Kevin Hearne: Hounded

Oberon said,

You’re a pretty smart dog .

But I only have one employee right now. He’s doing me a huge favor working these two days while we’re gone .

Yes, they are . We were driving north on I-17 through Munds Park. The Coconino National Forest shrugged off the scrub oaks and alligator junipers in that area and started to assert itself with some taller trees.

Irish wolfhounds like Oberon were originally bred to hunt down wolves and deer. They were so good at it that Ireland doesn’t have any more of either.

Yeah, but that’s all private property , I pointed out. We have to play in the national forest. There will be ponderosas there too. And some stands of aspen .

No, we’re going to stop in Flagstaff .

It’s a coffee place. You can’t just automatically classify anything that isn’t a steak house as vegetarian .

Sometimes Oberon doesn’t process anything I say, and sometimes he listens to me a bit too well. We may be in America, but you’re not an American. You’re the hound of the last Druid in the world. I’m not going to allow you to get away with sloppy logic .

Yes, it is. I feed you sausage and steak instead of dry kibble, so I’m entitled to elevated conversation .

We wrangled happily over my high expectations until we reached Flagstaff. I promptly steered my way to Beaver Street just south of the railroad tracks, where sits Macy’s European Coffee House. It’s a wee place where they roast their own coffee and make all their pastries from scratch. They have metal picnic tables outside painted forest green, and there’s a large utility pole papered over with concert posters and flyers for seminars with visiting Asian mystics. Friendly dogs are routinely hitched to the pole or the tables, and get petted by everyone going in and out. I tied Oberon to the pole to keep people from freaking out and told him to try to look docile. He has to make a special effort since he’s such a huge dog, but wagging his tail and letting his tongue loll out tends to work fairly well.

he said.

I promised him I would hurry and stepped through the door into the most marvelous aroma: arabica beans and fresh-baked bread. Macy’s always smelled good like that.

Its regular customers live on the political left, and they dress like it, wearing cotton, hemp, and wool, applejack caps over thick ropes of Rasta dreads, and thickets of untamed facial hair. Framed watercolors from local artists line the walls, and the menu of sandwiches is scrawled on a chalkboard. The employee dress code seems to be “show up with clothes on,” but employees also seem to be encouraged to express their bohemian sensibility with many exotic facial piercings.

Macy’s is one of my favorite places to watch people. Half of the customers are self-conscious members of the intelligentsia from Northern Arizona University, much of the rest are Making A Point of some kind, and then once in a while somebody comes in from the street without realizing what kind of place it is. It’s genuinely shocking for such people to walk into a business that’s so anticorporate and independent. Their disorientation is plain—as is their growing horror and guilt that they are the only people there wearing synthetic fibers—and it makes me smile.

I like to look at people’s auras and see the blues and greens, glowing with health and hopeful of becoming healthier. The people there are bound together, though they do not know it or think of it as such, but it is true: The dirty rust of discontent stands out sorely in Macy’s, or the dull gray of depression, or the angry reds of greed and materialism.

The young woman at the front of the line when I walked in was a siren of angst and a sense of entitlement denied. She was a slender brunette with her hair tied in a ponytail, wearing a brown velour tracksuit trimmed in turquoise that hugged her shape. She had an aura that was roiling in reds and oranges, broadcasting her desire to go on a major power trip. Maybe she was just having a bad day, but she was kind of killing my groovy hippie buzz, and I couldn’t wait for her to leave so I could surf the spiffy vibe generated by a roomful of iconoclasts.

As she picked up her order—three coffees to go—and passed me on her way out, I noticed a telltale ripple playing about the wisps of her hair, a buzz of white interference that said this woman had practiced magic successfully. I almost pulled a Shaggy on the spot: Zoinks! Like run, Scoob, it’s a witch! Given the rest of her aura, she probably hadn’t chosen Glinda the Good as her role model. She looked like more of the Double-Double-Toil-and-Trouble type, and the three coffees took on more significance: She might be the maiden in one of those maiden-mother-crone covens.

Witches and I generally don’t get along. Druids look at the tapestry of nature and try to make sure the weave of it remains strong, reinforcing the binding amongst all living things and sewing up the threads on the edges that fray and unravel. Witches, on the other hand, often punch holes in the tapestry in the pursuit of personal power, making deals with dark, supernatural forces that want nothing more than to see nature perverted and destroyed.

Since I’m the only real Druid left, the witches are getting away with a lot more than they used to, and I confess I tend to look at them all as guilty until proven innocent, though I realize that’s not very fair of me.

This witch couldn’t read auras very well, if at all, or she would have shown some sign as she passed me. Aura readers always give me a double take, because mine doesn’t match the twenty-one-year-old redheaded lad that I look like.

Hey, Oberon, there’s a young woman coming out with three coffees who’s pretty weird , I called in my mind. See what you can smell on her .

Definitely not. You don’t want to do that .

There was a pause, and then he continued,

I beg your pardon? What stuff from my shop?

Which plants?

And a most excellent hound you are. I appreciate your help. Can you tell me if the plants you smelled were floral and sweet smelling, or perhaps bitter, maybe earthy?

That told me she wasn’t into love potions, and she wasn’t into siccing demons on people or sending plagues and agues either. It meant she probably wasn’t up to anything too dangerous at the moment, and I could ignore her safely. Thank you, Oberon, that’s very interesting. You just earned yourself a sausage .

It’s a deal. I’ll be out soon, the line’s moving .

Once I got to the counter, I bought a blue handmade ceramic mug and had the supercrunchy barista, Xypop, fix my San Francisco cappuccino in it. Since I enjoyed saying her name so much, I asked her to get me a few more things (“Xypop, do you still sell Cosmic Ray’s guide to mountain bike trails?”) and wound up buying stuff I didn’t need. She even sold me some baked vegan dog biscuits, which I purchased gleefully as a joke. I’d wait for Oberon to choke a couple down, then I’d tell him they were meatless and it was all Xypop’s fault.

I forgot about the three-coffee witch for ten whole minutes. Just before we left town to the east and the road curved north and turned to Highway 89, I saw her in the passenger seat of a maroon Honda Civic that was waiting for an opportunity to pull out of a gas station. That opportunity came right behind me, and I quickly checked out her companions in the rearview mirror to see if I’d been right about the maiden-mother-crone thing.