Hammered [3] (7 page)

When we were married, I did not move without thinking of her first. And now I am in a similar place; I cannot move without thinking of Oberon, as well as my duty to Granuaile. I will not,
cannot
abandon them. I saw that my need to defend and protect them had driven my choices in recent months—from killing Aenghus Óg to making an unwise bargain with Leif so that he would help me dispatch a nasty German coven. Flidais had told me, back at Tony Cabin, that she knew I would have run from Aenghus Óg again if Oberon hadn’t been
held hostage. And she was right. Likewise, if
die Töchter des dritten Hauses
had not killed Perry and tried to kill both Granuaile and me, I would not have called Leif for help and agreed to take him to Asgard. Those had been rash, desperate decisions, not the sort that would most likely allow me to stay alive. But once bound by the ties of love, there is no other choice one can make and remain human. They’d been simple choices at the time that were now making my life tremendously complicated. My immediate safety was an illusion; the consequences would come home eventually like the prodigal son—a karmic debt, Laksha might have said, but with the usurious rates incurred at a payday loan center.

It was time for me to leave Arizona. There was an annoying Tempe detective named Kyle Geffert who was convinced I’d had something to do with what the media called the “Satyrn Massacre”—and he was right. Thus far my lawyers had kept me from suffering long interrogation sessions in a steel-gray room laced with cigarette smoke, but I didn’t see how I could avoid it for much longer.

The lone Bacchant that had escaped that fiasco left knowing positively that the world’s last Druid lived in Arizona, and Bacchus would probably be roused by that alone, to say nothing of his reaction if the Norse pantheon had taken my bait and blamed him for my Thanksgiving shenanigans.

A group of fanatic Russian demon hunters who called themselves the Hammers of God thought I was too cozy with the forces of darkness, despite the fact that I’d probably slain more demons than they had. Rabbi Yosef Bialik would probably return to harass me with a few of his friends, now that he knew I kept company with werewolves and witches.

On top of all this, one of my regular customers in the bookshop had asked me last week how I stayed looking so young.

It was time to go.

The idea of moving wouldn’t bother me except for what I’d have to leave behind. The fish and chips at Rúla Búla, sipping whiskey with the widow MacDonagh, the simple pleasures of being a practicing herbalist—all would be sorely missed. Too, there was a large wasteland to heal around Tony Cabin, the existence of which was at least partly my responsibility, and I wanted more than anything to spend all my time there righting that particular wrong. But I had chains of obligation to throw off first—proverbial ducks I had to get in a row.

After running for most of the last couple days, I surprised myself by asking Oberon as soon as I got home if he’d like to go for a run.

he said. I’d picked him up from the widow MacDonagh’s house, where he’d been staying during my absence. The widow wasn’t in, which was just as well. If she’d been home, I would have had to sit and chew the fat for a while, and Oberon had been waiting long enough. The widow’s cats provided him plenty of entertainment, but she couldn’t take him for walks and give him the sort of exercise a very large Irish wolfhound needs.

We jogged through the Mitchell Park neighborhood where I lived, and he brought me up-to-date on what I’d missed.

he complained.

I chuckled and spoke aloud as we jogged. I often spoke directly to his mind through the bond we shared, but since no one was around to hear me, I enjoyed
making use of my breath. “Whoa, five syllables. Very impressive.”

“Indubitably. And we’ll go hunting as soon as I can manage. I’m sorry to hear about your emasculation.”

I frowned at him and checked to see if he was joking. “She does?”

“Oh. That does make me sorry. She’s never said anything about them to me.”

I let a few paces go by before I answered. The neighborhood mourning doves were happy and cooing to each other. A stooped old man in Bermuda shorts was trimming down his cloud sage bush for the winter, moving slowly and carefully. He was too preoccupied with his topiary to recognize that I was talking to my dog as we passed. “Yes. I could reverse the aging process with Immortali-Tea, and that would take care of pretty much everything. It repairs cell damage, prevents cancer, increases white blood cells, you name it. But what if I did that for her? What do you think would happen?”

“True. But you’re not thinking it through. The widow’s getting close to ninety years old, if she’s not there already. Let’s say I put her on an intensive regimen of Immortali-Tea and she shed fifty years in five weeks. She would look and feel forty years old, and if I never gave her any tea after that, she could still look forward to living at least another fifty years.”

“No, it wouldn’t. People would start asking questions.
Everyone would want to know how she did it. Her friends and relatives especially. She’s told you about her kids and grandkids, right?”

“Well, her oldest son is sixty-seven. She’d be younger than him. That would be awkward. Her grandkids would freak out because their grandma didn’t look like a sweet old lady anymore. So what does she tell them? This nice Druid I know did me a solid?”

“It’s not about hurting me. They’re going to want to stay young too. And then their friends and relatives will, and before you know it the tabloids will get hold of the story and latch on like seven puppies after six tits.”

“And then the government will get involved, because having someone live that long is eventually going to raise flags at the IRS and the Social Security Administration. Her driver’s license picture won’t match her face. All sorts of questions are going to be asked.”

“The widow by herself would be worth the trouble. But I can’t confine it to her. Still, let’s say I did. She gets to start life over at forty while her kids all continue to age and die. Would she thank me for her youth when she’s standing over the grave of her son? Or the graves of her grandchildren?”

“Good. I’ve been in that position, Oberon, far too many times. I’ve buried my children and their children and so on. It carves away a piece of you.”

“Sure I have. It’s how I learned all the stuff I just told you—the painful way. And I learned that some people become distanced from humanity, severely troubled, and
reclusive when they live too long. Sort of like vampires tend to do, only without the bloodsucking. If their minds aren’t trained like a Druid’s, they gradually collect neuroses over time, like sunbathers collect wrinkles. Immortali-Tea can’t fix batshit insanity.”

“Yep. That’s why eventually I stopped offering.”

“Not soon. Need to be in a place where I can settle down. And this isn’t that place. I need to talk to you about that, actually.”

I explained to him that we needed to move out of Tempe. “I’ll have to go back to Asgard soon, and it’ll be a longer trip than the first one. It might be forever, because I might not come back, and if that’s what happens, then you need to be good to Mrs. MacDonagh. But if I do return, we’ll be leaving right away.”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Heh! I never thought of it that way.” I smiled. “But now that you’ve clarified my thinking, I wonder why they don’t list those amenities in real estate ads. It seems criminally negligent.”

“I care, buddy. I believe you to be remarkably wise.”

I laughed. “Perhaps when we are safely settled elsewhere.”

“I cannot promise you, Oberon,” I said, regret tingeing my voice, and I could tell he was disappointed. “But, look, it is good to have a dream so long as you do not let it gnaw at the substance of your present. I have seen men consumed by their dreams, and it is a sour business. If you cling too tightly to a dream—a poodle bitch or a personal sausage chef or whatever—then you miss the felicity of your heart beating and the smell of the grass growing and the sounds lizards make when you run through the neighborhood with your friend. Your dream should be like a favorite old bone that you savor and cherish and chew upon gently. Then, rather than stealing from you a wasted sigh or the life of an idle hour, it nourishes you, and you become strangely contented by nostalgia for a possible future, so juicy with possibility and redolent of sautéed garlic and decadent slabs of bacon that you feel full when you’ve eaten nothing. And then, one fine day when the sun smiles upon your snout, when the time is right, you bite down hard. The dream is yours. And then you chew on the next one.”

Oberon chuffed, his version of human laughter.