Shattered: The Iron Druid Chronicles, Book Seven (18 page)

“Thank you.” There’s a beep, and then he looks over and smirks as he puts the car in gear. “Don’t worry. She’s part of the pack.”

That wasn’t my worry at all. My worry was that my ignorance had me stuck in a bog when everyone else was on dry land and dancing to pipes. It’s no fun being stuck in a bog.

Hal’s house is perched on a hill of granite and sandstone that the locals call Camelback Mountain. Big sprawling place with a swimming pool in the back. He talks to the house as he walks through, and lights come on even though it’s not dark outside yet, then strange music plays, using instruments I have never heard before. He gets me a cold beer in the kitchen and leads me to a room with couches and a large-screen television.

“You’ve seen one of these before?” Hal asks, and takes off his coat but leaves the shirt and silver tie. I reply, yes, they had some smaller ones in that brewery in Flagstaff. “Good. I’m going to show you a chap who uses his mind, his vast knowledge of facts, to deduce what is going on around him. Might strike you as Druidic. Maybe.” He speaks into the air, and the music stops and the television turns on. It’s like he’s creating bindings but without any help from the earth, following no laws of Druidry. The magic of these people is a wonder.

Siodhachan tried to explain some of it to me—made me say
electricity
and
technology
three times each. But he pointed out that I can make their magic technology work without understanding exactly
how
it works, and this is largely how people function now. That idea—the idea that you can use magic without knowing how it works—is fundamentally different from how Druids do things. There is no way to perform Druidry without knowing how first. To even attempt it would be dangerous. I am beginning to think that much of what these people are doing in the name of convenience might be dangerous also. Magic does not happen free of cost.

Hal explains that the show is called
Sherlock
and that it was made some years ago by the Britons, some tribe from the island next to Ireland that rose to prominence after my time. A Roman
outpost called Londinium grew into a huge city called London, and this Sherlock Holmes solves crimes there. Except not really.

It opens with explosions and people diving to the ground, and Hal says that’s how modern humans conduct wars, with guns and with vehicles that carry bigger guns around on them. So this war veteran, John Watson, joins up with Sherlock to solve crimes.

The plot of the first episode involves phones—more modern magic—and the sending and receiving of messages on them. I keep making Hal stop the show and explain what I’m looking at.

“Do I need to get myself one of those fecking phone things?”

He considers and then says, “I wouldn’t imagine you’d need one in the short term.”

“Good. If you had said yes, I would have shat kine.”

Sherlock’s a clever lad, no doubt, and I think that Hal is right: He takes a Druidic approach to his problems. Unlike Watson and the other people around him, he pays attention to how things work and how humans behave.

“What did you think?” Hal asks after it ends, and I wonder aloud if there are any more of these shows. He says, aye, there are more, and he puts on the next one. I don’t have to interrupt him quite as much this time to ask questions, but we are interrupted by the arrival of Hal’s pack members, who trickle in as they get off work and make their way to Camelback Mountain. The first to arrive is a healer, but they’re known as doctors now and you’re supposed to call them Doctor before you say their surname. He’s a handsome lad named Dr. Snorri Jodursson, and I can tell he spends more time than he should styling his hair. He doesn’t have a wedding ring—something Siodhachan said I should look for—and once I meet more of the werewolves, I notice that almost none of them do. Apparently, only shallow, informal relationships with humans are allowed, to preserve the secret of the pack. And when a human gets too close to the truth or starts to notice how the werewolf is never seen during full moons, the relationship is over. If the human persists, then the
werewolf in question is uprooted and sent to join another pack—new identity, new job, the works. On a somewhat regular basis, entire packs trade territories with another. A werewolf who wants a lasting relationship must find one in the pack, therefore, or perhaps with another creature of the magical world that already knows about them and is used to keeping secrets. Dr. Jodursson’s hair tells me he isn’t looking for a lasting relationship. It’s flashy and indicates that he might belong to a tribe of modern men that Siodhachan told me about called the Douchebags.

Turns out the doctor is a big fan of
Sherlock
too. His favorite character is the woman who works at the hospital morgue. I cannot stand her. I am not sure if this reveals more about him or me.

One of the things Siodhachan told me to expect after meeting the fox lady from Japan was a greater range of skin tones and bone structures than I was used to seeing in the old days. He was nervous about it, like he expected me to disapprove of the way Gaia had created people.

“Is there something wrong with them? Are they witches? Abominations?”

“No, no,” he says.

“Why are you so worried, then?”

“I … well, you see, history …” Then he stops and shakes his head. “Never mind.” He smiles, relieved now, and says, “That’s perfect.”

Punch me stones if I know what he was talking about. But I finally get to meet a variety of people, once the rest of Hal’s pack shows up. The core of his group is from Iceland, of “assorted Scandinavian stock,” he says, but over the years the pack has taken on new members from everywhere, transplants from this part of the world or that. Efiah is a tall woman from someplace called Côte d’Ivoire; Farid is originally from Egypt, where his brother, Yusuf, is the alpha of the Cairo Pack; and Esteban is a small, quick man from Colombia. I have to admit that me heart beats a little faster when I meet one of Hal’s original pack,
a tough woman named Greta with braided yellow hair that falls down to her waist. When Hal introduces me as Siodhachan’s archdruid, her eyes flash with anger and her mouth presses together as if she’s biting her tongue. It can’t be me causing a reaction like that, so it must be Siodhachan.

At first I think maybe he’s broken her heart at some point, but then I remember him mentioning her in that endless story of his while I was fixing his tattoos. Greta had been there at Tony Cabin and was wounded by the Sisters of the Three Auroras, who had kidnapped Hal and used silver weapons when the pack came to rescue him. She watched several of her pack mates die that day. And later Siodhachan had taken off to Asgard with her alpha, Gunnar Magnusson, and come back with his body. She had good reason to despise him, and now I had just been introduced as the man who taught him everything he knew. Fecking wonderful.

Siodhachan’s advice about disguising my loyalties from the Tuatha Dé Danann comes back to me, and I figure it might be wiser here as well. I couldn’t deny any connection with him, but it would be best to bury any notion that I thought him incapable of doing any wrong. We pause the video and I announce my need for another beer. Everyone congregates in the kitchen around an island of granite, and I tell them stories of Siodhachan’s greatest cock-ups back when he was me apprentice, asking them to forgive me poor skills at the language. When I tell them about that one time with the goat and the Roman leather skirt stolen from Gaul, they laugh so hard that some of them cry, and Greta simply gives up trying to stand and falls down on the floor, rolling around and laughing until she’s gasping for breath. She almost drops her beer and creates a minor tragedy, but thank goodness she has the sense to hand it off to Hal before she loses it completely.

This is reassuring to me. Amidst all the fancy plastic and unnatural materials of the modern world, some things still endure. Goat shenanigans are still fecking funny.

The sun set without me noticing, and it feels wrong when I finally figure it out; you can’t tell time well inside these modern buildings. Farid asks Hal if he should throw together some dinner. Hal says, sure, Farid, dazzle us. Farid raids the refrigerator and recruits Efiah to help him. He’s a chef at some restaurant that specializes in “Sino–Mexican fusion cuisine.” I have no earthly clue what that means and they chop up vegetables I have never seen before, but when the food is finished, it tastes good to me. We drink more and the wolves all share how they were first transformed. Most of them admit that they shat or pissed themselves when they were first bitten and that at the beginning they considered the moon’s light to be a curse, but with the gift of the pack and the fullness of time they came to view it as a blessing.

I nod and approve: This should be the nature of power. It must always be acquired at great personal cost. Thus the Druids have the
Baolach Cruatan
, and the twelve years of training, and the three months of binding to the earth. After the dinner, we are faintly exhausted from entertaining one another and ready to be entertained by other means. We return to the sitting area and spread ourselves around. Farid brings around glasses of whiskey, and I enjoy the sound of ice clinking against glass. Greta sits next to me on a couch and answers my questions in a low voice, and I keep asking them so that she will keep talking. Laughter swirls around the room like the ice in me drink, and though there is much in this time that confuses and worries me, I have to admit that I like werewolves. They’re hearty and loyal and believe in the many benefits of recreational arse-kicking.

After the second episode of
Sherlock
concludes, everyone goes into the kitchen for refills or visits the bathroom or goes outside for a smoke. Greta remains with me on the couch.

“So,” she says.

“So.”

“You’re not a smart-ass know-it-all like Atticus.”

“Ha! You mean Siodhachan? He’s a thief, is what he is. Robs you of your patience within five minutes of meeting him. The
fact that he’s still alive is a testament to me restraint. I wanted to thrash the shite out of him on so many occasions, and only did it maybe ten percent of the time, heh heh.”

Her eyes twinkle, and her mouth, which had been drawn tight in disapproval at our introduction a few hours ago, relaxes and widens in a smile. “Yes, I think it’s true that he’s a thief of patience.” She looks down and her expression twists at a sudden thought, and she spends a bit of time involved with some kind of internal struggle. I wait in silence until her eyebrows fly up and she shrugs, as if to say, “To hell with it.” She moves closer to me, puts a hand on my shoulder, and whispers in my ear. “Tell me: Is it also true that you haven’t had sex for more than two thousand years?”

From my point of view, of course, it hadn’t been that long. But I didn’t need Siodhachan to tell me that she had just made the first move.

“It sure feels like it,” I says.

I wake up in the furs, with tremendous pressure on my bladder, and shuffle to the yeti privy to take care of business. I quickly discover that it is the coldest seat in the universe. It’s not really designed for wolfhound use, so I promise Orlaith we’ll go outside as soon as I’m finished.

When I emerge into the main hall, Erlendr is tending yet another animal over the fire and Hildr is sitting at the table with the whirling blade spinning in the air in front of her.

“Erlendr, how long was I out?”

“A little over half a day.”

“Oh, my. You’re already finished with your, uh, whirling?”

“I worked through the night while you slept. Hildr has just begun. If we work around the clock instead of only the waking hours, we can complete it in two days instead of four.”

“I see,” I say, careful to disguise whether I think this news is good or not. It’s easy, because I’m not sure at all how I feel. “Excuse me, I need to take Orlaith outside.”

I had thought of an alternate scenario, in which I used the
whirling blade to save my father and then returned it to the yeti to destroy in whatever manner they chose. It would be nice to believe that I would not be responsible for what happened then. But I know that by merely asking them to make it for me, I have become responsible. Walking away at this point would not change the fact that some creature would have its spirit splintered at my behest.

Against that I had to weigh my father’s spirit. What would happen to him if I did not free him from the raksoyuj? Would he be consumed? Or would he die and go wherever he believed he would go? I am not sure what he believes, actually, and though it’s completely illogical, I feel like a terrible daughter for not knowing something so basic about him.

The cold outside is much worse than in the cave. The constant fire has warmed it up in there a noticeable few degrees, and as such I think it better to make a decision inside and not linger where I could turn into an Otter Pop.

When Orlaith is finished, we return to the fire pit and warm up while staring longingly at the roasting meat.

“It’s ready. Are you hungry?” Erlendr asks.

“Yes, we both are.”

“Sit. I will bring you some.”