"You had kids who went batshit insane?"

“Yep. That’s why eventually I stopped offering.”

"Are you going to have any more?"

“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.”

"About what?"

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.”

"Where are we going?"

“I don’t know yet.”

"Anyplace is good so long as there’s sausage and bitches."

“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.”

"Human priorities are messed up, Atticus. I’ve made the observation many times, but nobody cares for the wisdom of hounds."

“I care, buddy. I believe you to be remarkably wise.”

"Then I think it would be wise for you to adopt a French poodle."

I laughed. “Perhaps when we are safely settled elsewhere.”

"Promise?"

“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. "Suffering cats, Atticus, you’re talking like I’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 h*ps forward lewdly. “GET SOME!”

That was when I lost it. Up to that point my mouth was hanging open in shock, but when she whipped out the pelvic thrust for nothing more than a salad, well, that brought on an epic fit of the giggles. Her performance began looping in my mind’s eye, and the absurdity of it kept tickling me so that I couldn’t stop. Paroxysms shook me until I fell off my chair, and that made it worse. Tears came to my eyes and I gasped for breath as I slapped the wood laminate of her floor. Granuaile’s face turned bright red and she sank down laughing too, laughing both at herself and at my reaction.

Eventually we got around to eating that salad, but not before our stomachs ached from extended merriment. It was succulence itself: spinach and red leaf lettuce tossed with jicama, white onion, mandarin oranges, and candied walnut pieces. The dressing was a homemade citrus vinaigrette.

This, however, was merely a side. Chef Granuaile MacTiernan set a broiled orange roughy fillet on top of a wild-rice pilaf, then placed on top of that a flash-broiled portobello mushroom that had been marinated in a Beaujolais red wine. Several spears of lightly salted asparagus drizzled with olive oil complemented the fish, and a bottle of pinot noir from the Santa Cruz Mountains did all those snooty and delicious things in our mouths that wine connoisseurs go on about.

“Outstanding,” I said, chewing appreciatively. “Truly fantastic.”

“I always settle accounts,” Granuaile said, and quirked an eyebrow at me.

“That’s good to know. I’m the same way. There are a lot of people who would like to settle accounts with me, however, and we should probably speak of it.”

“All right,” she said. She narrowed her eyes and pointed her fork at me, jabbing it forward to punctuate her words. “But if you’re going to try to convince me to give up being a Druid again, you can forget it.”

I shook my head with a rueful grin. “You don’t have all the information yet.” She’d already heard about Ratatosk and Yggdrasil and I’d shared the general look of the plane with her, but I hadn’t explained what really happened other than that I’d successfully stolen an apple. Now I recounted everything.

“So Hugin and Munin are looking for you right now?” she asked after I’d finished.

“As we speak, no doubt. The only reason they haven’t found me already is that they don’t know what to look for. But if Odin ever suspects it was a Druid that slew the Norns and his favorite horsie, he’ll make noise around Tír na nÓg and then they’ll find me quickly, because everyone there knows where I am now. I have to move.”

“Of course you do, but”—her face clouded—“that means I have to move too.”

“Right.” I nodded. “And change your name. And cut off all contact with your family and friends to protect them. Unless you like having a family and friends. Then you should give up this dream of being a Druid and live happily ever after.”

Granuaile slammed her fork down. “Damn it, sensei, I’m not giving that up, I told you!”

“How will your loved ones take this, Granuaile? Look at it from their perspective for a moment. To them it’s going to look like I’ve kidnapped you or that you’ve joined a cult.”

“Well … it kind of is a cult, isn’t it?” she joked.

I chuckled. “I suppose. A very tiny one—here we all are. You can shave your head if you like for verisimilitude.”

Granuaile’s jaw dropped. “I thought you liked my hair.”

Oh, damn. She’d noticed. There’s no winning this, change the subject.…

“You never answered my question. Aren’t your parents going to worry? You won’t be able to contact them often, if at all.”

She shrugged and puffed a soft dismissal past her lips. “I don’t talk to them much as it is. They’re divorced. Dad is always on a dig somewhere in the cradle of civilization, and Mom is busy raising her new family in bloody Kansas.” The way she spat out Kansas led me to believe she did not consider it the cradle of civilization. “I let them know I wanted my independence early on and they gave it to me.”

“They seem to have set you up well,” I remarked, flicking my eyes around.

“Oh, yeah. How does a barmaid afford a condo like this, right? Well, it’s paid for by dinosaurs. Mom’s new husband is an oily oil man. So greasy he looks like he sleeps in a jar of Vaseline. He has one clump of hair that he’s grown really long, and he combs it over pathetically to try to cover up his shiny bald head. I despise him and he loathes me. When I said I wanted to attend ASU, he was only too happy to pay all the bills so long as I agreed to stay out here.”

I sighed and closed my eyes. Clearly she wasn’t going to miss much of her old life. I’d gone and caught myself an ideal candidate for Druidry. Still, it was best to be thorough, and I still had a couple of disincentives to offer her.

“Granuaile. Did I ever tell you what happened to my last apprentice?”

“No, but I think you’re probably going to tell me he died horribly.”

“Tragically, yes. Cut down by Moors in the kingdom of Galicia in 997. He was only a couple months away from getting his tattoos and becoming a full Druid. He was utterly vulnerable, you see. Utterly defenseless. And that’s what you’re going to be for twelve more years. There aren’t many shortcuts we can take. This isn’t like the movies where you can just feel the Force or learn everything you need to know in a three-minute montage, or those novels where the young hero masters advanced swordplay in a couple of months of lessons on the trail. And all that time you’ll be a target in a way I never was, in a way Cíbran never was.”

“Cíbran was your apprentice?”

“Yes. I trained him in secret. The locals all thought I was a staunch Christian, the rock of the neighborhood, and never suspected for a moment what I truly was. And back when I was in training, before Christianity, it was perfectly safe to be a Druid. Best possible thing that could happen to a lad, in fact. But you’re not in that situation. I’m currently a high-value target, and I’m going to be the gods’ most wanted after this next trip to Asgard, no matter how it turns out. If things don’t go well, you’re almost certainly going down with me. You could be throwing away your whole life.”

Granuaile pressed her lips together and smiled tightly. “Nope, you’re not scaring me away. Correct me if I’m wrong, but so far the score is Atticus 5, gods 0.”

“That’s a poor analogy. If they score one, I’m dead and they win.”

“Whatever.” She held up a hand. “My point is that you kick ass, and it reminds me of something I’ve been meaning to ask you: How did the Romans ever manage to wipe out the Druids? You can travel to different planes, camouflage yourselves, shape-shift, and fight without ever getting tired—so what happened?”

“Caesar and Minerva,” I said. “That’s what happened.” Granuaile said nothing. She picked up her wineglass and took a sip, raising her eyebrows expectantly, waiting for me to elaborate.

“There was more to it than that,” I admitted. “I think there were vampires behind it too. But what I know for certain is that Caesar tromped through Gaul, burning all the sacred groves, and that effectively prevented most Druids from shifting planes and escaping easily. We didn’t have the freedom to use any healthy forest we wanted at the time—that became my project afterward. The fires didn’t simply burn the wood, you see, they burned away the tethers to Tír na nÓg. It left all the continental Druids stranded here on this plane. Once that was accomplished, Minerva screwed us over by giving Roman scouts the ability to see through our camouflage, and then they could chase us down. The ability to fight without tiring doesn’t help when a cohort of legionnaires surrounds you and thrusts their spears from every direction. And that’s what they did, make no mistake. It was a systematic slaughter. Some tried to fly away in their bird forms, but they were shot down by archers.”

“But surely some of you escaped.”

“Oh, aye. Druidry struggled on, especially in Ireland, because it was isolated from the Romans. But then Saint Patrick came along, you know, spreading Catholicism. Lots of lads looked at twelve years of hard study and responsibility, weighed it against the instant acceptance and fellowship of the Christians, and chose the easier faith. And then it was just a matter of attrition. None of the other Druids knew the herblore of Airmid, and they eventually died of old age, if the Romans didn’t get them. And one day, the last Druid except for me died without leaving behind a trained Druid to take his place. I couldn’t tell you precisely when it happened, but it was most likely the sixth or seventh century.”