Tricked

“You think that skinwalker could have come back here and gotten to this blood while we were away?” I asked.

“Naw,” Coyote said. “I got him pretty good. They’re both laid up healin’ somewhere. Prob’ly won’t hear from either one of ’em for a couple days. But they’ll be back soon enough. Maybe you’ll be in decent shape yourself by then.”

Maybe. Getting into the truck while keeping my head as still as possible was awkward, but I managed it with only a couple of spikes of sharp pain.

Coyote drove with the window down and leaned his head out a bit into the wind. “So, when will the gold be there, Mr. Druid?”

“Sometime after the coal mines shut down,” I rasped. “The elemental wants them out of commission permanently. You’ll have a big labor pool to draw from.”

“An’ if the coal starts up again, the gold shuts down, is that it?”

“Right,” I said. Monosyllables, I decided, were good. Especially since I couldn’t nod.

“That means you’re goin’ to have to stay here longer’n you thought.”

“Yep.”

Coyote grunted but said no more until we drove up to camp. Granuaile and Oberon came running toward the truck.

Before we opened the doors, Coyote turned off the engine and said, “By the way, Mr. Druid, you lost a day. It’s Monday morning.”

I’d been missing for two nights? They were going to kill me.

"Atticus! Where have you been?"

Oberon approached at a dangerous speed as I stepped gingerly from the cab of the truck. Slow down, don’t jump on me, okay? I’m injured.

"Where?"

Neck. Under the skin; you won’t see it. I’ll explain to Granuaile and you’ll hear it all.

As she hurried to catch up, Granuaile’s face was cycling through expressions of relief and worry and determination to make me pay. I held up my hands in case she wanted to throw her arms around my neck and hug me—or in case she wanted to grasp my neck in her hands and choke me.

“Where have you been?” she demanded, stopping several paces away and folding her arms in front of her.

“Sorry to make you worry,” I grated, “but I’ll be okay soon enough.”

Her eyes flicked down to my wet, muddy jeans and noted my profound lack of shirt.

“What happened to you?”

“Someone took advantage of me.”

Granuaile shot an uncertain glance at Coyote.

“Hey, don’t look at me like that,” Coyote said. “Far as I know he’s still cherry.”

I jumped in with a fuller explanation before Granuaile could react or Oberon could question that particular colloquialism. “On the way back from the mine, I got attacked by a skinwalker and then we got chased by Hel’s hound, Garm.”

Granuaile’s jaw dropped. “How did you escape?”

“I didn’t, really. Coyote saved me.”

“Uh, what was that, Mr. Druid?” Coyote asked, cupping a hand behind his ear. “Didn’t quite hear that.”

“Yes, you did.” I didn’t feel like rehashing my brush with death while Coyote loitered nearby, so I gestured to Granuaile’s car. “Let’s go to town,” I told her. “We have business to attend to and clothes to buy. I’ll tell you everything.”

“Hey, when are ya gonna be back?” Coyote asked.

“Before dark, don’t worry,” I said.

On the way in to town, I informed Granuaile and Oberon that I quite nearly died and that only Coyote’s intervention had prevented me from being completely eaten by the skinwalker and Garm. He’d saved me twice and died for me twice.

“I owe him big now,” I said. “Damn it.”

“Well, that explains why it was quiet in the hogan last night,” Granuaile said. “One skinwalker stabbed through the shoulder and another one shot twice. They’ll be laid up for a while.”

I gently begged to differ. “Not much longer, I expect. They’ll have accelerated healing as well, and if they still have the Famine spell laid on them, they’ll be desperate to reach me. I’m hoping that’s not the case, though. How goes the Blessing Way?”

“It’s almost finished. The hogan will be completely safe after tonight.”

We reached the outskirts of Kayenta and Oberon wagged his tail, seeing the buildings. "Do they have a decent butcher in this town?"

“I imagine someone’s working at it,” I said. Granuaile darted her eyes quickly at me but then realized I must be talking to Oberon. She was getting used to my occasional non sequiturs.

“Where to, sensei?” she said.

“Head for the big box store. I can pick up some clothes and a neck brace there. Or, rather, you can. Don’t think they’ll let me in looking like this. It’d be nice to have a pair of sandals too.”

“Got it.” I gave her my sizes and she left Oberon and me sitting in the parking lot.

"Where are we going next?" Oberon asked.

Breakfast. There’s a place on the highway called the Blue Coffee Pot.

"Will I get to come in?" Oberon asked. His tail wagged in excitement, thumping against the backseat.

I hope so. We’ll get you camouflaged and you can squeeze in somewhere.

"Awesome! I can almost smell it already. The air will be thick with coffee and butter and sausage. Just what I need after three days of dirt and beef jerky."

You could use a bath, I told him.

"I actually wouldn’t mind one for once, even though we had one just a few days ago. Do you have a good story ready?"

I can probably think of something, I replied. What sort of story are you in the mood for?

"Something with ninjas in it!"

That’s no fun. The ninjas are almost always invisible, and if they’re not then they’re wearing black pajamas and they don’t want to talk about anything. How about a story with samurai instead? I can tell you about one of them.

"You knew a real samurai?"

Yep. I spent a couple years in feudal Japan until Aenghus Óg chased me out of there.

"Did the samurai you knew suffer terribly over minor points of honor and struggle to keep his face expressionless as his world came crashing down?"

Most definitely.

"All right, that sounds cool! I can’t wait! Well, no, I take that back. I can wait until after breakfast. Priorities, you know. But, hey, before I forget, I need to report."

You do? Report what?

"You asked me to hang out around Sophie in the clever disguise of Snugglepumpkin and find out what she knows. It was a mission and I chose to accept it."

Ah, yes. Report, Snugglepumpkin.

"It’s not a very good secret-agent name, is it? Oh, well. What I found out is that she is secretly obsessed with lasers and wants to equip everything she owns with them. When nobody else was around, she would talk to me about her plans to mount giant frickin’ lasers on top of her truck, her roof, and above her front door, to disintegrate missionaries and stray cats that come to take a dump in her front yard. She is a completely awesome lady. She even shared with me that she prefers T-bones to New York strips, and that means she is one of the finest human beings on the planet."

Oberon. What did you find out about the building site?

"I was coming to that! Okay, they are laying out a massive compound, and I am not sure I understand it all. In one place they are building a factory for solar components; there’s another for wind, and in another they are planning a rail depot—does that make sense?"

Yes, they need to ship out their products somehow.

"Okay, and then she also pointed one time to this space across from where the rail depot would be and said the storage facilities would be there, and behind that would be the transformers. Does that mean Optimus Prime has decided to help the Navajos achieve energy independence?"

No, the kind of transformers she’s talking about transmit electricity. They are, sadly, inanimate structures.

"Oh. I thought that was too cool to be true. But, anyway, how did I do? Did I earn two sausages back?"

Yes, you did very well. You’re at negative twelve now.

"Gravy!"

Gravy, indeed. It was comforting to know that Coyote planned to follow through on his plan—or at least he was thorough enough in his trickery to make sure that Sophie and her crew believed they were going to build all that.

Granuaile returned with a bag full of clothes and a neck brace for me. I put the latter on first, and it eased some of the strain immediately. That would allow the muscle to grow back a bit faster.

“I didn’t know what kind of shirt would be best, but I figured we shouldn’t do anything like a regular T-shirt, which you’d have to squeeze over your head and put pressure on your neck. So I got this button-up one,” she said, holding up a chocolate-brown shirt with a light tan vertical pinstripe design, “and then I also got these tank tops, because I figured those would be easy to pull on.” She held a package of mixed black and gray undershirts. I considered both and then chose the undershirts, thinking the collar on the button-up would look a bit unwieldy and hang uncomfortably around the brace. I could stand to be cold for a while.

“Thanks,” I said, taking the package and the rest of the clothes from her. “Turn around and stand guard, will you?”

“You’re going to change right here in the parking lot?”

I cast camouflage on myself. “Sure. Scandal-free public nudity.”

“Damn.” She shook her head as I melted from view. “I can’t wait until I can do that too.”

“Only eleven years and nine months to go,” I teased her as she turned around. I gladly shucked off my wet, muddy jeans and put on the new pair. I noticed she hadn’t bought me any underwear; Granuaile either didn’t think of it or she did think of it and decided that I should go commando.

I tore open the package of undershirts and gingerly pulled a black one over my head before tucking it into my jeans. Though I was now dressed in a similar fashion to Coyote, I figured he could keep the cowboy hat and I’d rock the tattoos. Usually I don’t wear shirts that show them off, because they tend to draw attention and sometimes questions. “Where’d you get those done?” was an awkward one, because the truthful answer was, in Ireland around 50 B.C.E.

I slipped my feet into the sandals, then turned in a slow circle to check my surroundings, since my neck was now immobilized. No one was looking, so I dispelled the camouflage and pronounced myself ready to go.

Granuaile gave me a good once-over and her gaze felt less than innocent, but all she said was, “Much better,” before walking around to the driver’s side.

The Blue Coffee Pot was bustling for a Monday morning; we had to wait for a table. I asked the hostess if it was always like this, and she shook her head. “Coal mine’s closed, so a lot of the workers are enjoying a day off.”

“The mine’s closed?” I said, letting a bit of incredulity flavor my tone. “Why?”

“It’s in the paper,” she said, nodding her head over to a rack filled with the Arizona Daily Sun, Flagstaff’s newspaper. I bought one and grinned over the headline. BLACK MESA COAL MINE SABOTAGED, it read. The article claimed the shutdown was only temporary, until new equipment could be brought in, a few days at the earliest and two weeks at the latest, and there would be a raft of new security measures put in place to prevent something like this from happening again. The security measures wouldn’t bother me; I’d simply have to make sure I went during full daylight and allowed myself plenty of time to get back out. And maybe I’d take my sword, just in case.

It was interesting, I thought, that it had taken a couple of days to make it into the paper. That bespoke some serious suppression on their end at first, but now they were looking for someone to blame.

On page seven there was an extended article about my mysterious death in Tuba City. That headline read: BIZARRE TUBA CITY MURDER BAFFLES POLICE. Before I could get too far into the article, a table opened up and we were ushered over to a small two-top by the window. Once I saw where it was, I said, “Be right there, I forgot something in the car,” then I went to get Oberon. I camouflaged him and explained that the space was going to be pretty tight.

"It always is. Sometimes I wish I weren’t so freakishly huge. Do you ever wish you had a tiny dog?"

Nah. People find small dogs approachable, and I don’t necessarily want to be approached. When they see you coming, they’re more likely to cross the street. It’s like I have Sasquatch on a leash.

"Sasquatch on a leash! I like that."

You’re welcome. That would be a great band name, actually.

"Or it could be a line of men’s beauty products, like those musky soaps and colognes and stuff. Sasquatch on a Leash: Control your Smelly Beast."

I opened the door for Oberon and let him walk in. Watch out for people. Table’s to the right, next to the window.

"No problem."

Granuaile startled a bit when she felt Oberon brushing past her legs to wrap himself around the center of the table but otherwise gave no sign that she had a huge Irish wolfhound lying on her toes. I carefully sat down, tucked my legs underneath the chair, and then scooched forward.

We ordered coffee, eggs, and a whole lot of meat sides. While we waited for our food, I returned to the paper and read aloud the article about my death.

TUBA CITY—Authorities are flummoxed by a strange murder scene in a small patch of desert in Tuba City, where the remnants of a man were found on Thursday.

The body of Atticus O’Sullivan, age 31—