I charge up the silver storage of Scáthmhaide and use the bindings carved into it at Flidais’s instruction to make Orlaith and myself completely invisible. Then we enter the steel-and-glass tower of Thatcher Oil & Gas, travel up to the tenth floor, and stroll right past his secretary’s desk.
When I open the door to his office, he’s on the phone, red-faced and angry, practically shouting into the receiver. He’s hearing that his entire oil production is at a standstill and can’t be fixed. Customers will begin to get their oil elsewhere when they can’t fill orders. Good: He’s already having a bad day.
I haven’t seen him in the flesh for more than twelve years, and his flesh has suffered the ravages of time. He used to have very sharp features—bladed cheeks and a keen edge to the ridge of his nose—but the lines have softened and swelled now, there’s heavy luggage under his eyes, and his hair clings to his scalp like thin wavy patches of pond moss, if the moss were pale gray. His mouth still has the same cruel curl to it, though, and it frowns at the door when we walk through and close it behind us. His eyes drop away, seeing nothing, and he resumes his bilious shouting into the phone.
“Right now I don’t fucking care how it happened; I care about getting it fixed, God damn it! Tell me when you’ll have it fixed!” He pauses to listen briefly and then interrupts. “Hey, are you a fucking engineer or aren’t you? You’re supposed to know how shit works. You can’t tell me you don’t know how to fix it without me suspecting that you’re incompetent, you understand? Now, you’d better know how to fix it and tell me when it’ll be fixed before the hour’s up! Call me then!”
He slams down the phone and growls, “Shhhhit!” in his frustration. It makes all of yesterday’s work well worth it, and I smile.
That’s when I drop my invisibility and Orlaith’s and say, “Hello, Beau.”
He startles, his eyes going wide, and says, “Who the hell are you?”
“I’m Granuaile. Don’t you remember? The stepdaughter you sent off to college in Arizona oh so long ago?”
“Bullshit. She’s dead. Tell me who you really are and how you got that big damn dog in here.”
I walk forward and seat myself in the plush leather chair opposite his mahogany desk. Orlaith sits next to me on the left.
“Come on, Beau. Believe your eyes. I’m Granuaile and I’m not dead. And, no, Mom doesn’t know. I’d appreciate it if you kept this between us.”
He takes a good long look at me and shakes his head. “I don’t believe it. Where the hell you been? Why’d you let us think you were dead?”
“That’s all secret stuff. The kind of thing where if I told you I’d have to kill you.”
“Whatever,” he says, waving my answer away. His hands drop below the desk after that and I almost comment but he continues to say, “I’m not really interested.”
“Oh, I know. You never were.” There would be no “Welcome home, Granuaile, I’m so glad you’re not dead!” coming from him.
He scowls at me. “What do you want? I’m busy.”
“No, you’re not. You have an oil empire that’s producing no oil right now, so you’re not busy at all. You have me to thank for that.”
“What?”
“Every well and refinery owned by TO and G stopped working yesterday, am I right?”
“How do you know that?”
“Because I made it happen.”
“How?”
“How is not the question you should be asking. You should be asking why. And it’s because enough is enough, or because of karma, or whatever you want to call it. I want you to stop. Reinvest in solar and wind, open a chain of hardware stores, I don’t care. Just stop being a blight on the earth.”
He sneers at me in disgust. “Oh, you’re a goddamn hippie, aren’t you?”
“I’m a Druid.”
“What you are is full of shit and about to be arrested,” he says.
The office doors burst open behind me, and four security guards rush in, presumably in response to a silent alarm he triggered behind his desk. They’re fit and well-paid professionals, not the slow and soggy kind. Orlaith spins and growls at them, and that makes them pull up for a second. I have Scáthmhaide in hand, and when they see that, along with the tomahawk I have at my hip, they pull out those hard-plastic police batons. The one closest to Orlaith looks like he’s going to use it on her, so I slide over there and poke him gently in the gut, forcing him back a couple of steps. “Let’s be kind to animals, sir.”
They start shouting at me to drop my weapon, Orlaith barks at them, Beau yells at them to stop fucking around and take me down, and I grin. Their uniforms are awful polyester blends and I can’t mess with them, but their shoes are made of leather. Natural material there, even if treated with chemicals. Almost identical to the leather of the chair I was just sitting in. I bind the closest guy’s right foot to the back of the chair, high up, and the binding simultaneously yanks his foot up in the air and the back of the chair down. They rush to meet, both toppling over and dragging across the floor toward each other, effectively blocking the other guards from getting to me. I repeat the binding on the others, and soon they’re all immobilized and cursing, kicking at the chair. They won’t stay that way forever—eventually they’ll slip out of their shoes, but I plan to be gone by then. I turn around to bid Beau a mocking farewell, since I’ve delivered my message, and discover that he’s pulled a gun out of his desk and he’s pointing it at me. My amusement at the guards disappears.
“Aha! Not so funny now, is it?” he says. “You shoulda stayed dead, Granuaile. Pretty thing like you is gonna hate what’s left of your life in prison. Now, put that fucking stick down slow or I’ll pop you in the knee. My boys there will testify I had no choice. And drop that axe too; then we’ll talk about what you’ve done to the wells.”
His condescending sneer—a frequent nightmare from my youth—sets off a rumbling quake of rage inside me, and the careful admonitions I had made to myself last night float down the River Lethe.
“Okay, okay,” I say, and slowly begin to sink to my knees, seeming to comply. Then I mutter the words to trigger invisibility, and as soon as I wink out of his sight I drop down behind the desk and roll out of the gun’s line of fire, moving to my right and his left, away from my hound.
“Hey, now,” he says, standing up and waving that gun around, searching for me. Orlaith is growling at him, and through our mental link I tell her not to move.
“Don’t fuck with me. No telling who could get hurt,” he says, the gun barrel drifting in Orlaith’s direction.
It’s not a direct threat, but it’s not subtle either, and if I was angry before, now I’m ready to erupt. I come up on his left, raise Scáthmhaide, and bring it down hard on his extended right wrist. It’s a blow across his body, but that’s why long staffs are handy. He shoots a round into the top of his desk before letting go, at the same time making a high squeal of pain because I’ve shattered the bones in his wrist. He clutches it, takes a step back, and I drop Scáthmhaide to lay into him with my fists. Doing so makes me visible and he sees me coming but not in time to do anything about it except reflexively widen his eyes. I crunch my fist into his face, and he lets out another cry as he collapses. I follow him to the ground and keep punching him in the body as I shout.