Kevin Hearne - Hexed

I cast camouflage on myself and asked, “Who are you talking to?” before silently stepping forward a couple of paces. That freaked their shit right out. They both put their hands to their guns and asked each other where I went. My camouflage isn’t perfect invisibility, but at night it might as well be. I stepped off to the right about ten yards or so as they looked all around them and called out for me to come back. The driver suggested that they call for backup.

“Backup for what, Frank?” the first officer said. “We’ve got nothing here.”

“Maybe he ran into the club,” Frank suggested.

“You want to check it out?” I didn’t like where this was going. Put a couple of guns into a bacchanalian setting and eventually those guns are going to be used.

“Yeah,” Frank said, “let’s go. That guy looked pretty dangerous.”

I looked pretty dangerous? There was something dangerous in the club, all right, but it wasn’t me. I had to do something quickly, so I decided to go the Three Stooges route, since the two cops had moved next to each other before tackling a club full of horny twenty-somethings. A Druid’s ability to see the connections between all natural things and bind them together encourages mischief at times, and while I usually did this sort of thing for an immature laugh, now I would be saving their lives. I muttered a binding between two sets of skin cells so that they couldn’t bear to be parted a second longer—specifically, the skin cells on the first officer’s right palm and the cells on Frank’s left cheek. I broke the binding as soon as it was consummated, and the effect was that the first officer gave Frank a beauty of a bitch slap.

Frank reacted as any American might to being slapped unexpectedly in the face by his partner. “Ow! You dick, Eric! What the fuck?” Now I knew both their names. Frank lashed out and laid one on Eric before Eric could explain it had been an involuntary muscle spasm, and then it was on. Watching two cops have a slap fight was a pretty amusing way to pass an idle moment or two. I’ve rarely been so entertained while waiting for someone.

Eric had the advantage in terms of reach, but Frank was much faster. Frank was landing two or three slaps to every one of Eric’s, and after a half minute of that, Eric had damn well had enough. He turned his openhanded slap into a fist, crunching it into Frank’s nose. Frank yelped and staggered backward, raising his hand to his face. It came away drenched in his own blood.

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry, Frank,” Eric said, holding his hands up.

“Sorry isn’t going to make it better,” Frank growled, and he bull-rushed his partner and wrapped him up in a textbook tackle. Eric managed to twist as he fell so that he landed on his shoulder, keeping his head from hitting the pavement. They rolled around a little bit, back and forth, neither getting the advantage over the other, but eventually Frank came up on top, rage driving him to dominate his larger opponent. He landed a couple of solid punches on Eric’s face, and then they were both bleeding. Eric boxed Frank’s ears and threw him off to the side but didn’t pursue him. They were both dealing with more pain than they were used to, so they were content to lie there bleeding, sling various anatomical epithets at each other, and accuse their mothers of sexual adventures with farm animals. Good times.

Laksha still hadn’t returned, and no one had exited the club in all this time. The music continued to thump through the walls into the night, and I wondered if I should start worrying.

The police officers hauled themselves slowly to their feet and plotted to blame their injuries on me. Their story would be that I had hit them with my baseball bats, broken both their noses, and escaped. They’d get worker’s comp for fighting, and I’d get an APB for assaulting an officer. Great.

As they returned to their patrol car to radio their lies to the station, I heard what sounded like faint screams coming from the club, a high-pitched top note to the techno pulse. Laksha emerged with a wicked grin on her face, and then more people came spilling out behind her, some of them in nothing but underwear, clearly panicked and fleeing for their lives.

Laksha’s grin faded as she saw the lights of the police car but didn’t see me. She kept coming straight ahead to clear the press of the stampeding mob, and I hissed at her to get her attention.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Use your other senses. I’m in camouflage.”

Laksha’s eyes rolled up and then she spied me standing off to her left. “Ah, excellent.”

“What happened?” I gestured at the club.

“I killed twelve Bacchants, as we agreed,” she said pleasantly.

“Is that why these people are panicking?”

“Partially. But mostly it’s because there are three more in there and they’re tearing people in half.”

Since I’m an Irish lad, I’m already fairly pale, but that intelligence turned me from eggshell white to bone. Either Malina’s divination had been incorrect or a few bonus Bacchants had arrived late in the game. “Well, why didn’t you kill them too?” I asked.

“Because we agreed on twelve.”

“I’ll be sure not to fetch you any extra apples, then. Where are they?”

“I’m sure they’ll be coming out after me soon enough. They’ll be the ones dressed in white sheaths stained with wine and carrying staves. Bloodthirsty look in their eyes, chunks of meat in their teeth—you can’t miss them.”

She wasn’t kidding. A particularly piercing scream drew my gaze to the entrance, where a diminutive brunette in a white nightie had seized a much taller woman by the hair and a fistful of fabric at the small of her back. As I watched, this tiny woman—who could not have weighed more than 110 pounds—heaved the larger one off her feet, spun her around like a discus thrower, and slung her in a high, shrieking arc across the parking lot, over our heads, to land ruinously on top of Frank and Eric’s patrol car.

I almost wished Granuaile could have seen it; she wouldn’t have thought the Bacchants were victims anymore. Laksha laughed, somehow thinking the poor woman’s death was funny. We had different senses of humor, I guess.

I couldn’t stay back any longer. Not only was it clear that Laksha had done all she was going to do, but now the police would be getting involved. I had to eliminate the threat before bullets started flying and ricocheting off the Bacchants’ magic hides. There was no danger of being lured into their orgy now; the happy time was over and the madness had begun.

Still in camouflage, I charged the wee Bacchant as she tore after another panicked clubber. A second Bacchant emerged from the club, bloodstained and wrathful, eyes bulging as she grabbed a full-grown man and broke his back over her knee in one of those wrestling maneuvers that simply wasn’t for show. Too late to save him, but not too late for the fellow the tiny Bacchant was after. As she seized him by the collar of his Dolce & Gabbana shirt, I came in low with the bat in my left hand and swept her legs out from under her so that she fell ungracefully on her backside. She made the sound a cat makes when you step on its tail, and now that I was closer I was surprised at how young she was. She had probably been pretty once, with a name like Brooke or Brittney or maybe Stacy. She might have been captain of the cheer squad and a homecoming queen, driving to school in a pink Cabriolet her daddy had bought for her. Now, however, her nails were more like claws, and her teeth were filed to points, and she had blood dribbling from her mouth—and it wasn’t hers. I brought the bat in my right hand down hard on her face before she had time to leap back up. I even hit her again to make sure she was through, regretting the necessity and thinking that one never quite gets used to crushing skulls. Then I looked up to track where the other Bacchant went.