My shop, to all appearances, has only the single entrance. There is no back door, no fire exit, no other means of visible egress than the single glass door with a dead-bolt on it. That would never satisfy a paranoid sort like me. I needed an escape route in case something big and nasty or official arrived. In a closet marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, next to the bathroom, I had a steel-rung ladder bolted into the wall that led to a trapdoor in the roof. Said trapdoor couldn’t be opened from the outside, in both practical and magical terms. I was the only one who could budge it.
To give the rabbi the slip, I climbed the ladder with the silver knife between my teeth, pirate style, and crept out onto the roof, staying low in the early-evening shadows. I cast camouflage on myself and shed my clothes, regretting the necessity of leaving my cell phone behind. I tied one end of a piece of string around my key ring and the other end around the hilt of the knife. That done, I bound my form to the shape of a great horned owl and firmly gripped the string in my talons. I then cast camouflage on it, the keys, and the knife and lifted off, silently, invisibly, into the Tempe night. I didn’t fly straight home but rather lit high up in the branches of a large eucalyptus tree near Mitchell Park. I spent a good quarter hour just looking around to see if anything had followed me, on both the mundane and the magical planes. How the rabbi could have possibly followed an invisible bird he didn’t know to look for was beyond me, but paranoia was my standard operating procedure.
Finally satisfied, I glided home and spiraled down into my backyard, where I released the binding and returned to my human form. Oberon was very happy to see me.
"Mr. Semerdjian’s back from the hospital," he said. "We can stick it to him again when he’s feeling up to it. I hope he feels better soon."
I cooked dinner for us, then gave Hal a call from my home phone to suggest he pick up the silver knife to aid in the investigation of Father Gregory and Rabbi Yosef. I left it on the front porch for him, the blade carefully wrapped in oilskin for his protection, then immediately began to work on shielding my house from Kabbalists. Once I finished, hours later, I felt mentally drained from the exertions of the day, but I crashed gratefully on my bed and counted myself lucky that I didn’t need to spend another night healing outside.
Chapter 17
The Morrigan tried to wake me up gently this time, but she still managed to startle me into a waking nightmare.
“Gah! Please tell me you’re not horny,” I begged, clutching the sheets and trying to hide behind a pillow.
“No,” she replied, smirking, even though she was sitting na**d on the edge of my bed, raven hair falling on alabaster skin. “I have returned with the amulets.” Four black droplets of cold iron shifted with the percussive clack of rocks in the palm of her hand. “Goibhniu was quick.”
“Ah, that’s great.” I lowered the pillow and sighed in relief. “Very good. Because I don’t think I could take another day like yesterday.”
The Morrigan laughed, genuinely amused, and it did not sound remotely malicious to me. “You look well, Siodhachan. You are completely recovered.”
“Physically, yes. But you left me in an awkward position with Brighid, and you know you did.”
The goddess of death snorted. “I saw that she redecorated your kitchen.”
“She tried to kill me, Morrigan. She could have killed my hound.”
“I felt no danger for you at any time.” Her head shook slowly and a tiny smile stretched across her face.
“Will you ever feel that danger again, now that you’ve agreed not to take me?”
“Oh, yes, I know I will, because I already have. It’s coming.”
“It is? When?”
“Very soon. Today or tomorrow. You battle with shadowy figures.”
I was bemused. “That … kind of sounds like a horoscope.”
The Morrigan laughed again. She was in an extraordinarily good mood. “I suggest you perform your own divination. Soon. But for now I come bearing gifts. These three extra amulets are yours to dispose of as you wish. And there is a package of fresh sausage in the kitchen.”
“Thank you, Morrigan,” I said, taking the three amulets from her. They were teardrop shaped, with a loop at the top to string on a necklace. “Oberon’s going to love the sausage. Shall I cook breakfast for us? Are you hungry?”
“Yes, I’m rather famished. And you make such excellent omelets.”
“Okay,” I said, whipping off the bedspread and padding barefoot toward the kitchen. I had to go to the bathroom, but I was putting that off until I had the Morrigan settled. I didn’t want a repeat of what happened the last time.
Some watchdog you are, I told Oberon, who was sitting meekly by the refrigerator.
"She scares me."
What? I’ve never seen her in such a good mood. I gave him an affectionate scratch under the chin and got out the makings for coffee.
"That’s what scares me. She’s never even petted me, and now she’s bringing me sausage? She wants to fatten me up for something terrible, I just know it."
I don’t think that’s it, buddy. I think she’s happy because she feels she’s beaten Brighid somehow.
"Well, it’s disconcerting. Wait, discombobulating. I should get a snack for that. It’s discombobulating because now I don’t know what to expect, except a snack."
You must proceed on the expectation of good manners, both yours and hers. That is the essence of hospitality.
The Morrigan walked into the kitchen and took a seat at the table. “Good morning, Oberon,” she said with a smile.
"Three kinds of cat shit, Atticus, she’s talking to me!"
So go over there and wag your tail. She won’t hurt you, I promise.
Oberon got to his feet, kept his head low, and wagged his tail slowly, half expecting to die.
“Oh, you’re actually coming to see me? I’m honored,” the Morrigan said. Oberon’s tail wagged a bit faster. “This is quite a feather in my cap, to be acknowledged by the great Druid’s hound,” she added. Oberon bumped his snout under her arm, flopping her hand expertly onto the back of his neck. She immediately began to pet him with a series of massaging squeezes, chuckling softly as she did so.
"She thinks petting me is an honor," Oberon said, his tail wagging enthusiastically now. "This is an unexpected position to take for a goddess of slaughter, but I applaud her defiance of convention."
Breakfast was pleasant. The Morrigan asked for advice on what to do next with the amulet, and I advised her to wear it as a talisman for now and cast spells with it off and on to discover what difference there was. She had to discover a way to cast spells without any interference whatsoever from the iron. In the meantime, she should introduce herself to an iron elemental and give it a few faeries, asking nothing in return. Repeat as necessary until the elemental asked if it could do anything for her. “That might take years,” I warned. “It took me three years to get to that point, and I’m a friendly guy. Never betray a moment’s impatience.”
“Where did you get the faeries to feed it?”
“Aenghus Óg kept sending them after me.”
“Ha!” the Morrigan barked. “So in a way he was helping you all along to build the defense that enabled you to stand up to him.”
When the Morrigan left, I finally relieved my grateful bladder, then discovered I was only mildly late to get on the road with Granuaile. My cell was still on top of my shop’s roof, so I used the phone in the kitchen to call her to come pick me up. After that, I got my wands out of the garage to perform a long-overdue divination.
My wands are twenty sticks with Ogham script carved into one end. Each of the sticks stands for a different letter of the Ogham alphabet, and these in turn are associated with the trees of Ireland, together with a host of prophetic meanings.
I took my wands out to the backyard and cleared my mind. I focused on my friends and their safety, then, without looking, I withdrew five sticks from the bag and threw them gently into the air, letting them fall in front of me. How they fell—and how I interpreted them—would hopefully give me a glimpse of the future.
I saw willow, alder, hawthorn, blackthorn, and yew. The latter chilled me quickly; it prophesied death. Fortunately it did not definitively cross the alder or willow—which I took to mean both male and female friends—yet it threatened both, lying between them, as a stark possibility, a possible outcome. Hawthorn and blackthorn—magic guardianship and danger. My friends needed magical protection: The German hexen would attack again soon, perhaps at any moment.
“Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune!” I cried with all the venom of Charlton Heston.
"What’s a strumpet?" Oberon asked.
“It’s a Shakespearean word for whore.”
"Cool word! It rhymes with trumpet. And pump it. Why didn’t the Black Eyed Peas use it in their song? Aren’t rappers always looking for cool new rhymes? They should kick it old school with the Bard."
I snorted. “Indeed.”
"Who’d you call a strumpet?"
“Fortune. It’s a quote from Hamlet. The idea is that Fortune is fickle or unfaithful, like a whore. The character who says it continues, ‘All you gods, in general synod take away her power;’ because he doesn’t like what Fortune has in store for him. Well, I’m not a god, nor am I in general synod with anyone, but perhaps I have a way to take away Fortune’s power to do you harm.” I had three amulets of cold iron that I could use like talismans—three people I could protect. “Come here, Oberon. Let me see your collar.”
"Aw, no, not more tags?"
“Not this time. This is a special magical talisman to protect you from the Man.”
"Gravy! Thanks, Atticus!"
“You’re going to need to hold still for a few minutes while I activate it. We have to make sure the Man can’t get past all the juju to grind you down, you know?”
"Oh, I dig it, I totally dig it. I’ll just pretend I’m one of those crazy Sphinx cats."
“Excellent.” Protective talismans are fairly simple to construct from most objects, but they vary in strength depending on the base material and the skill of the caster. Cold iron naturally provides the strongest protection, but its magic-negating properties also make it tremendously difficult to twist to one’s own purposes—unless you’ve been watching how iron elementals do it. Like wards, you have to be specific about what you want the talisman to protect against—you can’t simply say, “Protect me against everything,” because absolutes are not only impossible to empower but dangerous in practice. Cold iron is almost an absolute in itself, but I specifically crafted Oberon’s talisman to watch for Fae magic, infernal hexes, several forms of old craft from Europe that the hexen might employ, and Kabbalistic spells. He’d be at least partially open to Obeah, Voudoun, and Wiccan craft, as well as most anything from the Indian and Asian traditions and the vast sea of shamanistic practice, but I had to put my money down somewhere.
Granuaile was knocking on the door as we finished up, and after she confirmed that she’d picked up some bats and baseballs for my Satyrn Massacre alibi, I got to repeat the practice on her.
“Aw, sensei, you shouldn’t have,” she said, as I presented her with the amulet. She was wearing a gold chain already, and the amulet was a bit heavy-looking once she had strung it up. She had a couple of freckles near her collarbones, and I resolutely kept my eyes up there.
“I hope it won’t throw off your wardrobe too much,” I said. “But you should wear this from now on. If you’re not wearing it, then it’s doing nothing for you. Eventually you’ll bind this to your aura as I’ve done with mine, but until then it’ll just be a talisman for you. I’m going to empower it for you now. Want to see what it looks like?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ll turn on my faerie specs to make the magic visible and then bind your sight to mine so you see what I see.”
“You’re going to let me watch you do some cool Druid shit?”
“Yep. But you should always remember to speak of such things with reverence and awe.”
She didn’t miss a beat. “You mean you’re going to initiate me into the sacred mysteries of Druidic craft?”
“That’s much better; well done.” I turned on my faerie specs, found the threads of Granuaile’s awareness, and bound them to mine. She gasped when the knot was completed and her point of view wrenched outside her own head.
“Whoa!” Her arms splayed out, searching for balance. “My first out-of-body experience.”
“Don’t move or you’ll probably fall over. Shut your own eyes.”
“Okay, okay. That’s better. Hey. Where’s the magic? You said there’d be magic.”
“Patience. I haven’t started yet. But look here.” I raised the back of my right hand into my sight and examined the power glowing white through the loop of my tattoo. In the visible spectrum my tattoos did nothing, but the strength of the earth shone underneath them like a back-lit neon sign when I looked at the truth of things. It appeared that I had an indigo racing stripe down my right side with a pulsing white halo.
“Wow! You’re lit up like Vegas! How does it glow under the tattoos? Never mind, tell me what all these threads and knots are—Wait. No. What the hell are all those knots coming out of my head? They’re really intricate.”
“You’re looking at the binding of your sight to mine.”