Kevin Hearne - Hexed

“Not this time. This is a special magical talisman to protect you from the Man.”

“You’re going to need to hold still for a few minutes while I activate it. We have to make sure the Man can’t get past all the juju to grind you down, you know?”

“Excellent.” Protective talismans are fairly simple to construct from most objects, but they vary in strength depending on the base material and the skill of the caster. Cold iron naturally provides the strongest protection, but its magic-negating properties also make it tremendously difficult to twist to one’s own purposes—unless you’ve been watching how iron elementals do it. Like wards, you have to be specific about what you want the talisman to protect against—you can’t simply say, “Protect me against everything,” because absolutes are not only impossible to empower but dangerous in practice. Cold iron is almost an absolute in itself, but I specifically crafted Oberon’s talisman to watch for Fae magic, infernal hexes, several forms of old craft from Europe that the hexen might employ, and Kabbalistic spells. He’d be at least partially open to Obeah, Voudoun, and Wiccan craft, as well as most anything from the Indian and Asian traditions and the vast sea of shamanistic practice, but I had to put my money down somewhere.

Granuaile was knocking on the door as we finished up, and after she confirmed that she’d picked up some bats and baseballs for my Satyrn Massacre alibi, I got to repeat the practice on her.

“Aw, sensei, you shouldn’t have,” she said, as I presented her with the amulet. She was wearing a gold chain already, and the amulet was a bit heavy-looking once she had strung it up. She had a couple of freckles near her collarbones, and I resolutely kept my eyes up there.

“I hope it won’t throw off your wardrobe too much,” I said. “But you should wear this from now on. If you’re not wearing it, then it’s doing nothing for you. Eventually you’ll bind this to your aura as I’ve done with mine, but until then it’ll just be a talisman for you. I’m going to empower it for you now. Want to see what it looks like?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’ll turn on my faerie specs to make the magic visible and then bind your sight to mine so you see what I see.”

“You’re going to let me watch you do some cool Druid shit?”

“Yep. But you should always remember to speak of such things with reverence and awe.”

She didn’t miss a beat. “You mean you’re going to initiate me into the sacred mysteries of Druidic craft?”

“That’s much better; well done.” I turned on my faerie specs, found the threads of Granuaile’s awareness, and bound them to mine. She gasped when the knot was completed and her point of view wrenched outside her own head.

“Whoa!” Her arms splayed out, searching for balance. “My first out-of-body experience.”

“Don’t move or you’ll probably fall over. Shut your own eyes.”

“Okay, okay. That’s better. Hey. Where’s the magic? You said there’d be magic.”

“Patience. I haven’t started yet. But look here.” I raised the back of my right hand into my sight and examined the power glowing white through the loop of my tattoo. In the visible spectrum my tattoos did nothing, but the strength of the earth shone underneath them like a back-lit neon sign when I looked at the truth of things. It appeared that I had an indigo racing stripe down my right side with a pulsing white halo.

“Wow! You’re lit up like Vegas! How does it glow under the tattoos? Never mind, tell me what all these threads and knots are—Wait. No. What the hell are all those knots coming out of my head? They’re really intricate.”

“You’re looking at the binding of your sight to mine.”

“No way! You can see spells? They just hang around in the air like Celtic artwork?”

I laughed softly. “Most Celtic works of art are spells, or at least they were at one time. The bonds between all living things are there for Druids to witness and manipulate as we choose. There are so many bindings that choosing what to see and focusing on it will become your most treasured skill.”

“Really? I’m having no trouble focusing.”

“That’s because you’re using my eyes,” I reminded her.

“Oh yeah. Dunce cap for me. So all spells look like this?”

“No, just Druidic ones. Some spells I cannot see very well or even identify, but you can always tell that something is wrong when parts of people are cut off from the world, when their ties are smothered or altered somehow. I will show you what other spells look like as the occasion arises.”

“Cool. This is so fucking cool.”

“Reverence and awe?” I prodded her gently.

“I meant to say this blessed mystery fills my soul with light.”

“Heh! That’s excellent. All right, now I need to concentrate, and you should probably keep your exclamations to yourself while I’m doing this,” I said, as I refocused on the amulet. “Don’t move either.”

“Okay.”

I gave Granuaile the same protections I had given to Oberon. Though she kept quiet as she saw the dim green web of protection spread out across her body from the amulet, she gasped when the binding was complete and energized, since the threads flashed and shimmered briefly with white light before fading back to a soft green.

“All right, that’s finished. You’re protected from line-of-sight magical attacks only. If someone gets hold of your hair or blood, this won’t do you a lick of good, because they can then cast a spell that attacks you from within, underneath this shell of protection.”

“You mean the kind of stuff Laksha can do.”

“Precisely. And the coven living on the floor above you. Now watch what happens when you remove the amulet from around your neck—can you take off that necklace using my eyes?”

“I think so. Hold on.” She reached behind her neck and loosed the clasp of the chain, removing the amulet and holding it in her right hand, which she dropped to her side. The gossamer threads of my binding sloughed off, retracting like a tape measure into the amulet in her hand.

“See that?” I said. “If you don’t wear it, it’s useless.”

“So I have to wear it all the time?”

“That would be safest, but you can remove it when you know you’re secure in a warded room. Your condo counts, because I’ve warded it.”

“So if I looked at my door through your sight, I would see the wards you’ve put there?”

“Yep. You can see the wards on my house here if you’d like. I can lead you outside to check them out.”

“How bitchin’ would that—I mean, you honor me, sensei.”

I chuckled. “Put the amulet back on first, and watch yourself armor up.” She did so, and it was a serendipitous bit of caution. Hands on my shoulders, she followed me out front to the edge of my lawn, commenting as she went on the network of bindings all across the porch and the grass and the mesquite tree that had helped me fight off the wheel bug demon. Then, as we were about to turn around to appreciate the wards on the house itself, I heard a sharp thumping noise behind me, as though someone had slapped their hand down onto the cushion of a couch. Granuaile grunted, and I felt her fingers clutch desperately at my shoulders before they tore away. I whirled around to see her falling backward onto the lawn. Before I could discern what had happened or even ask her if she was all right, my amulet punched me in the chest, knocking me backward until I was staggering into the street. I realized this had happened to me before, but it had been during World War II in the southwest of France. And between one awkward step back and the next, I had one of those singular moments of gestalt, where the synapses of several memories and the clues lying idle in my subconscious connected and delivered a single word to my frontal lobe, loaded with anger and revulsion and a bitter kernel of vengeance long denied: them .