Kevin Hearne - Hexed

“Oh. Is that all?”

“That’s it. The balls and bats are in your trunk, and you’re my snookie-wookie marshmallow fudge love pie.”

“Aw … wait. Did you just call me a Wookiee?”

I chuckled. “Caught that, did you?” I ended my conversation with her and then made my last call from my home phone. I’d saved it for last because I knew I’d be getting scolded. Lambasted. Reamed, even, in a Polish accent.

“That was poorly handled last night, Mr. O’Sullivan,” Malina said immediately.

“Those kinds of opponents aren’t my specialty,” I replied, wary of using the word Bacchant on a phone, untapped or not. “And I got most of them.”

“What do you mean, most of them?”

“There were fifteen, not twelve, as your divination foretold, so that was poorly handled, Ms. Sokolowski.” Talking about divinations and spells on the phone never worried me. Anyone listening from the government would dismiss us as fruity New Age hippies.

“How many got away?” Malina asked.

“Just one.”

“Ah, she will return to Las Vegas, then. But she may bring more next time.”

“Well, I can’t help next time. If that last one had wanted to fight, I’m not sure I could have taken her. What news of the hexen ?”

“We have managed to bid farewell to two of them.”

“From your condo?”

“Even so.” She sounded a bit smug.

“You knew them previously?”

“No, these were younger members, not so well protected and not so wise about masking their true nature.”

That told me that Malina didn’t necessarily need hair or blood to deliver a lethal attack from afar. And she knew how to pick magic users out of a crowd. Good to know. “Well done,” I said. “Does that mean you know where the rest of them are?”

“Unfortunately not. We are getting closer, however. We’ve narrowed it down to Gilbert. But we need more bloodwort.”

“All right, I’ll send over a courier with three more pounds. No one’s going to be asking about the two you bid farewell to, are they?”

“You mean the way people are asking about what you did last night? No, there was nothing suspicious in their leave-taking.”

“Oh. I see.” Accidents happen.

“You should try subtlety sometime. But, look, they’re going to know they didn’t succeed in getting us their first time around, so you should prepare for more attacks, however it is that you do that.”

“Attacks like the first one?”

“No, I imagine they’ll try something different. It probably won’t be as flashy, but the result will leave you just as dead if you’re not protected.”

“Okay, thanks for the warning.”

A car screeched to a halt outside. Oberon said.

I bet it’s vanilla .

I quickly said farewell to Malina and opened the front door to see Hal stalking up my front steps, a scowl on his face and a newspaper in his hand. “Good afternoon, sir! My, what impeccable tailoring you have.”

Hal stopped in his tracks and eyed me warily. “What the hell happened to you?” he said, taking in my shirtless and heavily bruised and scratched form. He gestured at my wounds and asked, “Is that from last night?”

“No, it’s from the rough sex this morning.”

“Smart ass. Sorry I asked. Hey, did you get your ear back?”

“Yep. That was definitely the best part of my day so far.”

Hal sighed in relief and waved the newspaper significantly. “I’ll say, you lucky bastard. Police are looking for a guy that matches your description with a missing right ear. I thought they had your number on that one.”

I threw up my hands, perplexed. “How do police even know what to look for? The only two cops who saw me got killed.”

“Well, some of the modern-day fops fleeing the club saw you handcuffed on the ground in custody of the now-deceased police, so naturally the living police are anxious to figure out what happened to said suspect. They have your clothes and hair color along with the missing ear to go on, and that’s it. No descriptions of your face, since you were sucking asphalt.”

“Any mention of my tattoos?”

“Happily not. Your tats must have been facedown because of the way they had you cuffed, so they’re searching for a tatless, earless guy.” Hal sniffed the air speculatively and frowned. “Is something burning?”

“My house was for a while, but not anymore.”

“Oh,” he said, and the fires of his curiosity were extinguished, just like that. “Well, it’s kind of irritating even out here, so would you mind if we sat on the porch?”

“Not at all.” I gestured to a chair and Hal handed me the newspaper as he took it. Oberon thumped his tail against the chair and pushed his head under Hal’s hand.

“Hey, pooch,” Hal said, obligingly giving Oberon’s head a scratch.

Did it ever occur to you that maybe he’s trying to mask the wet dog smell with the citrus?

SATYRN MASSACRE, the newspaper screamed at me; 25 dead including two officers in nightclub nightmare . The photo showed body bags lined up outside the club.

SCOTTSDALE: Police are still searching for suspects in the aftermath of the city’s worst mass murder, which occurred last night in the Satyrn nightclub on Scottsdale Road. Witnesses were unsure exactly how the killings began, but the deaths of two Scottsdale police officers ended the carnage.

I scanned the rest of the article quickly. “Huh. They mention the broken bats, but they don’t mention my sword in here,” I said.

“You were whipping your sword around in front of all those witnesses?”

“No, no,” I said. I explained what happened last night and the alibi I’d cooked up with Granuaile via lovey-dovey code. “I still have my receipt from Target,” I pointed out, “and chances are good they’ll find that security tape anyway, if they’re any good at their jobs. So we’ll just say Granuaile’s bats are my bats, slightly scuffed and used from a night of baseball chasing with my dog.”

Yes, it does. But if you’re nice about it, I’ll put some gravy on them first .

“Prints on the bats?” Hal asked.

“Took care of it.”

“So you couldn’t possibly be their man from the club because you have an ear and you still have your bats intact—I see.” Hal nodded. “That might confuse things quite a bit if it were to come to trial, especially since the missing-ear detail is being so widely reported. There’s your reasonable doubt right there. But you’re still in a heap of trouble if any of those witnesses reported seeing the sword. You’ve been riding around with that thing on your back the past few weeks, everyone up and down Mill Avenue has seen you wearing it, and they might have noticed you didn’t have an ear either.”

“So what? The sword never left its scabbard. Nobody died from sword wounds.”

“They’ll use the sword to place you at the scene, Atticus. Look, do you still have it around here?”

“Of course. I have two fancy-schmancy swords now.” The other one had belonged to Aenghus Óg. His sword was named Moralltach—the Great Fury—and it had fallen to me by right of besting him in a duel.

“I suggest you hide both of them right now, and hide them well. Don’t lose a minute.”

“What? Why?”

“I think Tempe’s going to be working with Scottsdale on this to make sure they do things right, because of how royally they screwed up in your shop,” Hal said, alluding to a search warrant gone fantastically wrong that ended up with a Tempe police detective and me getting shot. “Which means they’re going to roll up here with a full search warrant for your place, they’ll do it all by the book, and if they find a sword, they’re going to take you downtown for a long talk.”