Kevin Hearne - Hexed

Dr. Snorri Jodursson was already at my house, watching The Fellowship of the Ring with my apprentice, so it wasn’t tough to find someone to take charge of Leif’s recovery. Snorri said he’d simply raid the blood bank, and he was nice enough to put my teeth back in place for me before I lay down to heal in the backyard. Said he wouldn’t even charge me this time.

As I stretched out gratefully on the familiar grass of my lawn with a worried Oberon nestled against my side, I hoped the near future would bring me a small portion of peace. I was tired of these constant distractions and the alarming rate at which I seemed to be losing my ears, and if the chaos would consent to desist for a while, I would heal and mourn and focus properly on what to do next.

There was a parcel of wilderness that needed my attention, which I had neglected for far too long.

It’s rare that I take the form of a stag. Though it’s the largest shape I can take, it’s still a bit lower on the food chain than I would like, and rare is the occasion when one of my other forms will not serve me better. But when the job at hand was lugging fifty-pound bags of topsoil miles across rugged terrain, it was the best option I had.

Granuaile and Oberon followed along and hauled a few things of their own as we hiked out to the blighted zone around Tony Cabin. They were carrying tools, our lunch, a set of clothes for me, and a five-gallon blue agave plant. I had a harness and travois hooked up to my shoulders so that I could drag 450 pounds of rich topsoil, teeming with all sorts of bacteria and nutrients, along the ground.

When we reached the edge of the blighted zone, my heart nearly broke; we were still four miles away from Tony Cabin, and there was so much to heal. If the cabin was at the center of a perfect circle, that meant we had fifty square miles to mend. The trees were little more than standing dead wood, and the cacti were lumps of desiccated tissue stretched over dry wooden ribs. The brush was all kindling now, lifeless and essentially petrified: There were no ants, no beetles, no bacteria or fungi to break down the plants and nourish new growth in the spring. But we had to start somewhere.

I unbound myself from the stag form and put on the clothes we’d brought along. Using the shovels Granuaile had carried, we dug up a few dead plants just off the trail and resolved to compost them. Then we excavated a small trench that led from living land into the drained area, much deeper than it was wide, and filled it with all the soil we’d hauled in. We spread the dead soil we’d dug up across the living, so that leaves and bugs and grasses and so on would fall or crawl upon it and gradually reinvigorate it.

We planted the agave in the trench and had to satisfy ourselves with pouring a couple of bottles of water on it to help it make the transition and take root.

Oberon asked, sniffing at the plant.

“This is just the beginning, Oberon,” I said aloud so that Granuaile could hear. “It’s an important first step.”

“Maybe next time. That might be too much of a shock right now.”

“Eventually I can get the earth’s attention and help it along, but there’s nothing for it to work with right now. Life is its medium, and there’s no life in that area, not even bacteria. We need to keep bringing in the raw material.”

I laughed. “How would I get heavy equipment here? There are no roads to this place. You know what the trail is like. It’s too rough. And most of this land is wilderness—completely untamed bush.”

Oberon looked down the trail toward Tony Cabin, still some four miles distant, then considered the lone agave near his feet.

“Yeah, it’s a big job, but I won’t feel well again until it’s finished. When I stand here and call to the earth, nothing answers.”

Oberon looked up at me.

Thanks, buddy , I said silently as I tried to surreptitiously zip up my jeans.

and your front. I deserve a treat.>

I know not how it goes with other writers, but for me, five months to finish a novel is akin to Maximum Warp, and it would not have been possible without my primary readers: Alan O’Bryan, Andrea Taylor, and Tawnya Graham-Schoolitz took time out of their busy lives to read each chapter as it was produced and give me valuable feedback. Allen Rouser, Mike Ruggiero, and Nick Steinkemper also read the work as early fans and gave me their thumbs-up.

Katarzyna and Leszek Rosinski were invaluable as translators for the Polish and Russian passages, and Andrea Hümer helped me out with the German. Any mistakes are mine, of course, and the accuracies are theirs.

Detective Dana Packer of the Lincoln, Rhode Island, Police Department helped by discussing what police procedures would be in a case like Perry’s. If the fictional Detective Geffert strays in any way from what he should have done, it’s because I didn’t hear Detective Packer correctly.

Evan Goldfried is my agent extraordinaire at JGLM, and I’m always appreciative of his tireless efforts on my behalf.

My editor at Del Rey, Tricia Pasternak, is undeniably the hoopiest frood in North America—but that’s not all! She’s also brilliant and helpful and I trust her judgment utterly. Her assistant editor, Mike Braff, deserves a proper spangenhelm for enduring the many slings and arrows of my outrageous pranks, and I am thankful for his help as well.

My wife and daughter were extremely supportive during the process, and words cannot express the depths of my gratitude for their love, encouragement, and curiosity about what Atticus and Oberon would do next.

The three-story building described in this book’s climactic battle is actually located on a street in Gilbert called Germann, rather than Pecos. I changed the name of the street because the locals inexplicably pronounce it like the word germane , which bears no phonetic relationship to the spelling, and I also did not wish to suggest, even by implication, that the German witches had chosen it as a forward base because of its seemingly close ties to their nationality. The building will most likely be occupied by the time of publication, but it did spend many months unfinished and unoccupied at the time of this writing, just as described.

You can follow me on Twitter (@kevinhearne) and GoodReads.com, and I have a spiffy website at kevinhearne.com with a link to my blog. Hope to say howdy to you there.