Kevin Hearne - Hammered

I’d brought a parcel to the restaurant, and it rested next to me on the vinyl material of the booth seat. Now I hefted it onto the table and untied the string around it before removing the top. A truly rare book lay inside in a nest of tissue paper. The green cloth cover with gilt lettering and blind-embossed leaves finally got a reaction from Hal.

“Is that … a first edition?” he asked.

“Uh-huh. Extremely rare copy of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass . It should fetch at least a hundred fifty grand, probably much more. This goes to Rebecca Dane once she’s bought the store—not before.” I replaced the box lid, and Hal stared at the book cover until it disappeared from view.

“All right.” He shook his head to clear it and get back to business. “What else?”

“I’ll need new IDs for myself and my apprentice. Pick some random Irish names.”

“All right, email me some pictures. Where’s she going to be while you’re gone?”

“She’ll stick around for a couple days, then move to a secure undisclosed location.” Hal looked up at my choice of words. “No, the vice president won’t be there.”

“All right. Is that all?”

“Almost. Granuaile is to contact you after three months if she doesn’t hear from me by then. You’re to assume I’m dead if she contacts you in that case.” I really hoped this wouldn’t be necessary, but it was best to plan for the worst. “I’ll need Oberon to be looked after, preferably by Granuaile, and I need to set up a trust for her now.”

We worked out the details of that and then Hal said, “I have some news to share with you. You recall that we set an investigator on the trail of this group calling themselves the Hammers of God?”

“Yes.”

“The investigator’s missing. Presumed dead.”

“Hmm. Are we also presuming that the rabbi is returning with reinforcements?” The Rabbi Yosef Bialik had been convinced to leave town without harm, but I’d always assumed he’d be back.

“Yes. Everyone in the Pack will shortly be wearing a thin body armor underneath their clothes. Should be good enough to stop a thrown silver knife.”

“They enchant the handles too, so I’d suggest gloves. The idea is to hit you again when you try to pull the knife out.”

Hal shrugged. “Magic doesn’t scare me. Only silver.”

I wondered what it would be like to be scared of only one thing.

After breakfast with Hal, I went to the shop and met Rebecca Dane there. I made her day by telling her she was getting a promotion and a raise, then spent the morning reviewing how to run the shop all by herself. She wouldn’t be able to make some of the more complicated teas that required the use of binding, but all the straight herbal stuff was well within her compass, including Mobili-Tea, my best seller for arthritic customers. “You can hire some help if you like. I’m going away for a while, and so is Granuaile. We are going on an archaeological dig in the Antipodes.”

“Oh,” she said, a faint wrinkle of concern appearing between her eyes. “For how long?”

“It might be months.” It would certainly be months. Years. I prepared her for it as best as I could, explaining that the law firm of Magnusson and Hauk would be paying her and keeping in touch. She was excited and flushed with the responsibility. She was fresh and affable, and my regulars liked her. She radiated innocence and served people without a trace of guile or condescension. I hoped that would be enough to save her when people came looking for me and realized that she knew nothing.

My lunch date was Malina Sokolowski, the leader of the Sisters of the Three Auroras. We met in Four Peaks Brewery on 8th Street. She was wearing the same red wool coat she’d worn the first time we met almost two months ago. Her blond hair lay upon her shoulders like a rich nude woman on a divan, sleek and shiny and unapologetically decadent. I felt the eyes of envious men boring into my back as she favored me with a brilliant smile of welcome and a pleased purring of my name.

It was strange to think that I had made peace with a coven of witches, but I had to admit that Malina’s crew was different. Though they still took advantage of people and were always, always plotting to exert some sort of control over others, they at least had pretensions of being good citizens otherwise. We had fought side by side and recognized that there was a patch of common ground between us, a sliver of ellipsoid in a Venn diagram of a witch and a Druid where we could meet—meet and pretend that the vast area of the spheres behind us was undiscovered country rather than our comfort zone.

We spoke of small things at first. She inquired after Granuaile and Oberon; I inquired after her coven sisters. Our draughts came: I had a Kilt Lifter and she was drinking the Sunbru Kölsch. We toasted healthy alliances and sighed appreciatively as we set our glasses down.

“Beer like that almost makes me forget the incredible danger we’re in,” Malina said.

“I beg your pardon? I mean, yeah, the beer’s good, but what danger?”

“We’ve been continuing our divination rituals because we’re unconvinced that we’ve seen the last of the Hammers of God. From what we can tell, the rabbi is definitely coming back with more Kabbalists just like him. But that’s not all,” Malina said. “Something else is on the horizon. Several somethings. I think one of them is Bacchus. He might be coming here to look for you.”

This wasn’t a surprise, between what I’d done to his Bacchants in Scottsdale and the blame I’d laid at his door while I was in Asgard. “How soon?”

“Tomorrow at the earliest, if I’m reading things right.”

That was a surprise. “Gods Below,” I cursed, “I don’t have time to deal with that.”

“Time?” Malina spluttered. “What about the strength? You can’t take on one of the Olympians.”

“I seem to remember you doubting I could take on Aenghus Óg,” I teased her. “Have I not earned at least a fighting chance against Bacchus? But that’s assuming I’d want to fight him, and I don’t. What else did you see?”

“Many vampires.” If I needed any confirmation that Hal was right about the vampire war, this was it. “How goes the recovery of Mr. Helgarson?”

“Absolutely peachy as far as I know. I’m supposed to see him tonight. But, look, between your coven and me, he’s leaving tomorrow.”

Malina’s lips tightened. “Leaving for good?”

I shrugged. “That’s my assumption. This place will be crawling with would-be replacements before long.”

Malina grimaced and muttered something in Polish that I guessed was a curse.

“By the way, I’m leaving too.”

Her eyes widened and the Polish cursing became more vehement.

“Plus Gunnar Magnusson.”

She didn’t have words to express her shock at that. Why would an alpha ever leave his pack? “What is going on?” she breathed.

“I can’t tell you. But what I respectfully suggest to you, as an ally, is to get yourself out of here. The Hammers of God are coming for you every bit as much as they’re coming for me. And you don’t want to be around when the vamp war begins. Whoever comes out on top is probably not going to ignore your coven like Leif did.”

“No, that’s for certain,” Malina said, and took a long pull on her beer for courage. “I think your advice is good and we should pursue it, but I don’t know where to go. We were counting on this area remaining stable.”