“That does sound fabulous, but that’s not the sort of tea I’m talking about.”
“Oh. Then whatcha lookin’ for?”
“I need a tea that will … humble a man who is attracted to me. Make me unattractive to him.”
“What? Wait. You wish to be unattractive?”
“To this one particular man, yes. Can you brew such a tea?”
“You want a sort of anti-Viagra, if I’m hearing you right.”
“You have understood me perfectly.”
I shrugged. “It oughtta be possible.” She smiled. Her teeth were very white and straight, a toothpaste commercial waiting to happen. “But how did you hear about me?”
“I am one of Radomila’s coven,” she said, extending her hand to shake. “The youngest, actually. My name is Emilia, but I go by Emily in America.”
I relaxed a little bit: Radomila and I had a professional and cordial relationship. She was the leader of the Tempe Coven, thirteen witches who actually knew what the hell they were doing. They had a fancier name for themselves than that, but they didn’t advertise it. Radomila was pretty powerful, and I would rather not get on her bad side. Oh, one-on-one I’d probably be able to dispatch her, but then her entire coven would come after me together, and they would chew me up and tell the Morrigan to go suck on it, because they most likely had their own goddess in their corner.
“Why do you need me, Emily?” I asked, shaking her hand once and knowing she was trying to gauge my power through the contact. That didn’t work too well on Druids. We draw our power from the earth as needed, so she probably felt nothing more than the low-level power I was using to maintain Oberon’s camouflage. It had caused more than one foe to underestimate me, so that was fine by me. I’m not into peacock displays of power. “Isn’t Radomila capable of looking after her own coven anymore? For that matter, you could take care of this problem yourself. You don’t need me.”
“That is true,” she said. “But Radomila wants no part in the crafting of this particular potion. Neither do I. We require … outside assistance.”
“And so you came here? I’m just a friendly apothecary who knows that witches are for real.”
“I pray you do not fence with me. I know full well what you are, Druid.”
Well. That was putting the cards on the table. I took another look at her aura, which was largely red and tossed about with the desire for power. She might be older than a century after all. College students these days didn’t begin their sentences with “I pray you,” and they thought fencing was selling stolen car stereos.
“And I know what you are too, Emily of the Sisters of the Three Auroras.” Her mouth formed a tiny O of surprise at my use of her coven’s true name. “If you don’t want to humble this guy yourself, then I don’t want to either.”
“If you would agree to this thing, then Radomila and her coven would be in your debt,” Emily said.
I arched an eyebrow. “Are you authorized to commit Radomila to such a pledge?”
“I am,” she said, and pushed a note across the counter to me. It was in Radomila’s hand. And the splatter beneath it was Radomila’s blood—even dried, I could see the power in it. Oh, yes, she had authorization.
I snatched the note off the counter and pushed it down into my pocket. “Very well,” I said. “I will agree to make this tea against your coven’s pledge of future favor, provided that you personally agree to follow my instructions to the letter and pay my customary fees.”
She bristled a little bit, obviously expecting the note to take care of everything, but eventually she nodded curtly. “Agreed,” she said.
“Very well.” I smiled. “How long do you wish to remain unattractive to this man?”
“A week should suffice.”
“Then you will appear here tomorrow at this hour to drink a tea I will prepare for you and every day thereafter for a week. Failure to appear will void our contract with no monies refunded.”
“I understand and agree.”
“Tomorrow you will bring me a cashier’s check for ten thousand dollars.”
Her eyes widened. “Outrageous!” she spat, and she had a point. I never charged more than two hundred dollars for my apothecary services. “That cannot be your customary fee!”
“If the Tempe Coven is unwilling to take care of your paramour’s libido on its own, which they could do far more simply than I, then I am owed danger pay,” I said.
“But not that much!” she fumed, all but admitting the danger was real.
I produced the note and offered it to her. “Then I bid you good day.”
Emily’s shoulders sagged. “You bargain well,” she said, her eyes downcast to my countertop. Her hands made no move to take back the note, but I kept it raised within her reach.
“You will bring me the cashier’s check tomorrow, then?” I asked.
“Aye,” she said, and with that I put the note back in my pocket.
“Then we will begin tomorrow.”
“Not now?”
“Until I have the check, no.”
“Then if I bring the check today, you will begin?”
“Aye, Emily, that is the contract I propose.”
“And once begun, you will not renege?”
It was an unusual request to put so bluntly, but not an unreasonable one. All contracts should allow the customer a reasonable expectation of completion. But it seemed an awful lot of trouble to go through to make one guy go limp for a week.
“You have my word, Emily, that once payment is received, I shall execute the contract as stated, so long as you appear daily at the same hour to drink my tea.”
She spat in her hand and extended it to me. “Contract offered?”
I stared at her hand and made no move to take it. If I spat in mine and shook her hand, then she would have some of my spittle to work with. Giving a witch your body fluids is akin to slicing off a choice cut of your buttocks and offering it to a werewolf. “Received,” I said, keeping my hands on the counter. “You may consider my word my bond.”
She smiled triumphantly, not in the least offended, and exited my shop without feigning interest in any of my wares, though she pointedly waved at Oberon behind the counter and said, “Bye, puppy,” just to show me she had seen through the camouflage. And I wondered, far too late, whether I had behaved wisely in agreeing to this business. Probably not. Witches had better ways of controlling their bodies than drinking a Druid’s brews, and if they were willing to put their entire coven in magical hock to me and pay me ten thousand ducats to boot to get rid of one horny guy, then I was probably dealing with an incubus or something similarly nasty.
The magic of attraction is little more than science these days. I would brew her a blend of herbs that would suppress her natural pheromones, which were currently exciting the fella, and then, with a bit of clever binding, cause her to emit the chemical signature of a skunk instead. Unless this guy was a closet skunkophile, she’d be looking at a wet noodle all night. On top of that, I was going to make sure she didn’t get excited either, throwing in some natural monoamine suppressants. I had made this sort of brew before: I sold it to sorority girls as Humili-Tea. They used it on their exes or their stalkers or sometimes to end a relationship when they had no good reason to do so.
Back when I first learned how to make a tea like this, I didn’t have names for all the chemical reactions caused by the herbs—the herblore was just as magical to me as my bindings were to a layperson. Science had taken away some of the mystery of the process but none of the utter coolness I felt knowing that I could whip up compounds the pharmaceutical industry could only dream of.
But I will not pretend I was helping Emily to feel cool. I figured to come out far ahead in the deal, because having a coven in your debt was serious mojo, and I could use plenty of that if the Morrigan’s casting were to come true.
Chapter 8
It actually turned out to be quite a busy morning, making my opening of the second register seem l
ike genius. Perry never found time to mess with the Tarot display until much later, and I never got time to read the full article about the park ranger. But I figured Hal would fill me in once I got to Rúla Búla.
Come on, Oberon. Lunchtime.
He lifted his head up hopefully.
Fish. And we’re going to be in a restaurant, so you need to behave and stay out of the way.
I waved at Perry and told him I’d be back in an hour or so. “Mind the fortress, will you?”
He waved back. “No problem.”
I slipped out the door and opened it wide so Oberon could follow me, then unlocked my bike from the stand and hopped on.
No stopping to smell the trees and fire hydrants, I said. I can’t be calling back to an invisible dog every few minutes to hurry it up.
he whined.
After I close up shop. You can play around at the widow’s house. You can chase her cats in camouflage and totally freak them out. Heh!
Oberon made chuffing noises, which was the canine equivalent of laughter.
We chuckled about it together as we made our way up Mill Avenue, passing the bars and boutiques and the occasional gallery. Oberon told me about his plans to just put his paw down on the Persian’s tail and watch what happened.
Hal Hauk had already secured a table inside Rúla Búla near the window, and he had ordered a pint of Smithwick’s for each of us. I was both pleased and disappointed by the gesture, for it meant I wouldn’t get to go to the bar myself and take a whiff of the barmaid.
That’s not as creepy as it sounds.
Granuaile, the redheaded siren behind Rúla Búla’s bar, was not entirely human, but I still didn’t know what she was, and her scent was my only clue. She was a mystery to me, and a beautiful one at that. Long locks of curly red hair cascaded over her shoulders, which were always covered in a tight but otherwise chaste T-shirt. She did not earn tips from her cleavage, like many barmaids do, but rather depended on her green eyes, her pouty lips, and the light dusting of freckles on her cheeks. She had pale, creamy skin and a few fine golden hairs on her arms, which led eventually to fingernails she had painted green to match her eyes.
She was not one of the Fae: I could see through all their glamours, and in any case she never blanched at my iron amulet. Neither was she undead, or she would hardly be working the day shift. She wasn’t a were of any kind, which Hal had mentioned but I had already determined using my own methods. I had thought she might be a witch, but she didn’t have the telltale signs in her aura. If she had been anything sent from hell, I would have smelled the brimstone, but instead she gave off an ineffable scent that was not quite floral, more like a pinot grigio and mixed in with something that reminded me of India, like saffron and poppies. I was left to conclude that she was a goddess of some sort, masking her true nature and slumming here incognito like so many other members of the supernatural community, displaced from points all over the world. The bonny Irish lass façade was even more shameless than mine, for I doubted that she was truly Irish underneath it all: She must be from some foreign pantheon, and I was determined to figure it out without asking her a thing.
She flashed a smile at me as I walked in, and my heart sped up a bit. Did she have a clue as to my true nature, or did she only see the dim college kid disguise?
Her face fell as I walked past the bar toward Hal’s table. “You’re not sitting with me today, Atticus?” she said with a pout, and I almost changed course right there.
Oberon said at my heels with ironic relish. I ignored him.
“Sorry, Granuaile”—that simply could not be her true name; she had to have picked it out on purpose to fit in at an Irish bar—“I have to talk a little treason with my friend,” I said, gesturing toward Hal.
She smiled. “If it’s a conspiracy, I want in on it. I can keep a secret.”
“I’ll bet you can,” I said, and she arched an eyebrow at me. I felt a foolish grin spread across my face.
“Ahem. Time is money, Mr. O’Sullivan,” Hal called, and I snapped my head around, suddenly realizing I had stopped in the middle of the bar and forgotten what I was doing there. Hal’s time was worth $350 an hour.
Oberon said.
Embarrassed, I stalked over to Hal’s table and sat myself across from him. Oberon squeezed underneath the table next to the window and waited for food to rain down from the sky.
Hal frowned. “I smell your dog.”
“He’s under the table, camouflaged,” I said.
Hal’s eyes widened as he processed the sling across my chest and the hilt peeking out over my shoulder.
“Is that the sword I think it is?” he asked.
“Yes,” I replied, and took a long pull from the Smithwick’s.
“Was it employed in last night’s mischief?”
“No, but I believe in being prepared. There’s more trouble on the way. A whole lot more.”
“Do I need to tell the Pack?” Hal asked.
Werewolves. Their pack always came first. “Hey, it’s my ass in the meat grinder here, not the Pack’s,” I said. “You don’t need to tell anyone but Leif about this business. In fact, I want to see him as soon as he wakes up tonight. Send him to my house.”
Hal looked as if I had just asked him to lick up vomit. “Will you be paying the firm for his time, or will he?” He was referring to the business arrangement I had with the vampire. Leif and I had a unique understanding: Sometimes I paid cash for his services, and sometimes I paid him in fine liqueur—that is to say, my blood. (I had carefully neglected to mention that to Flidais.) The blood of a 2,100-year-old human, and a Druid no less, was a powerful, intoxicating, and extremely rare vintage for a vampire. I slashed my arm, drained a wineglass full for him, and then healed myself, and that was worth twelve hours’ billing to him. Then I washed out the glass and made sure he hadn’t spilled any, because I was paranoid about my blood getting into the hands of witches. He paid the firm out of his own pocket for such a drink, and he had grown powerful over the years by it. I never saw him use the power, because nothing locally wanted to mess with him, but I think Leif was trying to become strong enough to mess with Thor someday.
“Does it matter?” I said. “The firm gets paid either way.”
Our waitress arrived, and we paused to order three plates of fish and chips—the third was for Oberon, who was doing a good job of remaining invisible. When she left, Hal spread his hands and said, “Okay, tell me everything.” I told him about Flidais but left out the Morrigan; it wasn’t everything, but close enough.
“So a goddess from your pantheon has come and gone,” he said when I had finished, “and you could get a visit from two more Irish gods before this business is through?”
“Right. Aenghus Óg and Bres. Plus Fir Bolgs.”
“Plus those. I’ve never seen one. What are they like?”
“To you they’ll look like a biker gang or something similar, but they will smell like shit.”
“Biker gangs can smell like shit sometimes.”
“Well, that just makes the disguise better,” I said. “The point is, you won’t see what they’re really like, because they wear glamour when they walk in the mortal world. In truth, they’re giants with bad oral hygiene and a predilection for wielding spears. They used to be an independent people in the old days, but the Tuatha Dé Danann use them as thugs now.”
“How much of a threat are they?”
“To my life? I am not particularly worried. I’m more worried about collateral damage than anything else.”
“That will bring the police into it.”
“Which I’m sure is the point of sending them.
Fir Bolgs are not renowned for their discretion.”
Our fish and chips arrived and I sighed happily. It is life’s small, simple pleasures that make it worth living longer than a century or two. I dropped a piece of cod down to Oberon and covered up his noisy chomping sounds with some noises of my own.
“So how can I keep Oberon from going to Animal Control?” I asked around a mouthful of chips and beer.
Hal shrugged. “The simplest way is to do what you’re doing and lie,” he replied. “Keep him hidden, and tell anyone who asks that he escaped and ran away. In a month or even less, they’ll be so swamped with other cases that they won’t be able to keep tabs on whether he’s with you or not. Then you tell all your neighbors you’ve given up, you’re going to get a new dog, and voilà, Oberon reappears. Oh, and I wouldn’t go hunting in the Papago Hills for a year or so.”
Oberon whined at that, and I hushed him by dropping another piece of cod on the floor.
“This is all supposing the police actually track him to your place,” Hal said. “They haven’t shown up yet, have they?”
I shook my head. “Not yet. But since I think someone is leading them around, I have no doubt they will show up soon. Now tell me what to do if I don’t want to lie.”
Hal stopped chewing and regarded me steadily for a few seconds. “You don’t want to lie?” he said, completely off his guard.
“Of course I do! I just want to know what else I can do that I haven’t thought of already. That’s why I pay you, Hal. I mean, shit, come on.”
Hal smiled. “You really sound like one of these modern kids. I have no idea how you do it.”
“Blending in is the best survival skill I have. It’s just listening carefully and parroting, really. So tell me what to do if I’m forced to play it honest.”
“Honest as in the police can see through your camouflage spell and know that Oberon is right in front of them?”
“Sure. Pretend I’m an ordinary guy with no magic at my disposal. Then how do I protect Oberon?”
The werewolf took a long drink of Smithwick’s and belched discreetly as he thought about it. Then he placed his hands flat on the table and said, “Well, the only way they would be able to build a case without witnesses is to use DNA matching. Oberon has no rights, but as his owner you can demand they get a warrant before they do the whole unreasonable-search-and-seizure thing. If they come with a warrant, though, you pretty much have to let them do what they want. And judging from what you’ve told me, if they get a DNA sample from him, the case will be pretty solid.”