“What? That’s nonsense, man. He’s been standing there passively more than five feet away from you the entire time!”
“He just hit me upside the head!”
‹Well, I’m sure he deserved it, Atticus.›
Hush, I didn’t hit him.
“He most certainly did not, and that security camera right there will prove it!” Hal exclaimed, pointing at the camera. All eyes followed his finger and saw that it would most definitely prove whether or not I had moved to slap Detective Fagles upside the head. Fagles heard the certainty in Hal’s voice, saw the doubt in his colleagues’ faces, and practically stomped his foot as he cried, “Well, something hit my head, and it sure as hell wasn’t me!”
“Something hit me too, Detective, but it wasn’t my client, and there’s no reason to keep pointing your gun at him. Let’s all calm down now.”
“I want to know what hit me!” Fagles insisted. “And hey! Where did the sword go? It’s gone!”
It wasn’t gone. But he couldn’t see it now that I had snapped that blue knot-the camouflage was in effect.
“What sword?” I said, playing dumb.
“The sword that we were just talking about!” Fagles screamed. “The one that was on that shelf!” He pointed impotently at the spot where my sword still lay, hidden from his unaided vision.
‹Now that’s funny,› Oberon said. ‹I think his panties are getting twisted. If I had any sausage to spare, I would give you one for that right there.›
“You saw it too!” Fagles accused Hal, looking around at the other cops who were eyeing him a bit uncertainly.
“How could I have seen it, Detective? I’m on this side of the counter,” Hal pointed out, the very picture of reason and affability.
“But you argued about it with me!”
“That’s because I’m paid to argue about things. But I never saw this sword you’re referring to. I merely objected to you taking anything not included in the warrant. Speaking of which, has anyone found the large dog yet?”
Detective Jimenez sighed and put away his gun, and all the other cops relaxed too, save for Fagles. They were beginning to look a bit embarrassed.
“I still don’t know what hit me, and I want an answer,” Fagles ground out, his chin lifted obstinately.
“I think it was a freak gust of wind, Detective,” Hal said, “coming through the broken door. I felt it too.”
That did it for Detective Jimenez. “The dog isn’t here, Fagles,” he said. “Let’s go; put the gun away.”
Fagles gritted his teeth in frustration, and the green wreath around his head flared menacingly. And that’s when he shot me.
Chapter 16
You know that old saw about your life flashing before your eyes at the moment of death? Well, if you’ve lived more than two thousand years, it’s going to take a while for your subconscious to put together a decent retrospective, and I imagined that there must be one of those “spinning beach balls of death” hovering over my head like when I asked my computer to do too many things at once. But that’s not the first thing I thought about as I fell to the ground with a hole in my chest; it was the second.
The first thing I thought was, “Oh no! I’ve been shot!” in the immortal words of the golden protocol droid when he got lased with special effects in a mining colony.
As I waited for my life’s highlight reel-much like those tributes they play at the Oscars every year-to play in my mind, quite a few people became excited in my shop.
All the cops, led by Jimenez, pulled their guns back out and pointed them at Fagles, shouting at him to put his gun down now. And Oberon wanted to start tearing into him right away.
‹ATTICUS!›
It’s okay, buddy, stay there. I’ll be fine.
Poor Fagles. Even as I watched from flat on my back, the green binding about his head dissolved. He came back to full conscious control of his mind to find himself standing over me with a smoking gun hanging from his hand and five cops pointing their guns at him.
His voice, thin and trembling, said, “It wasn’t me.”
“Drop the gun, Fagles!” Jimenez commanded. Fagles didn’t seem to hear.
“There was someone in my mind. Telling me what to do. He wanted the sword.”
“There is no sword!” Hal spoke up. “Only my unarmed client bleeding on the floor!”
That drew my attention back to my condition and how very, very much it hurt. Thanks a lot, Hal. I was bleeding out pretty good, and I had a punctured left lung that was filling up with blood as well. I reached for some power to begin healing… and didn’t have any to tap. I’d used everything I had stored in my bear charm on casting camouflage and dealing with Aenghus Og’s bindings. I needed to get outside, where I could touch the earth, but Fagles was still standing there and the cops were still telling him to drop the gun, and no one was dialing 911 while they had an armed rogue cop to deal with. Owie.
“But I didn’t shoot him. It wasn’t me,” Fagles pleaded. “You don’t understand.”
“There’s a security camera and six witnesses who watched you pull the trigger on an unarmed, unresisting man,” Jimenez said. “You know what that means. Drop the weapon now, Fagles.”
Tears began leaking from Fagles’s eyes, and his chin quivered. “I don’t understand how this happened,” he said. “I would never do something like this.”
“We all saw you do it,” Jimenez said. “Last warning. Drop the weapon or we will be forced to shoot you.”
The direct threat jarred Fagles out of his self-pity. “Oh, you’re going to shoot me, are you?” he sneered, and then he became unhinged. “Well, that’s better than going to prison! And even better than that would be taking you with me!”
“Fagles, don’t-”
And then there was a lot of noise. Fagles’s inchoate roar of rage against what he knew to be injustice, his brief attempt to raise his weapon, and then the percussive explosions of five guns going off, sending Fagles howling backward through the door, and finally the curses of the cops who knew they’d all be sitting on their asses for days, pending investigation.
“Somebody get the paramedics here and some black-and-whites to block off the street,” Jimenez said. “And we’re going to need that security tape.”
Hal rushed forward and knelt down to see how I was doing.
“I need to get outside to draw some power,” I whispered at him. “Lung filling up with blood,” and then I coughed some up for him by way of punctuation.
“How’s he doing?” Jimenez asked, looking over Hal’s shoulder.
“Help me move him. He needs air,” Hal said, and the detective backed off.
“Whoa, we need to wait for the paramedics. We’re not supposed to do anything.”
“Fine, I’ll do it myself,” Hal said, and he hooked an arm under my shoulders and knees and scooped me up as effortlessly as he would an Italian runway model. Silly cop, I don’t need your help; I have a werewolf on retainer.
“Hey, if he dies, it’s going to be your fault.”
“If he dies, he can sue me,” Hal said. “Get out of the way.” He sidestepped through the broken door, over the body of Detective Fagles, and then placed me down on the grass strip outside my shop. I gasped in relief as I immediately began to draw power from the earth. Between bloody coughs, I spoke quietly so that only Hal would be able to hear me as I began closing my wounds.
“I need the sword. It’s invisible, but you can feel it on the shelf. Bring it to me. And get someone over here to clean up all of my blood, completely sanitize the place, every drop. Including your clothes.”
Hal looked down and saw my blood all over him. “This is a three-thousand-dollar suit.”
