Snorri snorted his acknowledgment but otherwise didn’t move.
Laksha walked up behind Snorri, holding her nose. “Smells like demons,” she complained.
“Nice job on Radomila,” I said.
“Did she have the necklace?”
“Yes, she did.” I held it up so she could see her bloody treasure. “The rest of the coven is just about finished off, so you won’t need to use its power on them. Here you go, as promised.”
She took the necklace from me and smiled. “Thank you. It is a pleasure to work with a man who keeps his word.”
“I am actually going to help you keep the remaining part of your bargain,” I said.
“Oh?” Her eyes narrowed. “How so?”
“I’m giving Granuaile thirty thousand dollars to fly back east and find you a suitable host. Once you wake up in your new body, she’ll give you the rest to get yourself set up somewhere, minus her airfare home.”
“You have this kind of money to give away?”
I shrugged. “Ten grand just came from the coven. As for the rest, I live simply and I make a killing on long- term investments. Send me a postcard when you get settled; let me know how the karma rehab is going.”
Laksha chuckled and shoved the bloody necklace into Granuaile’s pocket. “I have no problem with this. Thank you for your consideration.”
“Thank you for taking care of Granuaile.”
“She is a sweet child, and very bright. She will make a good Druid.”
“I agree. May I speak with her now?”
“Certainly. Farewell.” Granuaile’s head drooped, and when it came back up she staggered backward and covered her face with her hands.
“Fauggh! What is that fucking smell? Oh my God, it reeks! I can’t-can’t-” She couldn’t finish her sentence because she was too busy vomiting on the side of the trail.
“Oh, yeah, I forgot about that,” I said. “Sorry. You kind of get used to it after a while.” Granuaile vomited again by way of reply, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually answered her question, and she might jump to the wrong conclusion if I didn’t say something soon. “It wasn’t me,” I assured her. “I swear it wasn’t me. That’s demons you’re smelling.”
“Whatever it is,” she gasped, “do we have to stay here for long? Because I don’t think-” She retched again, but now it was dry heaves. Part of me was finding this very interesting. Laksha had obviously been using the same nose as Granuaile, so the two had been exposed to the exact same stimuli, but Laksha had shown no urge to vomit so violently. It suggested that the physical reaction was even more psychologically based than I had previously supposed.
“Well, I have to stay and wait for the pack to return, but you could go back up the trail a little way until you can stand it. There’s nothing pretty to see here.”
“Then why did you have me come back here?”
“Precisely because there’s nothing pretty to see here. I wanted to give you a last chance to back out of our arrangement. You’re about to become an initiate in the world of magic, and that world can sometimes be brutally violent and smell as evil as it actually is. Breathe through your mouth and look around.”
“It’s all dark.”
Oh, duh. My binding had snapped when I lost my energy and Aenghus Og had drained the earth. Laksha clearly had used her own methods of seeing in the dark to get here. Using some more of the Morrigan’s power, I gave Granuaile night vision again, and she looked at the meadow full of corpses.
“My God,” she said. “Did you do all of this?”
“Everything except the witches and the two werewolves. But I had lots of help staying alive tonight. By rights I should be dead. And you should know that magic users rarely die peacefully in their sleep. So I want you to think about what you’re looking at and what you smelled as you take Laksha back east. I don’t want you entering into this with any romanticized ideals. And if you’d rather not be my apprentice when you come back, I will understand, no hard feelings, and I’ll make sure you get a good job to replace the one you quit today.”
“But what happened here? How did you manage this?”
“Whoa, hold that thought,” I said, hearing yips from the opposite side of the meadow and seeing Snorri lift his head off the ground. “It sounds like the Pack is returning. We may be able to leave sooner than I thought.”
Their arrival punctuated my point perfectly: Granuaile clutched my shoulder when she saw Emily’s head dangling from Gunnar’s jaws, and when he dropped it at my feet faceup, she hid behind my back.
“No, Granuaile, what are you hiding from? You need to see this too. This is part of it. This woman here looked about twenty before she died, and now we see her true age was closer to ninety. There are seven more witches who are older than she was and who think they’re wiser, so they might get ideas about trying to succeed where this one failed. Maybe seeing the head of their youngest will drive home the point that it’s not wise to tangle with me. When you cannot reason with people, you have to try scaring them. If that doesn’t work, then you either run or you kill them. Or set your lawyers on them.”
“Is that what you’re doing? Trying to scare me?”
“Think of it as full disclosure.”
“Okay. Thank you. I will think about it.” She turned and started back up the trail. “I’m just going to go far enough ahead to where I can breathe normally again.”
Gunnar and Hal sloughed off their fur and put their human skin on so they could carry their two fallen pack mates out of the wilderness. They didn’t want to talk, and I figured they were probably calculating the costs of having me as a client. Snorri moved slowly and Greta trotted on three legs, but they were able to make it out without help now that the silver was out of their system.
Before I left, I made sure to pick up Aenghus Og’s sword, Moralltach, since it now belonged to me by virtue of my victory. The hike out took much longer than the trip in, and we were a weary, silent lot, but we were back to the cars well before dawn. About two miles away from the trailhead, I could feel the earth again, and I wept as I walked.
Hal and I dropped Granuaile off at her apartment, and I told her to pack her bags for the trip east the next day. I didn’t know if I would see her again or not.
We made a call to Leif, who had woken up too late to join in the fun, and asked him to get his ghoul friends out there to clean up the mess.
Hal took me to a twenty-four-hour Walmart, and we bought gauze and tape to wrap around my chest where Fagles’s bullet hole used to be; we also fabricated a story to tell the police when I got home. I had been so traumatized by the attempt on my life by a police detective that I spent a couple of days incommunicado at my girlfriend’s house-and that would be Granuaile, for the purposes of the story. Hal said he’d straighten it out with her, then he drove me to my house and delivered me to the Tempe police, who were still staked out there, awaiting my statement. Hal was going to keep Oberon-and Emily’s head-until they left.
When they were finally satisfied with my story of a nervous breakdown, I called Hal to bring Oberon (and Emily) over, and then every other thought was of collapsing into the backyard to begin my true recovery from using Cold Fire.
That had to wait: too many things to do first.
I made a special point of calling Malina Sokolowski to tell her I had seen the sunrise but Radomila had most definitely not.
“I know you fully expected me to die, Malina, but don’t you think perhaps you underestimated me?”
“Perhaps I did,” she admitted. “There is so little available literature about the powers of Druids, and it is difficult to judge. But I hope you recognize that you underestimated me as well, Mr. O’Sullivan.”
“How so?” A thrill of panic shot down my spine. Did she get something of mine after all? Was I about to get magically squished?
“You thought me a liar and that I was somehow involved in this abhorrent plot to make bargains with hell and the Tuatha De Danann. I can understand why, because members of a coven tend to get painted with the same brush, often justifiably so. But looking back now, can you not see that I had only the best intentions?”
“You told me the truth about there being only six witches at Tony Cabin, and for that I thank you,” I said. “But when I asked you at my shop how many of your coven were plotting to take the sword from me, you refused to answer.”
