get to that point, and I’m a friendly guy. Never betray a moment’s impatience.”
“Where did you get the faeries to feed it?”
“Aenghus Og kept sending them after me.”
“Ha!” the Morrigan barked. “So in a way he was helping you all along to build the defense that enabled you to stand up to him.”
When the Morrigan left, I finally relieved my grateful bladder, then discovered I was only mildly late to get on the road with Granuaile. My cell was still on top of my shop’s roof, so I used the phone in the kitchen to call her to come pick me up. After that, I got my wands out of the garage to perform a long-overdue divination.
My wands are twenty sticks with Ogham script carved into one end. Each of the sticks stands for a different letter of the Ogham alphabet, and these in turn are associated with the trees of Ireland, together with a host of prophetic meanings.
I took my wands out to the backyard and cleared my mind. I focused on my friends and their safety, then, without looking, I withdrew five sticks from the bag and threw them gently into the air, letting them fall in front of me. How they fell-and how I interpreted them-would hopefully give me a glimpse of the future.
I saw willow, alder, hawthorn, blackthorn, and yew. The latter chilled me quickly; it prophesied death. Fortunately it did not definitively cross the alder or willow-which I took to mean both male and female friends-yet it threatened both, lying between them, as a stark possibility, a possible outcome. Hawthorn and blackthorn-magic guardianship and danger. My friends needed magical protection: The German hexen would attack again soon, perhaps at any moment.
“Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune!” I cried with all the venom of Charlton Heston.
‹What’s a strumpet?› Oberon asked.
“It’s a Shakespearean word for whore.”
‹Cool word! It rhymes with trumpet. And pump it. Why didn’t the Black Eyed Peas use it in their song? Aren’t rappers always looking for cool new rhymes? They should kick it old school with the Bard.›
I snorted. “Indeed.”
‹Who’d you call a strumpet?›
“Fortune. It’s a quote from Hamlet. The idea is that Fortune is fickle or unfaithful, like a whore. The character who says it continues, ‘All you gods, in general synod take away her power;’ because he doesn’t like what Fortune has in store for him. Well, I’m not a god, nor am I in general synod with anyone, but perhaps I have a way to take away Fortune’s power to do you harm.” I had three amulets of cold iron that I could use like talismans-three people I could protect. “Come here, Oberon. Let me see your collar.”
‹Aw, no, not more tags?›
“Not this time. This is a special magical talisman to protect you from the Man.”
‹Gravy! Thanks, Atticus!›
“You’re going to need to hold still for a few minutes while I activate it. We have to make sure the Man can’t get past all the juju to grind you down, you know?”
‹Oh, I dig it, I totally dig it. I’ll just pretend I’m one of those crazy Sphinx cats.›
“Excellent.” Protective talismans are fairly simple to construct from most objects, but they vary in strength depending on the base material and the skill of the caster. Cold iron naturally provides the strongest protection, but its magic-negating properties also make it tremendously difficult to twist to one’s own purposes-unless you’ve been watching how iron elementals do it. Like wards, you have to be specific about what you want the talisman to protect against-you can’t simply say, “Protect me against everything,” because absolutes are not only impossible to empower but dangerous in practice. Cold iron is almost an absolute in itself, but I specifically crafted Oberon’s talisman to watch for Fae magic, infernal hexes, several forms of old craft from Europe that the hexen might employ, and Kabbalistic spells. He’d be at least partially open to Obeah, Voudoun, and Wiccan craft, as well as most anything from the Indian and Asian traditions and the vast sea of shamanistic practice, but I had to put my money down somewhere.
Granuaile was knocking on the door as we finished up, and after she confirmed that she’d picked up some bats and baseballs for my Satyrn Massacre alibi, I got to repeat the practice on her.
“Aw, sensei, you shouldn’t have,” she said, as I presented her with the amulet. She was wearing a gold chain already, and the amulet was a bit heavy-looking once she had strung it up. She had a couple of freckles near her collarbones, and I resolutely kept my eyes up there.
“I hope it won’t throw off your wardrobe too much,” I said. “But you should wear this from now on. If you’re not wearing it, then it’s doing nothing for you. Eventually you’ll bind this to your aura as I’ve done with mine, but until then it’ll just be a talisman for you. I’m going to empower it for you now. Want to see what it looks like?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’ll turn on my faerie specs to make the magic visible and then bind your sight to mine so you see what I see.”
“You’re going to let me watch you do some cool Druid shit?”
“Yep. But you should always remember to speak of such things with reverence and awe.”
She didn’t miss a beat. “You mean you’re going to initiate me into the sacred mysteries of Druidic craft?”
“That’s much better; well done.” I turned on my faerie specs, found the threads of Granuaile’s awareness, and bound them to mine. She gasped when the knot was completed and her point of view wrenched outside her own head.
“Whoa!” Her arms splayed out, searching for balance. “My first out-of-body experience.”
“Don’t move or you’ll probably fall over. Shut your own eyes.”
“Okay, okay. That’s better. Hey. Where’s the magic? You said there’d be magic.”
“Patience. I haven’t started yet. But look here.” I raised the back of my right hand into my sight and examined the power glowing white through the loop of my tattoo. In the visible spectrum my tattoos did nothing, but the strength of the earth shone underneath them like a back-lit neon sign when I looked at the truth of things. It appeared that I had an indigo racing stripe down my right side with a pulsing white halo.
“Wow! You’re lit up like Vegas! How does it glow under the tattoos? Never mind, tell me what all these threads and knots are-Wait. No. What the hell are all those knots coming out of my head? They’re really intricate.”
“You’re looking at the binding of your sight to mine.”
“No way! You can see spells? They just hang around in the air like Celtic artwork?”
I laughed softly. “Most Celtic works of art are spells, or at least they were at one time. The bonds between all living things are there for Druids to witness and manipulate as we choose. There are so many bindings that choosing what to see and focusing on it will become your most treasured skill.”
“Really? I’m having no trouble focusing.”
“That’s because you’re using my eyes,” I reminded her.
“Oh yeah. Dunce cap for me. So all spells look like this?”
“No, just Druidic ones. Some spells I cannot see very well or even identify, but you can always tell that something is wrong when parts of people are cut off from the world, when their ties are smothered or altered somehow. I will show you what other spells look like as the occasion arises.”
“Cool. This is so fucking cool.”
“Reverence and awe?” I prodded her gently.
“I meant to say this blessed mystery fills my soul with light.”
“Heh! That’s excellent. All right, now I need to concentrate, and you should probably keep your exclamations to yourself while I’m doing this,” I said, as I refocused on the amulet. “Don’t move either.”
“Okay.”
I gave Granuaile the same protections I had given to Oberon. Though she kept quiet as she saw the dim green web of protection spread out across her body from the amulet, she gasped when the binding was complete and energized, since the threads flashed and shimmered briefly with white light before fading back to a soft green.
“All right, that’s finished. You’re protected from line-of-sight magical attacks only. If someone gets hold of your hair or blood, this won’t do you a lick of good, because they can then cast a spell that attacks you from within, underneath this shell of protection.”
