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 was 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 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.
"Go around the base and wait," I said to him. "I will chase them over to you."
"Very well," he agreed. "Cunning is better than running."
I kept my eyes on the retreating flanks of the sheep ahead of me and kept pumping my legs up the hill. Incredibly, I seemed to be gaining ground on them, and I felt so triumphant about it that I let loose with a few barks to scare them stupid. But they were built to negotiate those hills with ease, and I was not, and eventually I lost some ground as I had to scramble for footholds and find better places to jump up. When they disappeared over the peak and were headed down the other side, I started barking again to make sure they knew I was close behind and there was no time to stop. I wanted them to head straight for Oberon.
I had no way of knowing precisely where he was waiting, of course, but hopefully my barking would give him an idea of where we were headed.
Going down was much more treacherous than going up. The way the shadows fell, it was difficult to tell if the next step was a foot down or a fathom. But the pale flanks bobbing up and down ahead of me in soft, night-blue streaks gave me a good idea of what to expect. They were headed almost due south, and I heard nothing beyond their hooves clattering amongst the rocks and my own panting and barking. If Oberon and Flidais were waiting ahead, they were being careful not to reveal their positions.
I kept barking, though it was more to drown out any small noises Oberon might make than any enthusiasm I had for closing the gap between us. I fetched up at a precipice and saw that I would have to travel around to the west a bit before I could find a way down, and with every second the sheep got farther away. So I remained where I was and watched, and sure enough, Oberon was hidden behind a creosote bush not far from where the sheep finally came down off the hill. There was a gap of fifty yards or so before the next hill reared up out of the earth, with nothing but sparse desert plants in the way. Oberon cut off their approach to the next hill, and I was barking behind them, so the sheep turned east up the pass between the hills. Once they silhouetted themselves against the sky, an arrow knocked one off its feet and sent it tumbling, bleating to its doom as its fellows fled.
Oberon closed on it to finish it off, but there was no need. Flidais’s arrow had found its heart, and she would doubtless appear momentarily to claim her kill. I began to work my way down the hill, wondering if she would be satisfied. The hunt had not lasted long; we had flushed them too perfectly, owing perhaps to our recent visits and familiarity with the terrain.
But it seemed those recent visits had not gone unnoticed, unfortunately: As I reached the site of the kill, where Flidais was already gutting the animal and Oberon was standing nearby, a park ranger suddenly appeared, holding a flashlight and a gun. He demanded loudly that we freeze as he blinded us with a halogen glare.
We couldn’t have been more startled. He should not have been able to sneak up on any of us, much less all three. But it is not wise to surprise one of the Tuatha Dé Danann. Flidais whipped her knife out of its sheath and threw it to the left of the flashlight before I had even finished turning my head toward the ranger. She had not aimed, or even looked, so the knife didn’t kill him; it sank into his left shoulder and caused him to cry out and drop his flashlight, which would make it harder for him to aim that gun if he felt like shooting. It turned out he did; a few shots thundered in the night, and I felt one bullet whip over my spine and heard another smack into a barrel cactus to my left. Flidais grunted as she took a slug in the arm, then roared in outrage as she realized what had happened.
“Kill him!” she shrieked, and I unthinkingly leapt to obey, as did Oberon. But unlike Oberon, I managed an independent thought after the first couple of steps, and that stopped me. Killing a ranger would bring the law down upon us, perhaps forcing us to flee, and I did not want to leave Arizona. I changed back to my human form, and immediately the fog lifted from my mind. Flidais had been controlling me as a hound, just as she was controlling Oberon—just as she could control all animals. Unable to resist without the protection of cold iron, Oberon had not stopped, and now he had the man flat on his back, screaming. I tried to call him off, but it was no use with Flidais binding him to her will; I could not even feel his mental presence as I normally could.
“Flidais! Release my hound now!” I snapped, and the man’s screams stopped. But it was already too late. Without ceremony, without any dramatic growls or shivering violins, my hound had torn out the poor man’s throat.
Oberon’s thoughts returned and a flood of questions filled my mind. "Atticus? What happened? I taste blood. Who is this man? Where am I? I thought we were supposed to be hunting sheep. I didn’t do this, did I?"
Step away from him and I’ll explain in a moment, I said. When one has seen as much death as Flidais and I have, there are no expressions of disbelief at a person’s sudden end. There is no gibbering, no wailing, no tearing of hair. There is only a cool assessment of the consequences. But if the consequences are dire, then a display of emotion is allowed.
“That was necessary!” I shouted, but carefully kept my eyes on the corpse. “We could have disarmed him. His death will cause me and my hound much trouble.”
“I do not see how,” Flidais replied. “We can simply dispose of the body.”
“That is not so simple as it used to be. They will find it eventually, and when they do, they will find canine DNA in the wounds.”
“You speak of the mortals?” the huntress asked.
What does one do when one needs to pray to the gods for patience but a god is causing the need for patience? “Yes, the mortals!” I spat.
“What is this DNA you speak of?”
I ground my teeth and heard the short yips of Coyote on the thin desert air. He was laughing at me.
“Never mind.”
“I think it well he is dead, Druid. He shot me and tried to shoot you. And he also surprised me, which should not have been possible.”
I had to admit that piqued my curiosity. I stepped closer to the body and warned Oberon off.
"Atticus?" he practically whined. "Are you angry with me?"
No, Oberon, I said. You didn’t do this. Flidais did. She used your teeth as a weapon, just as she would use a knife or her bow.
He whined in earnest. "I feel terrible. Sick. Auggh!" He coughed and hacked, vomiting onto the dry, rocky soil.
I crouched down to take a closer look at the ranger. He was a young Latino with a wispy mustache and a pair of thick lips. His aura was already gone, his soul traveling elsewhere, but when I used one of my charms to check out the magical spectrum, I saw traces of Druidry in a diamond stud in his left ear. That set off alarms.
I rose and gestured at the man. “Flidais, his earring is magical. Can you determine its purpose, or perhaps its origin?” Its origin was clear to me, but the knots in these particular bindings were unfamiliar. My query was a sort of test: If Flidais confirmed their Druidic origin and even recognized their purpose, she was not playing double. If she tried to tell me it was Voudoun, however, or something else completely different, then she was on some other side than mine. Flidais’s boots crunched toward me, her trophy ram and wounded arm forgotten. She squatted next to the ranger’s head and examined the earring. “Ah, yes, I recognize these bindings. It’s not the sort of thing the lesser Fae can do. This man was under the control of the Tuatha Dé.”
“That is enough for me,” I said, satisfied she was telling the truth. “I’m sure it was Aenghus Óg himself. He gave the man a cloaking spell and then broke it abruptly as he was about to speak, ensuring our surprise and the man’s death. It is the sort of puppetry Aenghus enjoys.” I did not mention that Flidais seemed to enjoy it too. I felt like joining Oberon in a nice, cathartic vomit, utterly repulsed by these beings who robbed creatures of their own free will.
I had looked up Aenghus Óg on the Internet once to see if the mortals had a clue about his true nature. They describe him as a god of love and beauty, with four birds following him about, representing his kisses or some such nonsense. Who would tolerate four birds flapping about his head, constantly letting loose their bowels and screeching? Not the Aenghus I know. But some accounts provide a better picture of his character by also telling of his deeds, such as taking his father’s house from him by trickery and slaying both his stepfather and his foster mother. Or the time he left a girl who was hopelessly in love with him and who died of grief a few weeks later. That’s more the kind of man we are talking about.
No, the Celtic god of love isn’t a cherub with cute little wings, nor is he a siren born of the sea in a giant clamshell. He is not benevolent or merciful or even inclined to be nice on a regular basis. Though it pains me to think of it because of what it says about my people, our god of love is a ruthless seeker of conquest, wholly self-serving, and more than a little vindictive.
As if to punctuate that thought, emergency sirens began to wail in the night.
“That noise is used by mortal law enforcement, is it not?” Flidais asked.
“Aye, it is.”
“Do you think it probable that they are headed here?”
“Of course. Aenghus sent this man to die,” I said, waving at the ranger, “and he wants us to be inconvenienced as much as possible.” The chance that the police would not know precisely where in the park to look for us was as close to zero as I could imagine.
“And I suppose,” she said with asperity, “that you would not want me to kill the mortal authorities so that I can take time to harvest my trophy.”
She was not joking. She really would have killed them without compunction. From her tone, it was clear that I should be grateful to her for recognizing that I might have a different set of priorities.
“You suppose correctly, Flidais. Living as I do amongst the mortals, I am subject to their laws and do not wish to draw undue attention to myself.”
The huntress sighed in exasperation. “Then we must hurry. The best I can do is to have the earth swallow him,” she said, yanking her knife out of the dead man’s shoulder.
I shook my head. “The police will have him out of the ground again as soon as we leave. But go ahead, since it is the best we can do. It may contaminate the evidence somewhat.”
Flidais spoke some of the old tongue, and the skin around her tattoos whitened briefly as she drew power from the land. She frowned a bit: There was not as much to be had out here as in the Old World, and it cost her more effort than it should have. But she waved her fingers, said, “Oscail,” and the dirt beneath the ranger obeyed. First the surface gravel began to skitter away from him, then the crust began to cave and ripple beneath him, and he sank. Once he was only a couple of feet below the surface, Flidais waved her fingers in the opposite direction, muttered, “Dún,” and the earth closed over him. It was magic I could have performed myself, albeit not so quickly. There was nothing subtle about it though. The earth looked churned up and disturbed, and the police would have little trouble deciding where to look for a freshly killed body. The sirens were close now.
“Back to the chariot,” she said, and I nodded and set off at a ground-eating pace, calling Oberon to follow. Flidais paused only to collect her bow and pull her arrow out of the ram, then she caught up and ran with us.
The sirens stopped, and we heard the dull whump of car doors slamming to the south as we reached her chariot. If they had a guide, and I had no doubt they did, the police would reach the body in minutes.