Kevin Hearne - Hammered

“Well, can’t you break the bonds holding together someone’s aorta, for example? Or cause an aneurysm in the brain? Pull out all the iron in the blood?”

“I can’t because of this,” I said, holding up my tattooed right arm and pointing at it with my left hand. “I know you can’t read what these bindings mean yet, but there’s a condition woven into these knots. As soon as you attempt to use any of the earth’s energy to directly harm or kill a living creature—any creature, mind you, not just a human—you’re dead. The only reason the earth grants Druids her power is that we’re pledged to protect her life. So if a rhino charges me, I’m not bursting its heart. I’m getting out of the way.”

Granuaile stared at me. “That makes no sense.”

“Of course it does.”

“You just told me how you bound the Norns together and chopped off their heads.”

“I bound their clothes together—they happened to be wearing them at the time. I performed no magic directly on their bodies. I killed them with my sword.”

“That’s not protecting life!”

“I was protecting my own.”

“But you told me Aenghus Óg used magic to take over Fagles’s mind!” She was referring to a binding placed on the Tempe police detective who’d shot me six weeks ago. Since the Tuatha Dé Danann were bound to the earth like me, they had to follow the same rule.

“He did. But that binding didn’t directly harm Fagles. Fagles was killed by the Phoenix police.”

“But didn’t he make Fagles shoot you? Wasn’t that harming you?”

“The magic was directed at Fagles, not at me. And Fagles shot me with a completely ordinary, nonmagical gun.”

Granuaile tapped her fingernail on the table. “These are really hair-thin distinctions.”

“Yes, and they’re the sort that Aenghus Óg knew very well.”

“Why bother making them? I mean, the earth has to be aware that you’re using her power to strengthen your sword arm or make you jump higher and so on.”

“Yes. I’m using the power to compete. To prove myself worthy of living another day. Competition, strife, and predation are natural and encouraged by the earth. I still have to be smarter than the other guy, more skilled than the other guy to survive. I can’t simply fix everything by melting people’s brains.”

“Wait. You mess around with skin cells all the time. You give people wedgies by binding the cotton of their underwear with the skin high up on their backs. You started a slap fight between two cops in front of Satyrn.”

“No damage was done. The skin never broke. No harm, no foul.”

“All right, then, what about the demons? You used Cold Fire on them.”

“They’re not living creatures of the earth; they’re spirits from hell that take on a corporeal form here. But I have to warn you not to try anything standard on them. They are bound together differently than the flora and fauna of earth, so no Druidic magic works except for Cold Fire. It’s better just to hack them up. That unbinds them from their corporeal form quite well.”

Granuaile puffed an errant lock of hair away from her face and then tucked it behind her ear, thinking through the implications. “Does this tabu extend to healing?”

“Not in so many words, but in practice, yes. Messing around with tissues and organs is vastly complicated. It’s too easy to make a mistake and do more harm than good, and then you’re dead. That’s why I never go there with other people; I use magic to heal only myself, because there’s no prohibition against screwing yourself up and I know my body extremely well.”

“Ah, so that’s why you only use herblore for your healing.”

I nodded. “That’s right. You can perform bindings on harvested plants and the chemicals in them all you want. It’s slower than directly healing someone, but it’s safer all around. You can’t trespass against the prohibition to do no direct magical harm, and it keeps your abilities secret. If people wonder why your teas or poultices are so effective, you can plausibly point to your unique recipes or fresh ingredients or something else, and magic is never an issue.”

“Are you positive that you’re the last Druid alive today?”

I waggled the flat of my hand in the air in a sorta-kinda motion. “The Tuatha Dé Danann are technically Druids because they’re all tattooed like I am. They can do whatever I can do and then some. Best not to call them Druids, though. They like to think of themselves as gods.” I grinned sardonically. “Druids are lesser beings, you see. But so far as such lesser beings are concerned, I do believe I’m the last one walking the earth. Unless you want to count all the happy hippie neo-Druids who do seem to love the earth but lack any real magic.”

“No, I meant Druids like you.”

“Then there are none like me. Until you become one. If you live long enough.”

“I’ll make it,” Granuaile said. “You gave me this completely unsexy amulet to make sure I do.” She lifted a teardrop of cold iron strung on a gold chain out from her shirt. The Morrigan had given it to me, and I had passed it on to my apprentice.

“That’s not going to save you all the time,” I reminded her.

“I know. It seems to me that the thing to do is to simply disappear.”

“No, they’ll still look for us.”

“Who are they ?”

“The remaining Norse and any other gods who want to make a point that you can’t kill gods with impunity.”

“What if they think we’re dead? Will they still be looking for us then?”

I sighed and smiled contentedly. “You’re a constant relief to me, you know. Every time you say something smart it gives me hope that you might become the first new Druid in more than a thousand years.”

Moving sucks.

Most people would nod and agree without question, but saying it that way leaves ample room for interpretation. How much does it suck? Well, it’s not as bad as the stink behind a steak house. Nor is it comparable to the slow burn of heartache or the breathtaking agony of a swift kick to the groin. It’s more like the secret existential horror I feel whenever I see gummy worms.

I had a girlfriend in San Diego in the early nineties who noticed that I was profoundly unfamiliar with modern junk food. One day as I dozed at the beach, she tested the boundaries of my ignorance by arranging an entire package of gummy worms across my body, assuring me when I opened an eye that these gelatinous cylinders were some sort of new spa treatment called “sun straws” with UV protection built in, and I gullibly accepted her explanation. I woke up with bright death trails of corn syrup crisscrossing my torso, silently and stickily accusing me of wormicide in the hot coastal sun. Even the mighty rinse cycle of the Pacific Ocean couldn’t wash them away; they clung to me like soul-sucking leeches. She wasn’t my girlfriend after that, and I moved out of San Diego that very night.

It gets worse the longer you wait between moves, because you’ve had time to accumulate massive piles of crap, even if you try to minimize your consumption like I do.

Looking around at more than a decade’s worth of accreted stuff, I was glad this move would force me to leave it all behind. If I took anything with me, then “they” would know I’d scarpered off somewhere. Some of my best twentieth-century goodies were going to be let go—various bits of detritus saved from previous moves. My signed copy of the Beatles’ White Album was going to stay behind. So were the cherry Chewbacca action figures in the original packaging. I had a baseball signed by Randy Johnson when he was with the Diamondbacks and a beer bottle that had once met the lips of Papa Hemingway. Most of the weapons in the garage would be left; all I would take was the bow and the quiver of arrows blessed by the Virgin Mary, because those could come in handy. Other than that, I’d take Fragarach and Oberon and the clothes on my back, leaving everything else. The house was easy.