Kevin Hearne - Hammered

“Then I will take my leave,” I said, standing up and giving her a short bow. “I’d eat it all up soon, though, because Hugin and Munin are looking for it. Best of luck growing your own tree of immortality.”

“That’s it?” Laksha frowned. “I get no more civility than that?”

“I have kept my word to you, Laksha. Please judge me by that, and nothing more. As for civility, I leave you in far better circumstances than you left me after you slew the Bacchants. And there is much that demands my attention elsewhere. Please excuse me.” With that, I turned on my heel and started jogging back to the Pisgah Forest, for while I appreciated Laksha’s adherence to her word and her skills as a witch, I had no desire to cultivate a friendship with her.

I hadn’t been lying about the many demands on my attention. The long soak in the hot springs proved to be an extremely comfortable place in which to confront some uncomfortable facts. There really wasn’t anything for me to feel smug about beyond the stark fact that I’d bearded the lion in his den and survived—for now. There was no way that Odin would let the deaths of Sleipnir and the Norns slide—nor should he. Though I could argue that I’d slain them all in self-defense, the unyielding, inconvenient truth of it was that I had chosen to go to Asgard. No one had forced me; I had made promises and traded one set of problems for another, much larger set. I did not see any way to trade down to something more manageable now—except by abandoning everything I cared about.

It used to be so easy for me to run, to care about nothing but myself and the earth underneath my feet. That had been my modus operandi ever since Tahirah died; I never stayed anywhere long enough to be bound by commitments, never entangled myself with the lives of others, and told myself it was all about avoiding Aenghus Óg. That was more true than I realized: What I’d truly been avoiding was love, the strongest binding there is, and the pain that scrapes at your insides when the bond is forcefully broken.

It has been more than five centuries. I still miss her. She smiles in my dreams sometimes and I wake up weeping for the loss.

When we were married, I did not move without thinking of her first. And now I am in a similar place; I cannot move without thinking of Oberon, as well as my duty to Granuaile. I will not, cannot abandon them. I saw that my need to defend and protect them had driven my choices in recent months—from killing Aenghus Óg to making an unwise bargain with Leif so that he would help me dispatch a nasty German coven. Flidais had told me, back at Tony Cabin, that she knew I would have run from Aenghus Óg again if Oberon hadn’t been held hostage. And she was right. Likewise, if die Töchter des dritten Hauses had not killed Perry and tried to kill both Granuaile and me, I would not have called Leif for help and agreed to take him to Asgard. Those had been rash, desperate decisions, not the sort that would most likely allow me to stay alive. But once bound by the ties of love, there is no other choice one can make and remain human. They’d been simple choices at the time that were now making my life tremendously complicated. My immediate safety was an illusion; the consequences would come home eventually like the prodigal son—a karmic debt, Laksha might have said, but with the usurious rates incurred at a payday loan center.

It was time for me to leave Arizona. There was an annoying Tempe detective named Kyle Geffert who was convinced I’d had something to do with what the media called the “Satyrn Massacre”—and he was right. Thus far my lawyers had kept me from suffering long interrogation sessions in a steel-gray room laced with cigarette smoke, but I didn’t see how I could avoid it for much longer.

The lone Bacchant that had escaped that fiasco left knowing positively that the world’s last Druid lived in Arizona, and Bacchus would probably be roused by that alone, to say nothing of his reaction if the Norse pantheon had taken my bait and blamed him for my Thanksgiving shenanigans.

A group of fanatic Russian demon hunters who called themselves the Hammers of God thought I was too cozy with the forces of darkness, despite the fact that I’d probably slain more demons than they had. Rabbi Yosef Bialik would probably return to harass me with a few of his friends, now that he knew I kept company with werewolves and witches.

On top of all this, one of my regular customers in the bookshop had asked me last week how I stayed looking so young.

It was time to go.

The idea of moving wouldn’t bother me except for what I’d have to leave behind. The fish and chips at Rúla Búla, sipping whiskey with the widow MacDonagh, the simple pleasures of being a practicing herbalist—all would be sorely missed. Too, there was a large wasteland to heal around Tony Cabin, the existence of which was at least partly my responsibility, and I wanted more than anything to spend all my time there righting that particular wrong. But I had chains of obligation to throw off first—proverbial ducks I had to get in a row.

After running for most of the last couple days, I surprised myself by asking Oberon as soon as I got home if he’d like to go for a run.

he said. I’d picked him up from the widow MacDonagh’s house, where he’d been staying during my absence. The widow wasn’t in, which was just as well. If she’d been home, I would have had to sit and chew the fat for a while, and Oberon had been waiting long enough. The widow’s cats provided him plenty of entertainment, but she couldn’t take him for walks and give him the sort of exercise a very large Irish wolfhound needs.

We jogged through the Mitchell Park neighborhood where I lived, and he brought me up-to-date on what I’d missed.

he complained.

I chuckled and spoke aloud as we jogged. I often spoke directly to his mind through the bond we shared, but since no one was around to hear me, I enjoyed making use of my breath. “Whoa, five syllables. Very impressive.”

“Indubitably. And we’ll go hunting as soon as I can manage. I’m sorry to hear about your emasculation.”

I frowned at him and checked to see if he was joking. “She does?”

“Oh. That does make me sorry. She’s never said anything about them to me.”

I let a few paces go by before I answered. The neighborhood mourning doves were happy and cooing to each other. A stooped old man in Bermuda shorts was trimming down his cloud sage bush for the winter, moving slowly and carefully. He was too preoccupied with his topiary to recognize that I was talking to my dog as we passed. “Yes. I could reverse the aging process with Immortali-Tea, and that would take care of pretty much everything. It repairs cell damage, prevents cancer, increases white blood cells, you name it. But what if I did that for her? What do you think would happen?”

“True. But you’re not thinking it through. The widow’s getting close to ninety years old, if she’s not there already. Let’s say I put her on an intensive regimen of Immortali-Tea and she shed fifty years in five weeks. She would look and feel forty years old, and if I never gave her any tea after that, she could still look forward to living at least another fifty years.”

“No, it wouldn’t. People would start asking questions. Everyone would want to know how she did it. Her friends and relatives especially. She’s told you about her kids and grandkids, right?”

“Well, her oldest son is sixty-seven. She’d be younger than him. That would be awkward. Her grandkids would freak out because their grandma didn’t look like a sweet old lady anymore. So what does she tell them? This nice Druid I know did me a solid?”