Kevin Hearne - Hexed

As Father Gregory and Rabbi Yosef loudly insisted that I release them or face dire consequences, I turned to them and said, “You know, I think you guys might be the worst customers ever. Not only do you badger my employees and force me to interrupt an incredibly relaxing day to come deal with you, but you try to murder another customer when he walks through the door and then complain when I prevent you from committing a capital crime. Come on, Padre,” I said to Father Gregory. “What would Jesus do?”

Quivering impotently and with flecks of spittle forming on his lips, he bellowed, “He’d rain fire down upon you for consorting with minions of hell!”

“Whoa, slow down, there, Father. I think you’ve made several giant leaps of logic and faith and I’m not following. First, I don’t know any minions of hell. Second, I don’t consort with anyone, because I’m not fond of that word. And, third, have you ever actually talked to Jesus? Because I have, and he’s not really a rain-fire-down-upon-bookstores kind of guy, just so you know. Now, who are you guys, really?”

“You have no idea who you’re dealing with,” the rabbi seethed.

“Well, yeah, hence the nature of my query.” His beard seemed to be unusually active for a collection of facial hair. When a fully bearded man is talking, you expect a certain amount of twitching about the edges as his jaw moves around. But when the rabbi stopped talking, his personal topiary kept moving. “Hey, do you have some roaches living in your beard, or what?” The movement stopped as soon as I mentioned it. I turned on my faerie specs and it looked like a normal beard. The silver knife, though, thrust into the carpet, drew my attention. It was glowing with some extra juju but, oddly enough, only on the hilt, not the blade itself.

“Nice knife you got there, Rabbi,” I said, squatting down to examine the juju a bit more closely. The red pattern it made connected ten dots in a familiar sequence, then repeated as it wrapped around the hilt. It was the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

“You may have it if you let us go,” the voice said from the vicinity of the beard.

“Wow, no shit?” I said. The rabbi didn’t strike me as the negotiating type, so he must have hoped I’d just pick it up and say it was mine. The spell on the handle must do something nasty if anyone but the rabbi touched it.

“Yes, think of it as a gift.”

“My mom told me to beware of hairy men bearing gifts.”

Father Gregory said at his stuffy English best, “It’s supposed to be Greeks bearing gifts.”

I paused to regard him coolly. He was an odd fellow, considering he was clearly a British native and at least partially successful in the Catholic hierarchy yet also fluent in Russian and playing second violin to a Jewish guy who treated him like a trained show dog. Perhaps because of that, he demonstrated a desperate need to be right. Or righteous. Or both.

“My mom didn’t know the Greeks existed,” I told him. “She was worried about cattle raiders coming out of what is now County Tipperary.”

“Cattle raiders? But that was before St. Patrick’s time. How old are you?”

“Don’t you know already? You pretend to know everything else about me,” I replied. “Shut up for a second while I check this out.”

I wondered if the magical wards in my shop could snuff this Kabbalistic enchantment without much fuss. I’d never had the opportunity to test them against this kind of magic before, because they were designed to protect the place against spells from the Fae and from hell, as well as some of the more common forms of witchcraft. I’d run into a few Kabbalists here and there over the centuries, but they’d always been amiable sorts and I’d never had cause to think of them as antagonists, until now. This enchantment was still active because, essentially, it didn’t meet the definition of magic according to my existing wards. I was near certain it was naughty, especially if this would-be killer rabbi wanted me to touch it, so I directed the attention of my standing wards to the knife hilt and expanded my definition of magic to include the Kabbalistic Tree of Life. The enchantment broke under the attack of my wards, and the red tracery of the juju faded. I flipped off my faerie specs and examined the hilt in normal vision. It was smooth black onyx inlaid with two sets of gold filigree characters. At the top, near the blade, were three Hebrew letters that spelled Netzakh , or victory , the seventh Sephirot in the Kabbalah. Underneath that, at the base of the hilt, was a curious logo that looked like a stylized capital P with a halo.

“I’m confiscating this,” I announced, plucking it out of the carpet with no ill effect, much to the rabbi’s shock. “I accept no gift from you. When it comes to knives in my shop, I maintain a use-it-and-lose-it policy.” I twirled it in front of the rabbi’s face a couple of times to make sure he saw that his magic knife didn’t hurt me, then I walked calmly behind the counter of my tea station.

“So how about it, Father, feel like making nice? If I was as evil as you seem to think I am, wouldn’t I be sucking the marrow from your bones right now or something colorful like that? Why don’t I brew us a cup of tea, I’ll release you guys, and we’ll just sit down and talk things over calmly?”

“Ne doveryaite emu!” the rabbi spat in Russian. Don’t trust him . I still didn’t want to give away the fact that I understood everything he said, but maybe the priest would respond to a general plea.

“Look, Father,” I said, “I don’t know what this guy is saying, but if he’s coaching you on manners or diplomacy, I think he’s shown definitively by now that he doesn’t know much about either one.”

“His temper may be short,” the priest admitted, “but he was right to attack the wolf.”

“What wolf?”

“That man who entered the store was a werewolf. You cannot pretend you didn’t know this.”

I wondered how they knew so quickly Hal was a werewolf, but I suspected that challenging them on the righteousness of their actions would get me closer to information about who they were. “Well, so what if he was? He was in human form and he wanted to buy a book. That’s no reason to kill him.”

“Werewolves must be slain on sight!”

“Says who?”

The rabbi was thrashing about in his jacket, trying to get his arms free by pulling the whole cloth of the fabric over his head or … something. His hat fell off and his face was flushed, and his beard began to move again. I could have bound the bottom of his coat to the top of his pants and that would have stopped it, but his contortions were mildly entertaining, and I wanted to see what he would do if he worked himself free. I stayed behind my tea counter and made no threatening moves.

“Werewolves are abominations of nature. Nearly every religion acknowledges this.”

“Ah, now I see. Do you guys also have a thing about vampires?”

“If by a ‘thing’ you mean a predisposition to kill them, then, yes, we do.”

“How do you feel about witches?”

“We do not suffer them to live!” The priest flushed again, and I decided witches were a touchy subject with him.

“Right. You couldn’t possibly have said anything else. So what about me, then? What do you think you’ve been talking to?”

“You are a holy man, like us.”

That was a surprising answer. “Um, didn’t you just say a couple minutes ago that Jesus was going to rain fire down upon me?”