be thanked, Granuaile was now fully dressed and seemed unaware that she made me dizzy at times.

A couple of ASU professors were drinking tea at one of the tables and talking politics. A small, hairy man amused me for a while with the questions he asked Perry. First he wanted to find something about the Elder Gods (he’d clearly been reading too much Lovecraft), then he wanted a book about howling dervishes, not whirling dervishes, and then wondered if we stocked anything about the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. Perry showed him what we had in each case, but nothing seemed to satisfy him, and he finally purchased only a dollar’s worth of sandalwood incense. Such is life in retail.

“Three people are coming in around four o’clock for interviews,” Granuaile said as I began making sachets of my most popular teas. “They all sound inordinately excited about ringing up books and boiling water.”

“It’s a glamorous career, no doubt about it,” I replied. “Are you missing Rúla Búla already?”

“A little bit,” she admitted. “Not that you’re not keeping me busy”—she waved at the computer screen that was coaching her on conjugating some Latin verbs—“I just miss the people and the atmosphere.”

“Me too,” I said. “Think they’d let you come back and work once a week, and let me come back and spend my money there?”

Granuaile shrugged. “I can ask.”

“Do, please. Oberon and I are missing the fish and chips.”

The bells above the shop door chimed and two rare sights entered my shop. I think my mouth may have dropped open. A tall, lanky, elderly gentleman with a high forehead and round spectacles, dressed in black save for a white priest’s collar, was followed by a shorter, younger, rounder fellow in traditional Hasidic garb. Perry greeted them with a friendly hello, and the older fellow immediately asked to see the proprietor.

“That would be me,” I said. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. Is this a joke?”

“I beg your pardon?” the older fellow inquired politely, a faint smile on his narrow face. He sounded like an English butler.

“You know, a tall priest and a short rabbi walk into a pagan bookstore …”

“What?” He looked down at his companion, seeming to realize for the first time that he was quite a bit shorter and in fact of a different religious order than he. “Oh, gracious, I suppose it must seem amusing at that.” He didn’t seem amused, though.

“How may I help you today?” I asked.

“Ah. Yes. Well, I am Father Gregory Fletcher, and this is the Rabbi Yosef Zalman Bialik. We were hoping to speak to Atticus O’Sullivan.”

“Well, hope no more.” I grinned at them. “You’re talkin’ to him.”

I laid on the college kid’s informality pretty thick. These fellows didn’t look right to me, and until I knew what they were after, they weren’t going to see anything but the façade I presented to the general public. Their auras were perfectly human, but they churned with lust—not the carnal kind; rather, the lust for power—and that wasn’t consistent with peaceful men of God. Plus, the rabbi’s aura betrayed the slim white interference of a magic user.

“Oh, I beg your pardon. You seem rather young for a man of your reputation.”

“I didn’t know I had a reputation amongst the clergy.”

“In some …” the priest paused, searching for the right word, then continued, “… small circles, we have heard of you.”

“Really? What kind of circles?”

Father Gregory ignored my query and responded with another. “Well, if you’ll forgive the direct question, were you involved in an unusual situation in the Superstition Mountains about three weeks ago?”

I looked blankly at him, and then at the rabbi, and told a whopper. “Nope, never been out there.”

“On ne gavarit pravdu,” the rabbi said in Russian, speaking for the first time. He is not telling the truth. Father Gregory responded fluently in the same language, telling Yosef to be quiet and let him handle things. If they thought I couldn’t understand Russian, I didn’t want to disabuse them of the notion.

“Hey, I’m an American,” I said, “and the only language I speak is English, and not too good neither. When you speak that other stuff, it makes me think you’re sayin’ something rude about me.”

“I beg your pardon,” Father Gregory said. “Were you perhaps at Skyline High School this morning?”

That question nearly triggered a flare of my nostrils. It took me to new heights of paranoia, and I struggled to maintain my mask of indifference. I knew that word of Aenghus Óg’s death had gotten around, but nobody should know about the fallen angel yet except Coyote and the Virgin Mary, and I hardly thought either of them would stop to chat with these guys.

I shook my head. “I don’t even know where that is. Been here all day.”

“I see,” Father Gregory said, clearly disappointed. Rabbi Yosef was seething silently and turning a bit red. He knew I was shoveling shit on their boots. The priest decided to change the subject. “I’ve heard you have quite the rare-book collection. May I see it?”

“Of course. North wall, over there,” I pointed to a group of large china cabinets full of books, all locked away and lacking any recognizable organization.

The rare-book trade is another part of my business Perry can’t handle, but there’s so little commerce in that area that no one complains when I’m not around to handle it. The books I have are extraordinarily rare—as in there are only one to ten copies in existence, because they’re handwritten grimoires and scrolls full of real, honest-to-Dagda spells and rituals for magical masters only.

I also keep many historical secrets in there—secrets that would be a bugle call for Indiana Jones and his ilk, like the supposedly lost Sotomayor manuscript. I nearly geeked out just thinking about it being there. Pedro de Sotomayor was the scribe for Don Garcia López de Cárdenas, a lieutenant of Coronado’s who took eighty days to make a two-week trip to the Grand Canyon. Garcia is famous today for being the first European to see the Grand Canyon, but, according to Sotomayor, they found a gigantic hoard of Aztec gold that the Tusayans (now known as the Hopi tribe) were keeping in trust for their southern friends under assault by Cortés. Garcia and his dirty dozen took the hoard and hid it, and Sotomayor wrote it all down because they planned to come back and get it later, cutting Coronado out of the deal. None of them ever made it back to the New World, however, and Sotomayor’s manuscript “didn’t survive,” so history only has the word of Castañeda—a guy who didn’t go with Garcia and knew nothing about what really happened—that they found nothing but a geological wonder after nearly three months. The gold is still there, on the Hopi reservation, and nobody’s looking for it. I like knowing secrets like that, and I admit that when I’m all alone in the shop sometimes, I rub my hands together greedily and laugh like a one-eyed, black-mustached pirate to think that I have a bona fide treasure map locked up in my cabinet.

The cabinet looked fragile, but it was a customized job: Behind the wood veneer there was steel plate, and the glass was bulletproof; it was vacuum-sealed to prevent the further decay of the paper and bindings, and the locks opened by magic only. Around the entire thing I had set my strongest protective wards, and of course there were more wards around my entire shop.

The priest and rabbi strolled over there, hands clasped behind their backs, to peruse what I had on display. They would most likely be disappointed. Writers of spell books do not emblazon the spines with easy-to-read titles. Granuaile caught my eye as I moved to follow them, and I put a finger to my lips and then mouthed at her, “Later.”

Perry had already lost interest and was back to restocking the shelves.

“What sorts of books do you have here, Mr. O’Sullivan?” Father Gregory asked when I came to a stop beside him, regarding the cabinet.

“Oh, all sorts,” I said.

“Can you give me an example of what I might be looking at?” the priest asked, gesturing toward a volume bound in the gray skin of cats. It was an Egyptian text written by Bast cultists, which I’d saved from Alexandria. If I waved that in front of a museum curator, he’d promptly lose control of his salivary glands.

“It’s really not a section open for browsing,” I replied.

“My dear boy,” the priest chortled in an avuncular manner, “how do you expect to sell any of it if you won’t let customers peruse your catalog?”

I shrugged. “Most of it’s not for sale.” I sold one purely historical work per year at auction, and that gave Third Eye a healthy balance sheet even if I lost money on the bulk of the store’s business. “I look at myself as more of a caretaker.”

“I see. And how did you come to take care of such a collection?”

“Inherited it from my family,” I said. “If there’s a certain title you’re looking for, I can see if I have it, or maybe I can get it for you.”

The priest looked at the rabbi and the rabbi shook his head briefly. I could see they were getting ready to make excuses and leave, but I wanted to know a little more about them. I slipped in between them and the cabinet, uncomfortably close. They took a step back and I crossed my arms in front of my chest.

“Why did you come here today, gentlemen?” I said, a challenge in my tone. I let the vapid college kid slough away just a wee bit, and they noticed.

Father Gregory looked flustered and began to stammer. The rabbi was not so easily rattled. He glared at me and said coolly in English with a telltale Russian accent, “You can hardly expect us to be candid with you when you have not been candid with us.”

“You haven’t earned it. You’re strangers and you refuse to answer my questions.”

“You answer ours with lies,” the rabbi hissed. Such an affable fellow.

“Perhaps I’d tell you what you want to hear if I knew you didn’t mean me any harm.”

Father Gregory tried to be avuncular again. “My dear boy, we are both men of the cloth—”

“Who have wandered into a New Age bookstore asking strange personal questions,” I interrupted. “And look, you could’ve gotten those costumes anywhere right after Halloween.”

Both of them registered shock at the suggestion they were not truly clergymen—so that was one question answered. I should be able to find them on the Internet somewhere if they were legit.

Father Gregory clasped his hands together in a prayerful attitude. “I do apologize, Mr. O’Sullivan. It appears we have started off on the wrong foot. My colleague and I represent certain interests who believe you may be able to advance their agenda.”

I crinkled my brow in confusion. “Advance their agenda? Well, I have a website. I could put up a banner or something, if they’re looking for publicity.”

“No, no, you misunderstand—”

“Purposely misunderstand, you mean,” the rabbi spat. “Come on, Gregory, this is a waste of time.” He pulled at the priest’s arm and stalked off toward the exit. Father Gregory shot me an apologetic look and followed the rabbi, looking defeated. I let them go, because I had research to do. They clearly knew more about me than I knew about them, and that’s an extremely uncomfortable feeling for an old Druid.

“What was that all about?” Granuaile asked as I rejoined her behind the apothecary counter.

“Don’t know.” I shook my head. “But I’m going to find out soon.”

I brooded and busied myself with preparing tea blends until it was time for interviews. The first two candidates were semi-sentient boys who stared at me with their mouths open whenever I was talking. Their eyes were dead and never lit up until I asked them if they liked video games. They’d probably have difficulty alphabetizing.

Rebecca Dane, the third candidate, was refreshing. She had a strong chin and large eyes that she had seen fit to accentuate with Betty Boop eyelashes. Her blond hair fell to her shoulders, was pulled back and clipped with silver butterflies, and her bangs stopped just above her eyebrows. Her wardrobe was a black pantsuit with a shimmery blue scarf that she let fall straight down her torso, and an impressive tinkling of silver jewelry about her neck proclaimed her to be a member of practically every known world religion. Alongside the cross I saw so often in America, there was the Star of David, Islam’s crescent moon, the Zuni bear fetish, and an ankh. When I asked her about them, she fingered the ankh sheepishly and grinned.

“Oh, I tend to vacillate between belief systems,” she said with a touch of Wisconsin in her voice. “Right now I’m kind of checking out the whole buffet, you know, and maybe in a little while I’ll decide on what I want to put on my plate and chow down on.”

I smiled reassuringly at her. “Belly up to the religion smorgasbord, eh? That’s good, may harmony find you. But how do you feel about people who are looking for a specific book, maybe about a religion you disagree with?”

“Oh, I have kind of a laissez-faire attitude—you know, live and let live. Doesn’t bother me if someone wants to worship the Goddess or Allah or the Flying Spaghetti Monster; they’re all seeking the divine within and without.”

I would have hired her based solely on her healthy attitude and self-awareness, but she proved to be something of an amateur herbalist—enough to be dangerous, to be sure, but also enough to train properly. I had visions of letting her and Perry run the store for days at a time while Granuaile and I tried to restore the land around Tony Cabin.

“You’re hired,” I told her, and her wide mouth split into a huge smile. “You’ll start out three dollars above minimum wage, but learn the apothecary side of the business in a month and I’ll double it.”

She was quite excited, and that made filling out the government paperwork less of a chore. She didn’t know what to think of Perry at first, but he put her at ease once he smiled and proved not to be the stone-cold Goth he looked like.

I enticed Granuaile to hang out with me for a while after work by telling her she could ask me anything she wanted about history and I’d answer to the best of my ability. I gave her full disclosure that I’d make her drive me to the airport to pick up Laksha if and when she called, and we also had the onerous chore of sipping Irish whiskey with the widow ahead of us.

“What’s onerous about that?” Granuaile asked.

“Nothing at all. I was being facetious. You’ll love the widow.”

Granuaile had seen the widow before and vice versa, but they’d never been formally introduced. Granuaile had been sharing her skull with Laksha at the time, and the widow had been preoccupied watching werewolves landscape her front yard. The prospect of introducing them actually made me nervous—what if they didn’t like each other? But I should have known I had nothing to worry about. Mrs. MacDonagh is the soul of hospitality to anyone who isn’t British and doubly welcoming to redheaded freckled gals with Irish names like Granuaile. I made sure to introduce her as my employee so the widow wouldn’t assume, as older citizens frequently do, that the young man and woman must be having loud, acrobatic sex every chance they got.

“Does Granuaile know all yer secrets, then, Atticus?” The widow winked as we settled down with clinking glasses of the Irish. It was a clever way of asking if she could talk freely.

“Yes, Granuaile knows how old I really am. She’s going to become a Druid herself, so you can talk about whatever you like.”

“She’s becomin’ a Druid?” the widow cast a surprised look at Granuaile. “Weren’t ye raised a proper Catholic girl?”

“I’m not a proper anything, I suppose,” Granuaile replied. “Majoring in philosophy kind of turns positive assertions into maybes.” That was the sort of observation I had already come to admire in my apprentice. Her philosophy degree compensated somewhat for starting her training so late. Her mind had not lost any of its flexibility, and she was very quick to pick up on the difficulties she’d face in the modern world as a magic user and a pagan to boot.

We chatted pleasantly until the sun went down, when I suggested I should be getting home to Oberon. I rode my bike and Granuaile trailed behind in her blue Chevy Aveo. I let Granuaile keep Oberon happy on the front porch with a belly rub while I put in a call to Leif.

He didn’t spend time on niceties like saying hello. He answered the phone with, “Have you changed your mind about Thor?”

“Um … no,” I said, and he promptly hung up on me. My disappointment must have shown on my face, because Granuaile asked me what was wrong.

“It seems my lawyer’s feeling unusually bloodsucky,” I replied. “Our cordial relationship may be over.”

“No way to patch it up, huh?”

“Well, no, it’s not like I can send him a box of chocolates. I have scruples about sending him people for dinner. And I can’t possibly do what he wants me to do.”

“What’s that?”

“Kill a thunder god.” Before Granuaile could reply, my phone started ringing in my hand. It was an unknown number.

“I’m back in town, Atticus,” Laksha Kulasekaran said on the other end of the line. “Pick me up on the north side of Terminal Four.”

She and I were going to hunt some Bacchants. I slung Fragarach across my back before Granuaile and I jumped back into her car, because while it would do me no good against them unsheathed, I could simply brain them with the scabbard if necessary—and I can’t count how many times I’ve wished I had it with me when I left it at home.