I hoped they wouldn’t find that out until much later, if at all. My primary advantage right now was my anonymity. Once Odin woke up and couldn’t find me in Asgard, he might waste time looking around Jötunheim until someone figured out I’d come from Midgard.
Taking a couple of deep breaths to brace myself and with apologies to my liver, I shifted once more to a stag and picked up the golden apple. The run south to the forest took me only two hours instead of three. I’d never been so relieved to see a friendly bunch of trees; once I shifted planes to Tír na nÓg, I’d be able to recover a cache of clothes I’d left there and make myself presentable. I wanted to shift to North Carolina this afternoon and place the apple in Laksha’s hand with cavalier indifference, as if stealing it had been no more taxing than running to the local grocery store.
She had slain twelve Bacchants without breaking a sweat—something I’d never be able to do—so in terms of badass grandstanding, I needed to make this caper appear as if it had cost me nothing, even though it might end up costing me everything. It had already occurred to me that Laksha might be hoping I’d never return from the trip and that the whole arrangement was an elaborate way to marshal me to knavery. Part of her—perhaps a very large part—would be disappointed that I’d succeeded without a scratch to show for it.
Thinking of how surprised she’d be made me smile. I was, in fact, dangerously close to contracting another acute case of Smug. But just before I cozied up to an old oak and shifted to Tír na nÓg, I looked up at the sky and saw two ravens circling above me. To the north, dark thunderclouds were boiling rapidly in my direction.
Odin was awake, those damn ravens really could see through my camouflage, and Thor the Thunder Thug was on his way to settle accounts.
Chapter 5
Sometimes people ask me how I got to be so old. It’s tough, I tell them. The short answer is to live as best you can while avoiding all the things that will kill you—but that never satisfies anyone. They want specific nuggets of wisdom, like “You probably shouldn’t go yachting off the coast of Somalia,” or “Never eat sushi in a restaurant where you’re the only customer.” But even these sound a bit disappointing. “Stay away from the guy who throws lightning bolts,” though—that’s a classic. Highly recommended.
My amulet wouldn’t protect me from a bolt of lightning, so I shifted to Tír na nÓg before Thor could get himself in range. He’d probably set the forest on fire once I left, just for spite.
I remained in Tír na nÓg just long enough to recover my cache of clothes, and then I shifted to another Fae plane, Mag Mell, and luxuriated in a hot mineral spring. It was partially to recuperate and partially to throw off Hugin and Munin; they couldn’t follow me to the Irish planes, and that was a blessed pint o’ peace.
Another blessed pint was the one served to me by a comely wood nymph in the spring: Goibhniu’s Mag Mell Ale. It’s a worty and voluptuous brew, quite mouthy, with a smooth yet grainy foundation and a bodacious, provocative finish that couples a whiff of wanton peaches with the innocence of a virgin. If you can get to Mag Mell, it’s free.
That’s right, there’s free beer in Irish paradise. Everyone’s jealous.
After a few of those, I had my Smug on for sure, and I shifted to Pisgah National Forest outside Asheville, North Carolina, to visit Laksha. We arranged by cell phone to meet in Pritchard Park downtown, where we sat on the rocks next to a small waterfall. If she was surprised or disappointed by my appearance, she hid it well. After inquiring about the small blemishes on the apple’s surface, she took a bite, and I saw true pleasure illuminate the features of the face she inhabited. Her skin, already beautiful, tightened and smoothed and shone with health.
“Satisfied?” I asked.
She nodded. “Very much so. Well done, Mr. O’Sullivan.”
“Then I will take my leave,” I said, standing up and giving her a short bow. “I’d eat it all up soon, though, because Hugin and Munin are looking for it. Best of luck growing your own tree of immortality.”
“That’s it?” Laksha frowned. “I get no more civility than that?”
“I have kept my word to you, Laksha. Please judge me by that, and nothing more. As for civility, I leave you in far better circumstances than you left me after you slew the Bacchants. And there is much that demands my attention elsewhere. Please excuse me.” With that, I turned on my heel and started jogging back to the Pisgah Forest, for while I appreciated Laksha’s adherence to her word and her skills as a witch, I had no desire to cultivate a friendship with her.
I hadn’t been lying about the many demands on my attention. The long soak in the hot springs proved to be an extremely comfortable place in which to confront some uncomfortable facts. There really wasn’t anything for me to feel smug about beyond the stark fact that I’d bearded the lion in his den and survived—for now. There was no way that Odin would let the deaths of Sleipnir and the Norns slide—nor should he. Though I could argue that I’d slain them all in self-defense, the unyielding, inconvenient truth of it was that I had chosen to go to Asgard. No one had forced me; I had made promises and traded one set of problems for another, much larger set. I did not see any way to trade down to something more manageable now—except by abandoning everything I cared about.
It used to be so easy for me to run, to care about nothing but myself and the earth underneath my feet. That had been my modus operandi ever since Tahirah died; I never stayed anywhere long enough to be bound by commitments, never entangled myself with the lives of others, and told myself it was all about avoiding Aenghus Óg. That was more true than I realized: What I’d truly been avoiding was love, the strongest binding there is, and the pain that scrapes at your insides when the bond is forcefully broken.
It has been more than five centuries. I still miss her. She smiles in my dreams sometimes and I wake up weeping for the loss.
When we were married, I did not move without thinking of her first. And now I am in a similar place; I cannot move without thinking of Oberon, as well as my duty to Granuaile. I will not, cannot abandon them. I saw that my need to defend and protect them had driven my choices in recent months—from killing Aenghus Óg to making an unwise bargain with Leif so that he would help me dispatch a nasty German coven. Flidais had told me, back at Tony Cabin, that she knew I would have run from Aenghus Óg again if Oberon hadn’t been held hostage. And she was right. Likewise, if die Töchter des dritten Hauses had not killed Perry and tried to kill both Granuaile and me, I would not have called Leif for help and agreed to take him to Asgard. Those had been rash, desperate decisions, not the sort that would most likely allow me to stay alive. But once bound by the ties of love, there is no other choice one can make and remain human. They’d been simple choices at the time that were now making my life tremendously complicated. My immediate safety was an illusion; the consequences would come home eventually like the prodigal son—a karmic debt, Laksha might have said, but with the usurious rates incurred at a payday loan center.
It was time for me to leave Arizona. There was an annoying Tempe detective named Kyle Geffert who was convinced I’d had something to do with what the media called the “Satyrn Massacre”—and he was right. Thus far my lawyers had kept me from suffering long interrogation sessions in a steel-gray room laced with cigarette smoke, but I didn’t see how I could avoid it for much longer.
The lone Bacchant that had escaped that fiasco left knowing positively that the world’s last Druid lived in Arizona, and Bacchus would probably be roused by that alone, to say nothing of his reaction if the Norse pantheon had taken my bait and blamed him for my Thanksgiving shenanigans.
A group of fanatic Russian demon hunters who called themselves the Hammers of God thought I was too cozy with the forces of darkness, despite the fact that I’d probably slain more demons than they had. Rabbi Yosef Bialik would probably return to harass me with a few of his friends, now that he knew I kept company with werewolves and witches.
On top of all this, one of my regular
customers in the bookshop had asked me last week how I stayed looking so young.
It was time to go.
The idea of moving wouldn’t bother me except for what I’d have to leave behind. The fish and chips at Rúla Búla, sipping whiskey with the widow MacDonagh, the simple pleasures of being a practicing herbalist—all would be sorely missed. Too, there was a large wasteland to heal around Tony Cabin, the existence of which was at least partly my responsibility, and I wanted more than anything to spend all my time there righting that particular wrong. But I had chains of obligation to throw off first—proverbial ducks I had to get in a row.
After running for most of the last couple days, I surprised myself by asking Oberon as soon as I got home if he’d like to go for a run.
he said. I’d picked him up from the widow MacDonagh’s house, where he’d been staying during my absence. The widow wasn’t in, which was just as well. If she’d been home, I would have had to sit and chew the fat for a while, and Oberon had been waiting long enough. The widow’s cats provided him plenty of entertainment, but she couldn’t take him for walks and give him the sort of exercise a very large Irish wolfhound needs.
We jogged through the Mitchell Park neighborhood where I lived, and he brought me up-to-date on what I’d missed.
he complained.
I chuckled and spoke aloud as we jogged. I often spoke directly to his mind through the bond we shared, but since no one was around to hear me, I enjoyed making use of my breath. “Whoa, five syllables. Very impressive.”
“Indubitably. And we’ll go hunting as soon as I can manage. I’m sorry to hear about your emasculation.”
I frowned at him and checked to see if he was joking. “She does?”
“Oh. That does make me sorry. She’s never said anything about them to me.”
I let a few paces go by before I answered. The neighborhood mourning doves were happy and cooing to each other. A stooped old man in Bermuda shorts was trimming down his cloud sage bush for the winter, moving slowly and carefully. He was too preoccupied with his topiary to recognize that I was talking to my dog as we passed. “Yes. I could reverse the aging process with Immortali-Tea, and that would take care of pretty much everything. It repairs cell damage, prevents cancer, increases white blood cells, you name it. But what if I did that for her? What do you think would happen?”
“True. But you’re not thinking it through. The widow’s getting close to ninety years old, if she’s not there already. Let’s say I put her on an intensive regimen of Immortali-Tea and she shed fifty years in five weeks. She would look and feel forty years old, and if I never gave her any tea after that, she could still look forward to living at least another fifty years.”
“No, it wouldn’t. People would start asking questions. Everyone would want to know how she did it. Her friends and relatives especially. She’s told you about her kids and grandkids, right?”
“Well, her oldest son is sixty-seven. She’d be younger than him. That would be awkward. Her grandkids would freak out because their grandma didn’t look like a sweet old lady anymore. So what does she tell them? This nice Druid I know did me a solid?”
“It’s not about hurting me. They’re going to want to stay young too. And then their friends and relatives will, and before you know it the tabloids will get hold of the story and latch on like seven puppies after six tits.”
“And then the government will get involved, because having someone live that long is eventually going to raise flags at the IRS and the Social Security Administration. Her driver’s license picture won’t match her face. All sorts of questions are going to be asked.”
“The widow by herself would be worth the trouble. But I can’t confine it to her. Still, let’s say I did. She gets to start life over at forty while her kids all continue to age and die. Would she thank me for her youth when she’s standing over the grave of her son? Or the graves of her grandchildren?”
“Good. I’ve been in that position, Oberon, far too many times. I’ve buried my children and their children and so on. It carves away a piece of you.”
“Sure I have. It’s how I learned all the stuff I just told you—the painful way. And I learned that some people become distanced from humanity, severely troubled, and reclusive when they live too long. Sort of like vampires tend to do, only without the bloodsucking. If their minds aren’t trained like a Druid’s, they gradually collect neuroses over time, like sunbathers collect wrinkles. Immortali-Tea can’t fix batshit insanity.”
“Yep. That’s why eventually I stopped offering.”
“Not soon. Need to be in a place where I can settle down. And this isn’t that place. I need to talk to you about that, actually.”
I explained to him that we needed to move out of Tempe. “I’ll have to go back to Asgard soon, and it’ll be a longer trip than the first one. It might be forever, because I might not come back, and if that’s what happens, then you need to be good to Mrs. MacDonagh. But if I do return, we’ll be leaving right away.”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Heh! I never thought of it that way.” I smiled. “But now that you’ve clarified my thinking, I wonder why they don’t list those amenities in real estate ads. It seems criminally negligent.”
“I care, buddy. I believe you to be remarkably wise.”
I laughed. “Perhaps when we are safely settled elsewhere.”
“I cannot promise you, Oberon,” I said, regret tingeing my voice, and I could tell he was disappointed. “But, look, it is good to have a dream so long as you do not let it gnaw at the substance of your present. I have seen men consumed by their dreams, and it is a sour business. If you cling too tightly to a dream—a poodle bitch or a personal sausage chef or whatever—then you miss the felicity of your heart beating and the smell of the grass growing and the sounds lizards make when you run through the neighborhood with your friend. Your dream should be like a favorite old bone that you savor and cherish and chew upon gently. Then, rather than stealing from you a wasted sigh or the life of an idle hour, it nourishes you, and you become strangely contented by nostalgia for a possible future, so juicy with possibility and redolent of sautéed garlic and decadent slabs of bacon that you feel full when you’ve eaten nothing. And then, one fine day when the sun smiles upon your snout, when the time is right, you bite down hard. The dream is yours. And then you chew on the next one.”
Oberon chuffed, his version of human laughter. ’m a twitchy Pomeranian when I’m more emotionally stable than you are. And I’m not missing out on the lizards. I’ve heard seven of them so far rustling around in the lantana bushes. They like the purple and yellow ones best, not so much the white. What I want to know is, where can I get a bone like that?>
Chapter 6
Here is how you know someone has had a good idea: Other people freely admit to their friends that said idea has changed their lives. Most people today will grant that fire and the wheel are the big two. After that, any attempts to rank the greatest ideas of all time are going to draw lots of argument. You’ll have zealots pimping this god or that on the one hand, scientists pimping Darwin on the other, and then practical people pointing at written language and saying, look, fellas, the reason those ideas have gone viral is because someone figured out how to write them down.
On Saturday night, the day after my return from Asgard, I heard about a new life-changing invention (for some): the salad spinner.
“I seriously love my salad spinner,” Granuaile confided. “It’s changed my life.” She said this in her kitchen, where she was busy making me the dinner she owed me for guessing wrong about Ratatosk’s size and the ability to enter Asgard via Yggdrasil.
“Excuse me for just a moment,” I said, and I exited the kitchen for the living room, where her laptop had access to Wi-Fi in the building. I Googled “salad spinner changed my life” and got more than six thousand hits. There was also a Salad Spinner Appreciation Society on Facebook. It wasn’t what I’d call a cultural revolution, but it had potential, and I was willing to find out more. I returned to the kitchen and said, “Sorry about that. Please explain how your salad spinner has changed your life.”
“Oh.” Granuaile’s eyes flicked down, perhaps with a shade of embarrassment. “Well, when you wash lettuce it’s tough to get the leaves dry without wasting paper towels and spending all your time patting them dry. If you just leave them wet, then your dressing dilutes and alters the taste you’re aiming for. Oil and water don’t mix, right? But now,” and her voice deepened into a mockery of a Nitro Funny Car drag-race commercial on the radio, “I can use the raw unbridled power of a SALAD SPINNERRR!” Her voice rose at the end of the sentence in maniacal excitement. Her hand plunged down to the handle of her spinner and she worked it furiously, continuing in the same frenzied voice. “SEE the centrifugal force work its MAGIC on the WATERRR! Red leaf, green leaf, spinach, or arugula, it DOESN’T MATTERRR! Just put your wet greens in the spinner and crank that mother ’til ALL the moisture’s GONE! SUPER! DRY! SALAD!” Here Granuaile balled her fists at her sides and thrust her hips forward lewdly. “GET SOME!”