Kevin Hearne - Hexed

“Yes?”

“I think the question answered itself. I beg your pardon.”

“Granted. They will be at a nightclub called Satyrn on Scottsdale Road. It’s fairly upscale. You will need to make an effort to appear a little less scruffy.”

She was baiting me, but I wasn’t going to bite. “Will you say scruffy one more time for me, please?”

“Scruffy. Why?”

“I’m trying to learn your accent.”

Her voice grew chilly and her accent became more pronounced. “I’m sure you have much more important things to do, as do I. Good day.”

I grinned as I put away my phone. She was funny when she got herself in a snit.

Biking to work actually took some effort on my part, drained as I was from using Cold Fire. I’d have to spend the night recuperating in the backyard to recharge my depleted cells.

The widow waved to me as I trundled past.

“Did ye see Mary, then?” she called.

“Sure did!” I gave her a thumbs-up. “I’ll come sit with you after work and tell you all about it.”

“Ah, that’ll be grand!”

The book side of Third Eye Books and Herbs doesn’t need much of my personal attention anymore. With automated inventory control, the computer orders another copy for me whenever I sell something. Perry Thomas, my employee for more than two years and the cheeriest Goth kid I’ve ever met, could almost run the whole thing for me. He was always restocking Karen Armstrong’s books, because they tended to move pretty well, along with books about Wicca and primers on Taoism or Zen Buddhism.

What Perry cannot do is run the apothecary side of things, except on the most basic level: If I point to pre-made sachets of certain proprietary blended teas and say, “Add hot water,” he’s all over it, and he happily serves my arthritic customers who come in every day for a shot of Mobili-Tea. But he cannot mix herbs on his own, cannot recognize when we’re low on one herb or have too much of another, and he’s simply not allowed to sell bulk herbs to anyone, because he’s incapable of warning them about the herbs’ dangerous properties.

He greeted me with a wave and a “ ’Sup, Atticus,” when I jangled the bells above my door. He was restocking some books that predicted the end of the world based on what loinclothed Mayan mystics said fourteen centuries ago.

Granuaile was sitting behind the apothecary counter, headphones jacked into a laptop and practicing her Latin as I had asked. Only at it for a week, she was already able to trade basic sentences with me. She didn’t hear the bells tingle due to the headphones, but she saw me peripherally after a moment and flashed me a smile of about 1.21 gigawatts.

I quickly reflected that the Diamondbacks’ bullpen had been remarkably shoddy last season and they had better find a solution before spring training began. Brighid be thanked, Granuaile was now fully dressed and seemed unaware that she made me dizzy at times.

A couple of ASU professors were drinking tea at one of the tables and talking politics. A small, hairy man amused me for a while with the questions he asked Perry. First he wanted to find something about the Elder Gods (he’d clearly been reading too much Lovecraft), then he wanted a book about howling dervishes, not whirling dervishes, and then wondered if we stocked anything about the mysteries of the Rosicrucians. Perry showed him what we had in each case, but nothing seemed to satisfy him, and he finally purchased only a dollar’s worth of sandalwood incense. Such is life in retail.

“Three people are coming in around four o’clock for interviews,” Granuaile said as I began making sachets of my most popular teas. “They all sound inordinately excited about ringing up books and boiling water.”

“It’s a glamorous career, no doubt about it,” I replied. “Are you missing Rúla Búla already?”

“A little bit,” she admitted. “Not that you’re not keeping me busy”—she waved at the computer screen that was coaching her on conjugating some Latin verbs—“I just miss the people and the atmosphere.”

“Me too,” I said. “Think they’d let you come back and work once a week, and let me come back and spend my money there?”

Granuaile shrugged. “I can ask.”

“Do, please. Oberon and I are missing the fish and chips.”

The bells above the shop door chimed and two rare sights entered my shop. I think my mouth may have dropped open. A tall, lanky, elderly gentleman with a high forehead and round spectacles, dressed in black save for a white priest’s collar, was followed by a shorter, younger, rounder fellow in traditional Hasidic garb. Perry greeted them with a friendly hello, and the older fellow immediately asked to see the proprietor.

“That would be me,” I said. “Good afternoon, gentlemen. Is this a joke?”

“I beg your pardon?” the older fellow inquired politely, a faint smile on his narrow face. He sounded like an English butler.

“You know, a tall priest and a short rabbi walk into a pagan bookstore …”

“What?” He looked down at his companion, seeming to realize for the first time that he was quite a bit shorter and in fact of a different religious order than he. “Oh, gracious, I suppose it must seem amusing at that.” He didn’t seem amused, though.

“How may I help you today?” I asked.

“Ah. Yes. Well, I am Father Gregory Fletcher, and this is the Rabbi Yosef Zalman Bialik. We were hoping to speak to Atticus O’Sullivan.”

“Well, hope no more.” I grinned at them. “You’re talkin’ to him.”

I laid on the college kid’s informality pretty thick. These fellows didn’t look right to me, and until I knew what they were after, they weren’t going to see anything but the façade I presented to the general public. Their auras were perfectly human, but they churned with lust—not the carnal kind; rather, the lust for power—and that wasn’t consistent with peaceful men of God. Plus, the rabbi’s aura betrayed the slim white interference of a magic user.

“Oh, I beg your pardon. You seem rather young for a man of your reputation.”

“I didn’t know I had a reputation amongst the clergy.”

“In some …” the priest paused, searching for the right word, then continued, “… small circles, we have heard of you.”

“Really? What kind of circles?”

Father Gregory ignored my query and responded with another. “Well, if you’ll forgive the direct question, were you involved in an unusual situation in the Superstition Mountains about three weeks ago?”

I looked blankly at him, and then at the rabbi, and told a whopper. “Nope, never been out there.”

“On ne gavarit pravdu,” the rabbi said in Russian, speaking for the first time. He is not telling the truth . Father Gregory responded fluently in the same language, telling Yosef to be quiet and let him handle things. If they thought I couldn’t understand Russian, I didn’t want to disabuse them of the notion.

“Hey, I’m an American,” I said, “and the only language I speak is English, and not too good neither. When you speak that other stuff, it makes me think you’re sayin’ something rude about me.”

“I beg your pardon,” Father Gregory said. “Were you perhaps at Skyline High School this morning?”

That question nearly triggered a flare of my nostrils. It took me to new heights of paranoia, and I struggled to maintain my mask of indifference. I knew that word of Aenghus Óg’s death had gotten around, but nobody should know about the fallen angel yet except Coyote and the Virgin Mary, and I hardly thought either of them would stop to chat with these guys.