“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 Og, 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
