Staked

“I, uh … think there’s been a mistake. Who are you?”

A red apparition swirled into form, very proper and charming and allowing me to note details of the dress, which helped me place her origins later. The illusion of propriety broke down around the mouth: It gaped unnaturally wide as it shouted at me. “I’m your fiancée! Gwendolyn!”

“What? Hey, I’m not the guy you’re looking for. My name’s not really Nigel either.”

“Liaaaaarr!”

The furniture got really aggressive at that point and clocked me pretty good, and there was very little I could do but run. There’s nothing a Druid can do about a ghost, honestly. Nothing physical about them to bind or unbind, and my cold iron amulet is just a hunk of metal to them.

That does not mean, however, that ghosts are not subject to being bound—they are typically bound to a space near where they died, albeit by intangible spiritual tethers rather than anything tied to the earth. For me to escape her, all I had to do was escape the building. Or so I thought.

As I pelted through the hall and then down the grand staircase leading to the exit, all manner of papers and books and dust devils followed me along with her screams. I got a textbook to the temple at one point and fell down but scrambled back up again, staggering a bit. She chased me right out the door in a rather shockingly immodest display and then, much to my horror, kept going. Now that she’d found her Nigel, she had moored herself to me and unchained herself from the building. I had to skedaddle, which I think is the best possible word for getting the hell out when a poltergeist thinks you’ve jilted her. Where the university’s law library is now, there used to be a giant old oak that I had tethered to Tír na nÓg, and I used that to shift away to safety and do some research on who or what she was.

Later on, I shifted back in and waited to be attacked, but Gwendolyn the poltergeist wasn’t lurking by the oak. She had probably returned to the building she had haunted before, but there was no way I was returning to check. I picked up what few things I had at my lodgings and took off before she could locate me again, never to return to Toronto until today.

“So that Gwendolyn Lady in Red could still be out there right now?” Oberon said as I rinsed him off.

“Yep.”

“And she could still be very mad at Nigel?”

“Yep. She appears to have quite the impressive memory for a ghost.”

“And you’re going to dress up as Nigel Hargrave again on purpose?”

“That’s right. Except this time I will try to be her Nigel instead of the pre-med student she mistook for him. She’s capable of talking—she has things she desperately wants to say to Nigel, you see—and I have something I need to say too.”

“You should sing her a love song. Music soothes the savage ghost.”

“Uh, that’s breast, Oberon, savage breast, not savage ghost. William Congreve wrote the original line, and he gets misquoted a lot.”

“Well, it’s no wonder. I’ve never met a savage breast. Tasty ones, yeah, fried up and covered in gravy, but never savage.”

“You’ve been a good hound in the bath. Let’s get you dried off and feed you a sausage or two.”

CHAPTER 4

Few things chap me tits worse than big cities. Smelly things, choked with cars, and the horizon choked with big rectangular signs telling people to buy newer cars. I says to Greta, “I love it when ye kick me arse, but this city is doing it in a way I can’t fight back. This Paradise Valley of yours is no paradise to me, love. I simply can’t live here in this fecking wasteland of concrete and cactus. I need me trees.” And gods bless her, she says she’ll move to the country with me. Sort of.

“How would Flagstaff be?” she says. “We’ll live on the San Francisco Peaks, with all those pines and aspens, and we can go into town when necessary.”

That sounds dodgy to me. “When would it ever be necessary?” I asks her.

“Well, we’d have to get food once in a while.”

“Why go to the city for that? We can hunt and grow our own. Get some sheep and goats and chickens.”

“All right, Owen, if you want to do that, I suppose it’s possible.”

“It’s more than possible. It’s the only way to live.”

She smiles at me and I feel hope again. “Then I’ll transfer myself over to the Flagstaff Pack,” she says. “It’s far past time for me to pick up and move on, and Sam and Ty are good guys.”

“Aye, good sparring partners,” I says. The leaders of the Flagstaff Pack are younger wolves than Hal Hauk and much of his crew in Tempe, but they’re a happy couple, share their beer, and don’t mind going a few rounds with a bear every so often. Truth be told, I’d rather go back to Ireland, but I can’t ask Greta to do that. She needs a pack to run with when the moon is full, and I’m not sure they have one over there.

A lot of business with something called a Realtor happens after that—they have people these days who do nothing but sell houses, and they aren’t even the ones who built them. Makes no fecking sense. “Here,” says I to Greta, “here’s this field full of prairie dogs I found and it has a shack to shite in. I will sell it to ye for stupid money. Is that how this Realtor thing works?”

“More or less. Except it’s the owner of the shack who puts it up for sale, not the Realtor.”

“Well, then, why do you need the Realtor person?”

“Lots of legal reasons. And it prevents the buyer and the seller from getting into fights.”

“Oh, well, I can understand that, then. I bought some bad venison once from a man who lived in a bog, and I wanted to pound the piss out of him. Should have had a Realtor do it for me; that would have been handy.”

“No, Owen, that’s not what Realtors do—”

“Well, they fecking should! There’s all manner of men living in bogs who need a good thrashing, and I bet there’s people who would pay. Could be a full-time job. Maybe it should be my job. Siodhachan says I’m supposed to have one.”

Greta gives up trying to explain Realtors after that, and I stop asking and just let her handle the modern horror of it all. She finds a place outside city limits, which suits me fine, with plenty of tree-dotted land attached to it and a house that’s way too big but she says will come in handy.

“Handy for what?” I asks. “I don’t need a fecking castle.”

“You might,” she replies.

I have no earthly idea what she means and she says to wait, she wants to sit me down with Hal and Sam and Ty and talk through something.

The sit-down comes a couple days later at Sam and Ty’s house when Hal drives up special from Tempe. They give me fancy beer and smile a bit too wide. They have cheese you can spread on crackers and clearly expect me ancient mind to be destroyed by the sheer cleverness of the idea. They must want to ask me to do them a favor and they’re afraid I’ll say no.

“All right, what is it, then?” I says. “If you’re going to try to convince me to get one of those cell phones, ye might as well give up now.”

“No, nothing like that, Owen,” Greta says. “As far as we know this is something you actually want.”