“It was rather difficult to concentrate. Aenghus Óg and Lugh were in my head, telling me to return the sword to Conn or die, and the Morrigan was telling me I would die if I gave it back. I said to the Morrigan that I wanted to keep Fragarach for my own, to which Aenghus Óg and Lugh both shouted no, so of course the Morrigan instantly agreed.”
Flidais laughed. “You played them against one another. This is utterly delicious.”
“But wait, it gets tastier. The Morrigan shielded my mind from Aenghus Óg and Lugh, and just in time. Conn’s lieutenants tried to slay me and quickly discovered that, while Fragarach was a great sword in Conn’s hand, it was a terrible sword in mine. They all shouted ‘Traitor!’ before they dropped in the mud, however, and I abruptly found myself surrounded by hostiles—hostiles egged on to kill me by Aenghus Óg and Lugh, no doubt. The Morrigan suggested to me that the best way out would be through Mogh Nuadhat’s army. Charging in that direction, I whirled Fragarach around me with all the strength a Druid could muster from the earth, cleaving bodies in two and shearing anonymous torsos from their trunks. The flying halves of men bowled whole men over, and fountains of blood showered upon my erstwhile comrades. I eventually reached Mogh Nuadhat’s Spaniards, who parted for me like the Red Sea for Moses—”
“For whom?”
“I beg your pardon. I was alluding to a figure from the Torah, who escaped an Egyptian army by appealing to the god Yahweh for aid. Yahweh parted the Red Sea for Moses and his Jewish friends to escape, and when the pharaoh’s army tried to follow, the Red Sea fell upon them, drowning them all. And so it was when Conn’s men tried to pursue me; the Spaniards closed ranks and thwarted them, and I ran freely to the other side of the field, thanking the Morrigan for her assistance. But that’s when Aenghus Óg decided to take a very personal hand in the matter. He appeared before me, in the flesh, and demanded that I return the sword.”
“You had better not be jesting with me now,” Flidais said.
“I assure you I remember it very clearly. He was outfitted in some stunning bronze armor etched with lovely bindings and dark-blue pauldrons and bracers. Do you remember seeing it?”
“Mmm. Long ago, yes. But that proves nothing.”
“Confirm it all with the Morrigan. For just as Aenghus and I were about to come to blows, she alighted on my shoulder as the battle crow and told Aenghus to back the fuck off.”
“She actually said that?”
“No.” I grinned. “I confess that was a bardic embellishment. She said I was under her personal protection and by threatening me he placed himself in mortal peril.”
Flidais clapped her hands in delight. “Oh, I bet he nearly shat kine!”
That made me laugh—I hadn’t heard that expression in a long, long time. I refrained from telling her that the modern expression would be “he had a cow,” because I liked the original better.
“Yes, the kine he nearly shat would have fed several clans.”
“What did Aenghus do then?”
“He protested that the Morrigan had gone too far and interfered beyond her compass. She replied that the battlefield was precisely her province and she could do as she wished. She tried to make him feel better by guaranteeing that Conn would survive the night and even win the battle. He accepted these concessions as his due but couldn’t leave without threatening me personally. He glared at me with those flat black eyes and promised me a short, miserable life—and I’m grateful for that, because the Morrigan has tried to make it the opposite as much as possible.
“ ‘You may enjoy this victory now, Druid,’ he said, ‘but you will never know peace. My agents, both human and Fae, will hound you until you die. Always you will have to look over your shoulder for the knife at your back. So swears Aenghus,’ blah blah blah.”
“Where did you go?” Flidais asked.
“At the Morrigan’s suggestion, I left Ireland to make it tougher for Aenghus to kill me. But the bloody Romans were everywhere and they weren’t friendly to Druids. It was the reign of Antoninus Pius, so I had to travel east of the Rhine to escape them and join the Germanic tribes holding the line there. I fathered a child, picked up a language or two, and waited a couple generations for people in Ireland to forget about me. By stealing Fragarach, I had ensured plenty more battles and horrible, bloody deaths. Conn wasn’t able to fully unite all the tribes without Fragarach to enforce his will, and Aenghus Óg’s dreams of some kind of Pax Ireland were ruined. Even though Conn won that battle and slew Mogh Nuadhat, he had to settle for a patchwork of truces and marriages to keep the illusion of peace, and it all fell apart after his death. The Morrigan has used my name to goad Aenghus Óg ever since, not that he needed it. After I bore witness to his cowering before her, there was nothing he wished more than to erase his humiliation by erasing me.”
“How long since you have wielded Fragarach?”
“I will not say.” The goddess’s face fell a bit, clearly disappointed that her gambit had failed, and I grinned. “But if you are wondering if I have kept up with my swordsmanship, the answer is yes.”
“Oh? And with whom do you spar out here? I would imagine that there are few mortals alive who are truly skilled with a blade anymore.”
“You imagine correctly. I spar with Leif Helgarson, an old Icelandic Viking.”
“You mean he can trace his lineage back to the Vikings?”
“No, I mean he really is a Viking. Came to this continent with Eric the Red.”
The brow of the goddess knitted in confusion. There were a few extremely long-lived mortals like me running around, but she thought she knew them all. I could tell she was reviewing them in her head, and when she failed to recall any Vikings, she said, “How is this possible? Has he made some sort of bargain with the Valkyries?”
“No, he’s a vampire.”
Flidais hissed and leapt out of bed, landing in a defensive fighting posture as if I was going to attack her. I very carefully did not move except to turn my head a little bit and admire her perfectly sculpted form. The last rays of the day’s sun were filtering through the blinds, leaving soft striped shadows on her lightly tanned legs.
“You dare consort with the undead?” she spat.
I really hate that word, even though I occasionally catch myself using it. Ever since Romeo and Juliet, I am of Mercutio’s mind when he takes issue with Tybalt’s suggestion that he consorts with Romeo. To mask my irritation, I grinned and tried to affect an Elizabethan accent. “Zounds, consort? Wouldst thou make me a minstrel?”
“I speak not of minstrels,” she scowled. “I speak of evil.”
Oh well. Not a fan of the Bard, then. “Your pardon, Flidais. I was alluding to an old play by Master Shakespeare, but I can see you are in no mood for light banter. I would not say that I consort with the undead, for that would imply a relationship beyond what is minimally necessary for business. I merely employ Mr. Helgarson. He’s my attorney.”
“You are telling me that your lawyer is a bloodsucking vampire?”
“Yes. He is an associate at the firm of Magnusson and Hauk. Hauk is also my attorney; he’s also Icelandic, but he is a werewolf and takes care of clients during the day, and Helgarson obviously does his business after sunset.”
“Associating with a member of the Pack I can understand, and even approve. But frolicking with the undead, that is tabu.”
“And a wiser tabu has never been enforced by any culture. But I have never frolicked with him and have no plans to do so. Leif is not the frolicking type. I merely use his legal services and occasionally spar with him because he is the finest swordsman available in the area—and the fastest as well.”
“Why does the pack member work with the vampire? He should have killed the foul creature on sight.”
I shrugged. “We are not in the Old World anymore. This is a new age and a new place, and they both happen to have a common enemy.”
Flidais cocked her head sideways and waited for me to name said enemy.
“And that
would be Thor, the Norse god of thunder.”
“Oh.” Flidais relaxed somewhat. “I can understand that, then. He could make a salamander team up with a siren. What did he do to them?”
“Helgarson won’t tell me, but it must have been bad. His fangs pop out if you just say ‘Thor’ aloud, and he hunts carpenters simply because they use hammers. As far as Magnusson and Hauk go, Thor killed some of their pack members ten or so years ago.”
“This Magnusson is a werewolf too?”
“Aye, he’s the alpha. Hauk is his second.”
“Did Thor have cause to attack them?”
“Hauk says they were on holiday in the old forests of Norway and it was nothing more than a capricious whim on Thor’s part. Eight precisely aimed lightning strikes out of a sky that had been clear moments before. Couldn’t possibly have been a freak occurrence.” Silver isn’t the only thing that can kill werewolves: Humans simply don’t have access to weapons like bolts of lightning, which fry critters before they can heal.
Flidais was silent for a time and regarded me intensely.
“This desert seems to attract an unusual collection of beings.”
I merely shrugged again and said, “It is a good place to hide. No easy access from the Fae planes, as you know. No gods stomping about, besides Coyote and the occasional visitor like yourself.”
“Who is Coyote?”
“He’s a trickster god of the natives. There are several versions of him running around all over the continent. He’s a nice lad; just don’t make any wagers with him.”
“Isn’t the Christian god prominent here?”
“The Christians have such muddled ideas of him that he usually can’t take shape beyond the crucifix form, and that isn’t much fun, so he rarely bothers. Mary will appear more often, though, and she can do some pretty awesome stuff if she feels like it. Mostly she sits around looking beatific and full of grace. Keeps calling me ‘child,’ even though I’m older than she is.”
Flidais smiled and crawled back into bed with me, vampires forgotten. “When were you born, Druid? You were already old for a mortal when first I met you.”
“I was born in the time of King Conaire Mor, who reigned for seventy years. I was nearly two hundred when I stole Fragarach.”
She threw a leg across my body and then sat up so that she knelt astride me. “Aenghus Óg thinks Fragarach is rightfully his.” Her fingers began to trace curling patterns on my chest, and I stopped her by covering her hand with mine, with seeming affection. It wouldn’t do to have her put a binding on me. Not that I thought she would; it was merely my customary paranoia.
“The people here,” I said, “have a saying: Possession is nine-tenths of the law. And I have possessed it for far longer than any other being, including Manannan Mac Lir.”
“Aenghus Óg cares nothing for mortal sayings. He thinks you have stolen his birthright, and that is all that matters to him.”
“His birthright? Manannan is his cousin, not his father. It’s not like I stole his personal family heirloom. Besides, if it truly mattered to him, then he would have come to get it himself by now.”
“You have not stayed long enough in one place to make it practicable.”
I looked at her with raised eyebrows. “Is that all it takes to finally make this end? Just stay still?”
“I would think so. He will send surrogates after you first, but if you defeat them, he will eventually have no option but to come after you himself. He would be pronounced a coward otherwise and banished from Tír na nÓg.”
“I will stay still, then,” I said, and smiled up at her. “But you can move if you like. May I suggest a gentle rocking motion?”
Chapter 6
Located just north of the Phoenix Zoo, Papago Park is an odd formation of isolated hills surrounded by teddy bear cholla, creosote, and saguaro. The hills are steep red rock and riddled with holes, fifteen-million-year-old remnants of ancient mudflows that petrified and eroded over the ages. Now the hills are playgrounds for children in one part of the park, a challenging day climb in some others, and, in a fenced-off area on zoo property, home to a score of bighorn sheep. These last can be viewed—occasionally, if they deign to show themselves—from a part of the zoo called the Arizona Trail. But even then the viewers may be forced to use binoculars to see them well, because it is not an exhibit so much as a tiny preserve, where the sheep are left largely to themselves and undisturbed—that is, until Oberon and I started terrorizing them.
When I hunted with Oberon, I took the form of a wolfhound with a red coat shot through with streaks of white, slightly taller in the shoulder than Oberon and with dark markings on the right side reminiscent of my tattoos. If I had gone out there with a bow and let Oberon flush them for me, it would have been far simpler but far less satisfying for both of us. Oberon wanted to bring them down in the “old way,” never mind that wolfhounds were bred to chase down wolves in the forest and take out charioteers on the battle plain, not leap around rocky hills after nimble-footed rams.
The reason the sheep were so hard to bring down was that the terrain was steep, unkind to our paws, and a tumble from the rocks would probably land us in a cactus—and anyone who’s ever tried to tangle with a teddy bear cholla knows there’s a whole lot more bear than teddy to it. The conditions would simply not let us open up full bore and catch up to them.
When we got to the park, Oberon was ready to kill just about anything that moved. He’d been trying to intimidate Flidais’s stags and found that they were not scared of him in the least, and it was practically making him rabid. I had overheard snatches of their conversation as we rode along in Flidais’s chariot:
he told them.
they taunted him. Oh ho!
Oberon growled at them and bared his teeth, and I told him to hush, doing my best to hide my amusement. Oh, was he ever mad. Calling a giant like him a runt? They really knew how to push a dog’s buttons.
Flidais asked me where she should park her chariot, and I suggested she leave it by Hunt’s Tomb, a small white pyramid incongruously erected on one of the hills as the final resting place of Arizona’s first governor. It was fenced off from the rest of the park, but the stags simply leapt over it, jerking the chariot abruptly behind but landing gracefully on the other side through some of Flidais’s magic.
one of the stags teased.
Oberon simply growled in response, far past the point of vocalizing. We got out of the chariot, and he barked at them once before I brought him to heel.
“We are after sheep tonight,” I reminded him.
he replied as the stags snorted their laughter.
“Get yourself ready, Druid,” Flidais said as she slung her quiver over her head.
And so I cleared my head and summoned power through the tattoo that tied me to the earth, drawing strength up from the desert. I fell down on all fours as I bound myself to the shape of a hound.
A Druid’s therianthrophy is nothing like the change of a werewolf, save in the sense that both are magical. One major difference is that I can change shape (or not) at will, regardless of the time of day or the phase of the moon; another is that it’s fairly painless, unlike lycanthropy; yet another is that I can transform into different animals, albeit a limited few.
In practice, I do not stay for long periods in animal form, for psychological reasons. While I can eat anything the animal would eat and not suffer physically from it, mentally I have difficulty choking down whole mice when I’m an owl or eating raw venison as a hound. (We had taken down a doe in the Kaibab Forest a couple of weeks ago, and once she wa
s down, I had walked off and waited until Oberon had had his fill.) So these hunts were for Oberon more than for me: I just enjoyed the chase and that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you know you’re making someone happy.
But something was different this time when I changed to hound form. My mind felt befuddled, and I was more than a little bloodthirsty. I smelled the sheep scent on the night air, and the nearness of the stags, but instead of accepting this input coolly, I became ravenous and started drooling a bit. It was wrong, and I should have changed back right then.
Flidais strode to the fence and ripped a section of it from the ground with a single hand, whistling once and gesturing for us to run through. We scampered underneath the links and headed for the hills we had hunted before, keeping silent so as not to alert the sheep too early that we were coming for them. There was another fence to negotiate to get into the preserve portion of the park, and Flidais obliged us there as well.
“Now go, my hounds,” she said as she ripped up another section of fence, and as she said it I felt as if I was her hound, not a Druid anymore, not even human anymore, but part of a pack. “Flush a ram out of the hills and bring him to my bow.” And then we were off, running faster than we ever had before, dodging cacti in the weak starlight of a city sky, and I was only dimly aware that there was magic at work here that was not my own. The cold iron amulet necklace, now shrunk about my neck like a collar, should protect me from it if it was sinister, so I did not worry.
It didn’t take us long to find the sheep. They were bedded down in a tangle of creosote, but they heard us scrabbling in the gravel of the desert floor and were already leaping up a nearly vertical hillside when we first laid eyes on them. Our legs spasmed as we tried to make that first leap up to the beginnings of a slope; I made it to a narrow precipice, though barely, but Oberon fell short and tumbled backward into the dirt with a whuff of breath.
I said to him.
he agreed.