Granuaile put down her glass and leaned forward. “But you should have destroyed them all! You had the power of the whole earth at your command! You see how things are bound together. Why couldn’t you, you know …” She faltered, making lame gestures of something breaking apart with her hands.
“Go ahead and ask. Every initiate does at some point.”
“Well, can’t you break the bonds holding together someone’s aorta, for example? Or cause an aneurysm in the brain? Pull out all the iron in the blood?”
“I can’t because of this,” I said, holding up my tattooed right arm and pointing at it with my left hand. “I know you can’t read what these bindings mean yet, but there’s a condition woven into these knots. As soon as you attempt to use any of the earth’s energy to directly harm or kill a living creature—any creature, mind you, not just a human—you’re dead. The only reason the earth grants Druids her power is that we’re pledged to protect her life. So if a rhino charges me, I’m not bursting its heart. I’m getting out of the way.”
Granuaile stared at me. “That makes no sense.”
“Of course it does.”
“You just told me how you bound the Norns together and chopped off their heads.”
“I bound their clothes together—they happened to be wearing them at the time. I performed no magic directly on their bodies. I killed them with my sword.”
“That’s not protecting life!”
“I was protecting my own.”
“But you told me Aenghus Óg used magic to take over Fagles’s mind!” She was referring to a binding placed on the Tempe police detective who’d shot me six weeks ago. Since the Tuatha Dé Danann were bound to the earth like me, they had to follow the same rule.
“He did. But that binding didn’t directly harm Fagles. Fagles was killed by the Phoenix police.”
“But didn’t he make Fagles shoot you? Wasn’t that harming you?”
“The magic was directed at Fagles, not at me. And Fagles shot me with a completely ordinary, nonmagical gun.”
Granuaile tapped her fingernail on the table. “These are really hair-thin distinctions.”
“Yes, and they’re the sort that Aenghus Óg knew very well.”
“Why bother making them? I mean, the earth has to be aware that you’re using her power to strengthen your sword arm or make you jump higher and so on.”
“Yes. I’m using the power to compete. To prove myself worthy of living another day. Competition, strife, and predation are natural and encouraged by the earth. I still have to be smarter than the other guy, more skilled than the other guy to survive. I can’t simply fix everything by melting people’s brains.”
“Wait. You mess around with skin cells all the time. You give people wedgies by binding the cotton of their underwear with the skin high up on their backs. You started a slap fight between two cops in front of Satyrn.”
“No damage was done. The skin never broke. No harm, no foul.”
“All right, then, what about the demons? You used Cold Fire on them.”
“They’re not living creatures of the earth; they’re spirits from hell that take on a corporeal form here. But I have to warn you not to try anything standard on them. They are bound together differently than the flora and fauna of earth, so no Druidic magic works except for Cold Fire. It’s better just to hack them up. That unbinds them from their corporeal form quite well.”
Granuaile puffed an errant lock of hair away from her face and then tucked it behind her ear, thinking through the implications. “Does this tabu extend to healing?”
“Not in so many words, but in practice, yes. Messing around with tissues and organs is vastly complicated. It’s too easy to make a mistake and do more harm than good, and then you’re dead. That’s why I never go there with other people; I use magic to heal only myself, because there’s no prohibition against screwing yourself up and I know my body extremely well.”
“Ah, so that’s why you only use herblore for your healing.”
I nodded. “That’s right. You can perform bindings on harvested plants and the chemicals in them all you want. It’s slower than directly healing someone, but it’s safer all around. You can’t trespass against the prohibition to do no direct magical harm, and it keeps your abilities secret. If people wonder why your teas or poultices are so effective, you can plausibly point to your unique recipes or fresh ingredients or something else, and magic is never an issue.”
“Are you positive that you’re the last Druid alive today?”
I waggled the flat of my hand in the air in a sorta-kinda motion. “The Tuatha Dé Danann are technically Druids because they’re all tattooed like I am. They can do whatever I can do and then some. Best not to call them Druids, though. They like to think of themselves as gods.” I grinned sardonically. “Druids are lesser beings, you see. But so far as such lesser beings are concerned, I do believe I’m the last one walking the earth. Unless you want to count all the happy hippie neo-Druids who do seem to love the earth but lack any real magic.”
“No, I meant Druids like you.”
“Then there are none like me. Until you become one. If you live long enough.”
“I’ll make it,” Granuaile said. “You gave me this completely unsexy amulet to make sure I do.” She lifted a teardrop of cold iron strung on a gold chain out from her shirt. The Morrigan had given it to me, and I had passed it on to my apprentice.
“That’s not going to save you all the time,” I reminded her.
“I know. It seems to me that the thing to do is to simply disappear.”
“No, they’ll still look for us.”
“Who are they?”
“The remaining Norse and any other gods who want to make a point that you can’t kill gods with impunity.”
“What if they think we’re dead? Will they still be looking for us then?”
I sighed and smiled contentedly. “You’re a constant relief to me, you know. Every time you say something smart it gives me hope that you might become the first new Druid in more than a thousand years.”
Chapter 7
Moving sucks.
Most people would nod and agree without question, but saying it that way leaves ample room for interpretation. How much does it suck? Well, it’s not as bad as the stink behind a steak house. Nor is it comparable to the slow burn of heartache or the breathtaking agony of a swift kick to the groin. It’s more like the secret existential horror I feel whenever I see gummy worms.
I had a girlfriend in San Diego in the early nineties who noticed that I was profoundly unfamiliar with modern junk food. One day as I dozed at the beach, she tested the boundaries of my ignorance by arranging an entire package of gummy worms across my body, assuring me when I opened an eye that these gelatinous cylinders were some sort of new spa treatment called “sun straws” with UV protection built in, and I gullibly accepted her explanation. I woke up with bright death trails of corn syrup crisscrossing my torso, silently and stickily accusing me of wormicide in the hot coastal sun. Even the mighty rinse cycle of the Pacific Ocean couldn’t wash them away; they clung to me like soul-sucking leeches. She wasn’t my girlfriend after that, and I moved out of San Diego that very night.
It gets worse the longer you wait between moves, because you’ve had time to accumulate massive piles of crap, even if you try to minimize your consumption like I do.
Looking around at more than a decade’s worth of accreted stuff, I was glad this move would force me to leave it all behind. If I took anything with me, then “they” would know I’d scarpered off somewhere. Some of my best twentieth-century goodies were going to be let go—various bits of detritus saved from previous moves. My signed copy of the Beatles’ White Album was going to stay behind. So were the cherry Chewbacca action figures in the original packaging. I had a baseball signed by Randy Johnson when he was with the Diamondbacks and a beer bottle that had once met the lips of Papa Hemingway. Most of the weapons in the garage would be left; all I would take was the bow and the quiver of arrows blessed by the Virgin Mary, because those could come in handy. Other than that, I’d take Fragarach and Oberon and the clothes on my back, leaving everything else. The house was easy.
The business was tough. If I was going to make it look like I planned on coming back, I had to keep it open. But I had only one remaining employee besides Granuaile—Rebecca Dane—and I hated to leave her in charge of the store all by herself, especially since it was the first place my enemies would look for me. By the same token, they’d know I’d left town instead of croaked if I packed it up or sold it; I’d prefer they think me dead.
No matter how I rationalized it, I couldn’t help thinking that leaving Rebecca in the lurch would make me every bit the cocknuckle Thor was reputed to be. Hiring someone new to help her would only increase my cocknucklery.
Added to this was the problem of my rare-book collection. There were seriously dangerous tomes in there, protected by seriously dangerous wards. I couldn’t leave either the books or the wards in place, but it had to appear as though the rare books were still there.
Problems like that are why I like to have lawyers. They do all sorts of useful things for me and keep it secret under the attorney-client privilege. After going for a morning jog with Oberon and tuning the TV to Animal Planet for him, I met one of my attorneys, Hal Hauk, at a Tempe bagel joint called Chompie’s. Hal ordered a bagel with lox (shudder), and I had a blueberry one with cream cheese.
Hal looked very businesslike, his expression professionally bland and his movements conservative and precise. He seemed to be slightly uncomfortable in his navy pin-striped suit, which was ridiculous because it was perfectly tailored. I knew that meant he was nervous. He hadn’t behaved this way since I first moved into Tempe and the Pack hadn’t settled my status yet. It made me curious: Had my status changed somehow with the Pack all of a sudden?
“What’s got you all twitchy, Hal? Fess up.”
Hal’s eyes met mine sharply, and I watched with amusement as his shoulders visibly relaxed, but only with a conscious effort. “I am not the least bit twitchy. Your characterization is scurrilous and unfounded. I haven’t twitched once in the two minutes we’ve been here.”
“I know, and the effort at locking it down is going to give you indigestion. Why don’t you just tell me what’s bothering you so you can get it out of your system and relax?”
Hal regarded me in stony silence for a few seconds, then his fingers began drumming in sequence on the tabletop. He was worked up, all right. But when he spoke, I could barely hear him. “I don’t want to be alpha.”
“You don’t want to be alpha?” I said. “Well, then, your dreams have come true. You’re not. Gunnar is alpha, and you’re doggie number two.”
“But Gunnar is going with you to Asgard.”
I blinked. “He is?”
Hal dipped his chin in the barest of nods. “It was decided last night. Leif talked him into it. I’m to be alpha until he returns. And if he doesn’t … well, then I’m doomed.”
“Bwa-ha-ha, cue the derisive laughter. You can’t be top dog and tell me you’re doomed, Hal. Nobody is going to buy that.”
“I like being Gunnar’s second,” Hal groused. “I don’t want to make those decisions. And there will be plenty to make if he doesn’t come back. Scores more if Leif doesn’t come back.”
“How is Leif, anyway? Is that finger fully grown back?” Leif had lost his finger—and nearly his undead existence—in the fight with die Töchter des dritten Hauses, when they managed to torch his combustible flesh.
“Yeah, it’s fine, and he’s coming to see you tonight, along with Gunnar.”
“Good. What’s the problem with Leif not coming back?”
“We’ll have the bloodiest vamp war in centuries if he’s gone more than a month. They’re already sniffing around.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The vampires. They want his territory.”
“The bloodiest vamp war in history will be fought over Tempe?”
Hal stared at me to gauge whether I was being serious or not. “His territory is a whole lot bigger than Tempe, Atticus. You can’t tell me you didn’t know.”
“Well, yes, I can. Leif and I never talked about his territory, because I’m not interested and he’s not a braggart. I know that Leif must be in singular control of Tempe, because I’ve never seen or smelled another vampire in the city, but I don’t know how he could realistically hold any more.”
Hal snorted and held his face in his hands. He peered at me from between his fingers. “Atticus. Leif controls the entire state of Arizona. All by himself. He’s the baddest of badass vampires. He’s the oldest thing walking around this hemisphere, besides you and the native gods.” He dropped his hands and tilted his head at me like a curious canine. “You honestly didn’t know that?”
“Nope. Why would I care? I’m not a vampire and I don’t want his territory. You don’t want the whole state for your pack either, am I right?”
“Well, no, but you have to appreciate what’s going to happen here.”
“No, I don’t. I’m moving.”
“Wherever you move it’s going to be felt. This kind of power vacuum is going to bring every wannabe vamp lord down on this state, all wanting to carve out a piece of it for themselves. And they’re going to leave other power vacuums behind them when they go. If Leif doesn’t come back, the ripples are going to be felt all over the country, I can guarantee it, and in quite a few other countries besides.”