I didn’t want to be a pawn. Or Korea. It would be better to be a knight. Or Denmark. The Danes used to kick everyone’s ass—until their victims figured out where they came from.
And that was precisely my problem. People knew where to find me. Especially, it seemed, on this particular Sunday.
I was calling a contractor to do an emergency replacement of my melted shop door when I saw, through the window, a familiar Crown Victoria pull up. Detective Carlos Jimenez climbed out, and shortly afterward a couple more cars screeched into parking spaces, and cops with sunglasses lumbered out of them to adjust their waistbands and check that their shirts were still tucked in. Detective Darren Fagles, the one who fancied himself a Reservoir Dog, had an official-looking piece of paper flapping in his hand, the legal-size sort with lots of fine print.
I hung up the phone as the contractor was in mid-sentence and told Oberon to leap up on top of the far table by the wall. “Curl yourself on top and don’t move a muscle. Not an ear twitch, not a tail wag, nothing until these guys leave.”
he said, as he moved to obey.
“Those cops are coming. If any of them manages to see you somehow, I want you to run out of here and go straight to the widow’s backyard and hide there, okay? Don’t wait for me to tell you.”
“They might be able to. They’ve certainly had help getting this far.” Oberon jumped gingerly onto the table, dwarfing it but just able to coil himself on its top. As soon as he settled down, all hints of his presence disappeared. I shot a quick glance at Fragarach, still resting on the shelf underneath my counter, and cast camouflage on it for insurance.
As the cops grouped together and began to walk toward the door, I wondered if they had decided to come here first or if they had visited my house. If they had visited my house first, where the hell were my lawyers?
A horn honked loudly, demanding attention, as a metallic blue BMW Z4 growled to a halt behind Fagles. Hal Hauk sprang out the door as if summoned.
“Pardon me, are you Detective Fagles?” Hal said, placing himself in the detective’s way perhaps a bit faster than a normal human could. The other officers registered this and tensed. A couple of hands drifted toward holsters.
“Stand aside, sir, I’m on official police business,” Fagles commanded. Hal wasn’t intimidated in the least.
“If your business is with Third Eye Books or its owner, then your business is with me,” he said. “I am the attorney of record for Mr. Atticus O’Sullivan.”
“You’re the attorney of record? Then who was the other guy at his house?”
“One of my associates. He called me and reported that your search of his house was not entirely legal, and I assure you that we will be making a complaint, perhaps filing suit.”
That got the cops’ attention. They glowered at Hal, and Fagles sneered, “We have a warrant signed by a Tempe judge.” He held it in front of Hal’s face to emphasize his point. “Our search was entirely legal.”
“But that warrant gives you permission to search for an Irish wolfhound or similar dog, I believe, and nothing more. Is that correct, Detective?”
Fagles didn’t want to answer with a flat-out yes, so he tried to sound defiant as he replied, “That’s what the warrant says.”
“An Irish wolfhound is a very large breed of dog. I saw the specific dog you’re looking for before he ran away, and I assure you he weighs almost as much as you. That being given, we can assume that the dog could not possibly be hiding in a drawer or a dresser or in kitchen cupboards or underneath a basil plant. Yet you and your colleagues searched through all those things at my client’s house, in clear violation of his civil rights.”
I didn’t need to hear any more than that to know they weren’t looking for just my dog. Aenghus Óg had sent these guys to find Fragarach. And they had torn up my basil in the kitchen—at least I hoped that was all. If they got my whole backyard herb garden, which I had left camouflaged, Oberon would have to make a run for it soon.
“We did no such thing,” Fagles said.
“My associate will testify that you did.”
“His word against ours.”
“He took some video of your search procedure with his cell phone.”
Fagles bit back his initial retort and ground his teeth for a moment. Then he said, “Look, whoever you are—”
“Hal Hauk.”
“Whatever. We have a legal warrant to search these premises. You will stand aside now or we will arrest you.”
“I will stand aside, Detective, but I warn you not to repeat the methods you used at my client’s house. You are looking for a large dog, nothing more, and I will be recording your search. If you look in places where a large dog could not possibly be hiding, then the lawsuit we bring against you will be much, much worse.”
“Fine.”
“Fine,” Hal said. “I’ll take that,” and he snatched the warrant out of Fagles’s hand, faster than the eye could track, before stepping aside. Fagles was pissed. He had probably wanted to slap the warrant against Hal’s chest or something like that, a not-too-subtle push or jab to establish his superiority, but Hal had not only robbed him of that, he had made Fagles look slow and stupid—which, compared to Hal, he was. In Fagles’s defense, he didn’t know he was trying to play dominance games with a werewolf.
Rather than say anything to deepen his humiliation, Fagles stalked forward, with Jimenez and the others close behind. He paused at the door, examining the broken glass around the edges and scattered on the floor inside. He peered through at me before stepping across the threshold. I was standing to his left, behind my counter, access to which was open and visible from the shop entrance.
“What happened here, O’Sullivan?” he said.
“A customer objected strenuously to my returns policy,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” Fagles muttered as he stepped through the door. As soon as he did, wards around my shop alerted me that he had a binding on him. I looked closely at his aura as he gestured for the others to file in and start searching, and I turned on my faerie specs. A band of green knotwork wreathed Fagles’s skull, almost like one of those Roman laurels. That was the primary method by which he was being controlled. But interlaced with those strands, I saw, were very fine blue and red threads. I could not break the green binding without breaking those too, and I didn’t know what those were for, though I assumed they weren’t friendly by their design—fail-safes, perhaps, or magical booby traps, or merely something for me to waste my time on.
The other officers, I noted quickly, had nothing about them beyond their normal human auras—all tinged with aggression and stress, but that was only to be expected after being schooled by a lawyer. Hal followed Jimenez and the other cops as they spread out through the store, which meant I could safely focus all my attention on Fagles. He remained by the door, transfixed by something he saw on my counter shelves.
“What’s that?” Fagles said, jerking his chin vaguely in my direction.
“What’s what?”
“That,” he said, removing his sunglasses and pointing, “That looks like a scabbard. You have a sword behind your counter?” He folded his sunglasses and slipped them into his shirt pocket before looking at me expectantly.
“Nope.”
“Don’t lie to me, I can see it!” Right. That told me quite a bit. If he could see the sword and not Oberon, who truly was sitting in plain sight on a table across the room, then Aenghus had given him a very selective ability: It wasn’t the ability to see through camouflage, which would have instantly revealed to him the purported target of his search; rather, it was the specific ability to see Fragarach, which was supposed to be magically cloaked. That cloak had worked very well on Bres, so it should work equally well on Fagles—except that he seemed attuned to it. How does one get attuned to a cloaked item? You need to have a lot of help from the person who cast the cloak in the first place. That meant Radomila,
leader of the Sisters of the Three Auroras. Fagles was walking, talking evidence they were working against me with Aenghus Óg.
“Is it a dog, Detective?” Hal asked, swinging around from surveying Jimenez’s progress to confront Fagles. He stopped a couple of paces away from the detective, far enough into the shop that he wouldn’t see what Fagles was looking at. “Because if it’s not, then it’s none of your business.”
The detective ignored him and said to me, “That’s a deadly weapon you’re hiding, and you need a permit for that. Do you have a concealed-weapons permit?”
“Don’t answer,” Hal told me, and pointed his cell phone at Fagles. “I am recording this, Detective. According to Arizona Revised Statute 13-3102, Subsection G, a permit is not necessary for weapons carried in a belt holster that is wholly or partially visible, or carried in a scabbard or case designed for carrying weapons that is wholly or partially visible.”
Whoa. That’s why Hal gets $350 an hour. Quoting Arizona statutes, complete with their soul-destroying legalistic sentence structure? That’s Druidic.
“That is not a concealed weapon,” Hal continued, “nor is it a dog, which is all you are authorized to search for.”
I tuned the two of them out as they continued to wrangle over whether the scabbard was concealed or not on my shelf and turned my attention to the bindings floating about Fagles’s impeccably coiffed dome.
My hunch was that the blue knots represented the binding that allowed him to see the cloak—which was, in turn, allowing him to penetrate the camouflage—so if I unraveled that particular binding, the problem of my sword would quite literally disappear. The trouble was that breaking the blue knots would snap the red ones too, and while I could appreciate the craft that went into these particular bindings, I still had no way of telling precisely what Aenghus had wrought there. Perhaps the Morrigan or Brighid could tell me precisely what spells the knots represented and how to deal with them safely, but the best I could figure was that the red knots were bad juju. If I took time to deal with it, it might “go off” in response to my tampering anyway, and I would still need to deal with the blue knot afterward, because I could tell Fagles wouldn’t give up until he tried taking the sword from me—Aenghus wouldn’t have it any other way. And the green knot? That would be a direct magical battle with Aenghus Óg for control of Fagles, during the course of which he would learn quite a bit about my abilities, and I didn’t want to tip my hand quite that much yet.
Here, then, would be a true test of my wards and bindings: I decided to activate all the magic dampening I could from my shop’s wards, then go after the blue knots and let the red knots do whatever they were designed to do, damn the consequences. It was one of those decisions you make when you have too much testosterone bubbling around in your system, or when you’ve been raised in a culture of ridiculous machismo, as I was.
The blue knot was absurdly fragile—it snapped almost immediately with the gentlest of mental tugs, and the red one snapped along with it: definitely a trap, the concussive sort. I felt a whump against my face, like getting hit unexpectedly full force with a pillow, and I saw Hal’s head snap back abruptly. He fell over backward, snarling in surprise. Fagles yelped and grabbed at his head, and then as Hal and I were recovering—Hal red-faced and eyes a bit yellow, his wolf close to the surface—Fagles went completely batshit and drew his gun on me.
“Hands up!” he yelled, and of course that brought all the other cops running over, Jimenez in the lead, drawing his gun out too. I raised my hands and wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t activated the shop’s wards first. Hal might have had his head taken off. He had taken a good shot as it was, and I got only a fraction of the power thanks to the stronger protections of my necklace. Fagles was reacting to some magical feedback, nothing more, and it looked like none of the other cops farther away had felt a thing—they were just backing Fagles’s play.
Oberon asked.
It’s okay. Don’t move, I told him.
“Whoa, Detective, that’s not necessary. You’re pointing a gun at an unarmed man who’s cooperating with a legal search!” Hal said, panting a bit.
“Bullshit! He assaulted me!” Fagles spat.
“What? That’s nonsense, man. He’s been standing there passively more than five feet away from you the entire time!”
“He just hit me upside the head!”
Hush, I didn’t hit him.
“He most certainly did not, and that security camera right there will prove it!” Hal exclaimed, pointing at the camera. All eyes followed his finger and saw that it would most definitely prove whether or not I had moved to slap Detective Fagles upside the head. Fagles heard the certainty in Hal’s voice, saw the doubt in his colleagues’ faces, and practically stomped his foot as he cried, “Well, something hit my head, and it sure as hell wasn’t me!”
“Something hit me too, Detective, but it wasn’t my client, and there’s no reason to keep pointing your gun at him. Let’s all calm down now.”
“I want to know what hit me!” Fagles insisted. “And hey! Where did the sword go? It’s gone!”
It wasn’t gone. But he couldn’t see it now that I had snapped that blue knot—the camouflage was in effect.
“What sword?” I said, playing dumb.
“The sword that we were just talking about!” Fagles screamed. “The one that was on that shelf!” He pointed impotently at the spot where my sword still lay, hidden from his unaided vision.
Oberon said.
“You saw it too!” Fagles accused Hal, looking around at the other cops who were eyeing him a bit uncertainly.
“How could I have seen it, Detective? I’m on this side of the counter,” Hal pointed out, the very picture of reason and affability.
“But you argued about it with me!”
“That’s because I’m paid to argue about things. But I never saw this sword you’re referring to. I merely objected to you taking anything not included in the warrant. Speaking of which, has anyone found the large dog yet?”
Detective Jimenez sighed and put away his gun, and all the other cops relaxed too, save for Fagles. They were beginning to look a bit embarrassed.
“I still don’t know what hit me, and I want an answer,” Fagles ground out, his chin lifted obstinately.
“I think it was a freak gust of wind, Detective,” Hal said, “coming through the broken door. I felt it too.”
That did it for Detective Jimenez. “The dog isn’t here, Fagles,” he said. “Let’s go; put the gun away.”
Fagles gritted his teeth in frustration, and the green wreath around his head flared menacingly. And that’s when he shot me.
Chapter 16
You know that old saw about your life flashing before your eyes at the moment of death? Well, if you’ve lived more than two thousand years, it’s going to take a while for your subconscious to put together a decent retrospective, and I imagined that there must be one of those “spinning beach balls of death” hovering over my head like when I asked my computer to do too many things at once. But that’s not the first thing I thought about as I fell to the ground with a hole in my chest; it was the second.
The first thing I thought was, “Oh no! I’ve been shot!” in the immortal words of the golden protocol droid when he got lased with special effects in a mining colony.
As I waited for my life’s highlight reel—much like those tributes they play at the Oscars every year—to play in my mind, quite a few people became excited in my shop.
All the cops, led by Jimenez, pulled their guns back out and pointed them at Fagles, shouting at him to put his gun down now. And Oberon wanted to start tearing into him right away.
It’s okay, buddy, stay there. I’ll be fine.
Poor Fagles. Even as
I watched from flat on my back, the green binding about his head dissolved. He came back to full conscious control of his mind to find himself standing over me with a smoking gun hanging from his hand and five cops pointing their guns at him.
His voice, thin and trembling, said, “It wasn’t me.”
“Drop the gun, Fagles!” Jimenez commanded. Fagles didn’t seem to hear.
“There was someone in my mind. Telling me what to do. He wanted the sword.”
“There is no sword!” Hal spoke up. “Only my unarmed client bleeding on the floor!”
That drew my attention back to my condition and how very, very much it hurt. Thanks a lot, Hal. I was bleeding out pretty good, and I had a punctured left lung that was filling up with blood as well. I reached for some power to begin healing … and didn’t have any to tap. I’d used everything I had stored in my bear charm on casting camouflage and dealing with Aenghus Óg’s bindings. I needed to get outside, where I could touch the earth, but Fagles was still standing there and the cops were still telling him to drop the gun, and no one was dialing 911 while they had an armed rogue cop to deal with. Owie.
“But I didn’t shoot him. It wasn’t me,” Fagles pleaded. “You don’t understand.”
“There’s a security camera and six witnesses who watched you pull the trigger on an unarmed, unresisting man,” Jimenez said. “You know what that means. Drop the weapon now, Fagles.”
Tears began leaking from Fagles’s eyes, and his chin quivered. “I don’t understand how this happened,” he said. “I would never do something like this.”
“We all saw you do it,” Jimenez said. “Last warning. Drop the weapon or we will be forced to shoot you.”
The direct threat jarred Fagles out of his self-pity. “Oh, you’re going to shoot me, are you?” he sneered, and then he became unhinged. “Well, that’s better than going to prison! And even better than that would be taking you with me!”
“Fagles, don’t—”
And then there was a lot of noise. Fagles’s inchoate roar of rage against what he knew to be injustice, his brief attempt to raise his weapon, and then the percussive explosions of five guns going off, sending Fagles howling backward through the door, and finally the curses of the cops who knew they’d all be sitting on their asses for days, pending investigation.