Kevin Hearne - Hexed

My hound flattened his ears and showed his teeth, but didn’t quite growl at our guest.

It’s okay, Oberon. He can hear you, so don’t give anything away. I’ll let you know if I need you . He subsided but kept watching Coyote warily.

I nodded for Coyote’s benefit. I didn’t tell him I was awfully tough to kill, since the Morrigan had promised never to take me. Still, Coyote could do a lot of damage I might never recover from, as my mangled right ear testified. I just wanted to know how serious he was about this, and now I had my answer.

“Think ya can give me a ride out there?” I asked. “I ain’t got a car.” Skyline High School was on the east side of Mesa, near the borderline with Apache Junction—which, of course, was the city right outside the Superstition Mountains where the demon had escaped from hell. It would be a twenty-mile bike ride for me one way, which would be less than comfortable.

“I ain’t got a car neither.” Coyote grinned as he took another slug of beer, threats forgotten. “But that shouldn’t stop me from gettin’ one by tomorrow.”

“All right, pick me up here at ten in the mornin’,” I said. “And bring a bow. We’re gonna shoot us a demon out o’ the sky.”

“With regular ol’ arrows?” Coyote’s eyebrows rose so high they got lost underneath his hat.

“No, we’ll get ourselves some special arrows,” I said. “I think I know where we can get us some holy ones, some demon-slayin’ arrows.”

“You do? I ain’t never seen any for sale in any of those Cath’lick churches,” Coyote said.

“When were you ever in a Cath’lick church?” I asked incredulously, and Coyote started to laugh. It was infectious laughter, the kind you cannot help but smile at. “I mean, how would you know, right? They could be passin’ out holy arrows with their Jesus crackers and you’d never know any different.”

Coyote hooted and hollered and howled his laughter, and it wasn’t long before I was doing the same. He doubled over; he slapped his thighs; he laughed silently for a while because he was out of breath; he laughed until he had tears streaming from his eyes. “I bet it was just like that, Mr. Druid!” Coyote finally managed to gasp. “Them priests would come on up to the soldiers and say, ‘In the name of the Father and the Son, here’s a cracker, now go kill some fuckin’ Indians!’ ” And abruptly the laughter died in our throats, and our smiles fell quietly like death shrouds on the fallen. It was simply too close to the truth to be funny. We spent some small while staring down at the flower bed in front of my porch. I cannot speak for what Coyote was thinking, but personally I was haunted by the ghosts of those who had trespassed against me; I was the only survivor of the Holy Roman Church’s war against Druidry.

Coyote eventually wiped at his cheeks, finished off his Stella, and said, “Thanks for the beer an’ the laugh, Mr. Druid.” He stood up and put the empty on my porch rail, then held out his hand to shake, a huge grin on his face again. “You’d be a good guy if ya wasn’t so damn white.”

I shook his hand firmly, grinned back, and said, “An’ you’d be a good guy if ya wasn’t a damn dog.” That set Coyote off to laughing again, but this time it seemed not entirely human. He let go of my hand and then I saw what was happening. He fell to all fours, and in another heartbeat he was bounding off my porch in his animal form, yipping his amusement into the cool November night.

He didn’t even leave any clothes behind; they just sort of melted away somehow. Oberon noticed too. he said.

“Right.” I looked down at Oberon and clapped my hands together as Coyote disappeared from view. “ Now we can go see the Polish witches.”

Oberon observed.

Detecting some ambivalence, I asked Oberon if he’d rather stay home than visit the witches.

he admitted.

“Sure. Besides, you don’t like witches, right?”

“I guess I know which kind of Eastwood movie you’d like to watch.” I got Oberon set up in the living room with a Dirty Harry flick and then took off on my bike, sword strapped to my back in plain sight, heading for Malina’s condo near Town Lake.

Ever since I’d started to carry Fragarach around regularly—just in the last few weeks—I had noticed an interesting phenomenon: Hardly anyone thought it was real. Most people took a look at the guy on a bike with a sword and assumed I was still living with my mom and harboring an unhealthy obsession for anime. Or they supposed the sword was a prop for a role-playing game or some other fantasy, because the idea of carrying a sword for personal defense in an age of firearms caused them too much cognitive dissonance. While I paused at the stoplight on Mill and University, one citizen even inquired if I was on my way to the comics shop.

Malina lived in the Bridgeview condos, a twelve-story tower of glass and steel built just after the turn of the century in Tempe’s rush to develop the Town Lake district. She and the rest of her coven owned the entire ninth floor—though now there were six vacancies. Granuaile, my apprentice, lived on the eighth floor, directly underneath the condo of Radomila, the coven’s erstwhile leader. I thought it would be wise to check on her before knocking on Malina’s door, so I rang her bell.

“Who is it?” her voice called through the door. “Oh, it’s just you.”

She answered the door in something scanty, and I experienced a moment of panic as prurient thoughts pushed aside the innocent inquiry I’d been planning to make about her safety. Granuaile was not plain; she was a tall, lithe redhead with green eyes, a mouth that looked delicious, and an extremely sharp mind. The latter was most important, for otherwise she would not be my apprentice. It was difficult to dwell on her mind, however, when so much of her athletic build was on display—more than I had seen to date, in fact. She usually dressed very modestly and I appreciated it, because it kept my thoughts of her (mostly) innocent. But now that she was dressed in a low-cut pale-green nightie, all slinky and clinging to her shape—

Baseball! Must think of baseball. Not the curve of her … curveball! Randy Johnson has a wicked slider too. Oh, how I would love to slide—

“Atticus? What’s wrong?”

“Huh? Oh. Um. Hi.” I’d been reduced to monosyllables by a nightie.

“Why are you looking up? Is there something above my door?” She took a step closer to me and leaned over to see what I was looking at and, oh, my—

“There’s some tit, uh, titillating wallpaper up there! Yes! Fantastic interior decorating here, I just noticed.”

“You’ve seen it before. What’s going on?”

Just the facts, Atticus. “Someone attacked me tonight and I wanted to make sure you were okay,” I said, trying to remember who held the record for stealing second base.

“Oh, well, yes, I’m fine. Who attacked you?”

“Still trying to find out. It was a magical attack, not a physical one. Actually, there was a physical one too, but that was a demon, and an elemental killed it for me so that’s all right, the ghouls are on their way, but I’m not sure my neighbor’s ever going to be the same, though you don’t have to worry about Oberon, he’s fine.” Sweet honey of Dagda, now I was babbling.

“What?” Granuaile said.

“Look, there’s no time to discuss it; just lock yourself inside and close all your windows. I’m going to put a ward on your door to keep you safe tonight while I go deal with this.”