Brighid closed her eyes and took a deep breath, determined not to lose her temper again. “Yes, this has been a day for my inadequacies to be made plain. Are you finished?”

“Just about. Will you agree to leave in peace and inform me in advance of your visits in the future?”

“Yes.”

“And my promised reward for killing Aenghus Óg? Rather than becoming your consort, I would like your forgiveness for today.” I released her from Fragarach and lowered the sword to the table but kept my hand on the hilt. “I look forward to your next visit and hope it will be much more congenial than this one.”

“I shall not break hospitality again,” Brighid said as she rose to her feet. “But neither shall you hear again an offer like you heard today. All of this,” she cupped her br**sts briefly, “could have been yours, Druid, but no more. Think on that the next time the Morrigan is gouging out pieces of your flesh.”

She made sure I saw plenty of what I’d be missing on her way out the door. Damn, damn, damn.

"Can I talk now?"

Sure, Oberon. What’s up?

"Usually I think your paranoia is really funny. But right now I’m just glad you told me where to stand so that I didn’t get set on fire by She of the Violent Mood Swings." He reared up and put both his paws on my shoulders and gave me a sloppy lick in the face. "Thanks, Atticus."

Chapter 15

There were multiple missed calls on my cell phone. Some were from Granuaile, some from Malina, and a couple from Hal Hauk, my lawyer. I called my lawyer first.

“Atticus! Tell me you weren’t involved in this Satyrn Massacre business,” he said without preamble.

“Satyrn massacre?”

“That’s what the papers are calling it. Capital M.”

“Oh. Well, look, why don’t you come over,” I said, because anyone could be listening.

“Gods of light and darkness preserve us. Don’t move, I’ll be right there,” he growled, and then hung up.

Granuaile was next. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to define your terms.”

“You’re still in one piece and everything still works.”

“Then yes, I’m all right.”

“Good. Thought you’d like to know that priest and rabbi came in again.”

“They did?” I frowned. “What did they want?”

“They asked me to open the rare-book case. I told them I couldn’t.”

“Right, because you can’t.”

“Right. They looked pretty pissed. And then they asked all these questions about you. Religious stuff, like whether you were a Christian or a Jew or a pagan, and whether you practiced your religion faithfully.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I said those were questions better answered by yourself. They wanted to know when you’d be back, and I had to tell them I really didn’t know.”

“Well, hopefully I’ll be in before the day is through. Can Perry and Rebecca run things tomorrow?”

“Sure. What do you want me to do?”

“Latin, of course, and get your job back at Rúla Búla.”

“Already got it. All it took was a phone call and some groveling to Liam.”

“Excellent! I want you to come over in the morning so I can see about doing something for your personal protection. I haven’t done a divination recently, but I’m getting one of those hunches.”

“The paranoid kind?”

“What other kind is there? Hey,” I said, my voice dropping and lilting with dulcet, honey-bunny tones, “can I tell you one of the many reasons I love you?” This wasn’t an abrupt flowering of love between us. It was a code phrase, one that Granuaile herself had suggested.

“Look, sensei,” she’d said upon her return from North Carolina. “I don’t know if things are going to get crazy again like they did with Aenghus Óg, but if they do, we need a way to communicate alibis successfully over the phone. You can’t just send your lawyer over every time you need to work something out. You might not always have time. The cops might get to me before he does. I might be out of town when you need me. And that whole business was so messy, so much could have gone wrong. So we should plan ahead and Be Prepared, you know, like the Boy Scouts.”

“Fuck the Boy Scouts,” I’d said. “Be Prepared was my motto before there were any streets to help little old ladies across.”

“Oh. Right.” Granuaile had paused, and when I failed to fill the silence, she asked, “Does that mean you already have a plan, sensei?”

“No, I’m just establishing my primacy over the Boy Scouts.”

Granuaile’s lips quirked upward. “Duly noted. I have a plan, sensei, if you’d like to hear it.”

“Of course I would. Thinking ahead like this is why you’ll make a good Druid. Seriously,” I added, because we were still too unfamiliar with each other for her to see through my customary curtain of wit.

“Thank you.” Her cheeks had colored faintly at the praise. “Well, you have to assume these days that all your cell-phone calls are being listened to, and maybe your home and business phones too. That means you have to say what you mean in code. But if the code is too obscure or in a foreign language, they’ll flag your ass for suspicious activity and put you on a no-fly list—”

“Beg your pardon,” I interrupted. “Who are they?”

“The government. The cops. The Men in Black. Maybe even the Boy Scouts. Them.”

“Ah. Please continue.”

“So we need a simple code, and I was thinking that since we’ve already pretended that we’re romantically involved in one alibi, we should stick with that concept in future situations.”

“We should, eh?” The beginnings of a smile played at the corners of my mouth.

“Just pretending,” she’d emphasized, her cheeks flushing more hotly. “Then we can call each other as necessary, throw out a code phrase, and then lay the alibi down.”

“What’s the code phrase?”

“Oh. Um. Well, it’s a question in keeping with the pretense of our relationship. It’s ‘Can I tell you one of the many reasons I love you?’ And then the other person says, ‘Sure,’ and then you just explain what we did last night and where and so on, putting in something cute or lovey-dovey for verisimilitude, and bam! You’ve slipped an alibi right past the ears of the military-industrial-authoritarian-douche-canoe complex.”

I had raised my eyebrows and nodded appreciatively. “Hey, that’s not bad,” I told her. “It’s even a turnoff to eavesdroppers when you get all sickeningly sweet with your voice. Listening to other people be ooey-gooey with each other is a guaranteed recipe for nausea. So let’s call it a plan and hope we never have to use it.”

Now that we had to use it, only a week after she’d brilliantly made the suggestion, Granuaile picked it up with only the slightest of pauses. “Sure you can, Atticus,” she said, her voice turning syrupy. “Anytime you want to tell me why you love me, I’m all ears, baby.”

“Well, you know how last night we went out to that park north of Indian Bend Road that has the lights on all night, and we hit baseballs for Oberon to chase? I just thought it was special how you picked up the baseballs all covered in drool and bite marks when I know you hate that kind of thing.”

“Well, Oberon’s sweet,” Granuaile replied. “We were out there a long time. How many balls do you think we hit?”

I was so proud I could have popped. Such a clever mind. “We had a dozen,” I replied. “And don’t forget, those two bats are still in the trunk of your car.”

“Oh, they are? I don’t remember, are those yours or do I need to return them to someone?”

So quick. She knew precisely what to ask. When I’d first agreed to make her my apprentice, it was partially under duress, but now I could see that I was wildly fortunate. “Those are mine. The wooden ones are mine, the Wilsons. The aluminum bats were the borrowed ones; I’ve already returned them.”

“Oh. Is that all?”

“That’s it. The balls and bats are in your trunk, and you’re my snookie-wookie marshmallow fudge love pie.”

“Aw … wait. Did you just call me a Wookiee?”

I chuckled. “Caught that, did you?” I ended my conversation with her and then made my last call from my home phone. I’d saved it for last because I knew I’d be getting scolded. Lambasted. Reamed, even, in a Polish accent.

“That was poorly handled last night, Mr. O’Sullivan,” Malina said immediately.

“Those kinds of opponents aren’t my specialty,” I replied, wary of using the word Bacchant on a phone, untapped or not. “And I got most of them.”

“What do you mean, most of them?”

“There were fifteen, not twelve, as your divination foretold, so that was poorly handled, Ms. Sokolowski.” Talking about divinations and spells on the phone never worried me. Anyone listening from the government would dismiss us as fruity New Age hippies.

“How many got away?” Malina asked.

“Just one.”

“Ah, she will return to Las Vegas, then. But she may bring more next time.”

“Well, I can’t help next time. If that last one had wanted to fight, I’m not sure I could have taken her. What news of the hexen?”

“We have managed to bid farewell to two of them.”

“From your condo?”

“Even so.” She sounded a bit smug.

“You knew them previously?”

“No, these were younger members, not so well protected and not so wise about masking their true nature.”

That told me that Malina didn’t necessarily need hair or blood to deliver a lethal attack from afar. And she knew how to pick magic users out of a crowd. Good to know. “Well done,” I said. “Does that mean you know where the rest of them are?”

“Unfortunately not. We are getting closer, however. We’ve narrowed it down to Gilbert. But we need more bloodwort.”

“All right, I’ll send over a courier with three more pounds. No one’s going to be asking about the two you bid farewell to, are they?”

“You mean the way people are asking about what you did last night? No, there was nothing suspicious in their leave-taking.”

“Oh. I see.” Accidents happen.

“You should try subtlety sometime. But, look, they’re going to know they didn’t succeed in getting us their first time around, so you should prepare for more attacks, however it is that you do that.”

“Attacks like the first one?”

“No, I imagine they’ll try something different. It probably won’t be as flashy, but the result will leave you just as dead if you’re not protected.”

“Okay, thanks for the warning.”

A car screeched to a halt outside. "Your werewolf lawyer’s here," Oberon said. "Bet you he smells like citrus air freshener."

I bet it’s vanilla.

I quickly said farewell to Malina and opened the front door to see Hal stalking up my front steps, a scowl on his face and a newspaper in his hand. “Good afternoon, sir! My, what impeccable tailoring you have.”

Hal stopped in his tracks and eyed me warily. “What the hell happened to you?” he said, taking in my shirtless and heavily bruised and scratched form. He gestured at my wounds and asked, “Is that from last night?”

“No, it’s from the rough sex this morning.”

“Smart ass. Sorry I asked. Hey, did you get your ear back?”

“Yep. That was definitely the best part of my day so far.”

Hal sighed in relief and waved the newspaper significantly. “I’ll say, you lucky bastard. Police are looking for a guy that matches your description with a missing right ear. I thought they had your number on that one.”

I threw up my hands, perplexed. “How do police even know what to look for? The only two cops who saw me got killed.”

“Well, some of the modern-day fops fleeing the club saw you handcuffed on the ground in custody of the now-deceased police, so naturally the living police are anxious to figure out what happened to said suspect. They have your clothes and hair color along with the missing ear to go on, and that’s it. No descriptions of your face, since you were sucking asphalt.”

“Any mention of my tattoos?”

“Happily not. Your tats must have been facedown because of the way they had you cuffed, so they’re searching for a tatless, earless guy.” Hal sniffed the air speculatively and frowned. “Is something burning?”

“My house was for a while, but not anymore.”

“Oh,” he said, and the fires of his curiosity were extinguished, just like that. “Well, it’s kind of irritating even out here, so would you mind if we sat on the porch?”

“Not at all.” I gestured to a chair and Hal handed me the newspaper as he took it. Oberon thumped his tail against the chair and pushed his head under Hal’s hand.

“Hey, pooch,” Hal said, obligingly giving Oberon’s head a scratch.

"I win. He smells like citrus on top of wet dog."

Did it ever occur to you that maybe he’s trying to mask the wet dog smell with the citrus?

"That doesn’t make any sense, Atticus. Wet dog is a perfectly acceptable way for a werewolf to smell. I think it must be the other way around."