Staked

by Kevin Hearne

  “They haven’t been named yet, but these are weapons worthy of a name,” he says. “Unbreakable, amplifies your strength, and serves as a power reservoir for Gaia’s energy.”

  “What do ye mean by that?”

  “Well, Siodhachan and Granuaile both have something similar. Ye may find yourself cut off from the earth at times in this modern world and need some juice for a binding. Ye can store some in these knuckles and draw on it as needed. Siodhachan has his silver bear charm, and Granuaile stores hers in the silver end of Scáthmhaide. They chose silver in case they had reason to worry about werewolves.” His eyes dart to his hosts, suddenly aware that he might be giving offense. He hurries on, “Well, bronze can store that energy too. These knuckles can each store more than both of those combined.”

  “Well, that makes me happier than a swim in a pool of porter. What happens when I shape-shift, though?”

  “That’s the best part! They shift with you and adapt to your forms. When you’re a bear they encase your claws; when you’re a ram they cover your horns; when you’re a walrus they coat your tusks; and when you’re a kite they move to your talons.”

  “Aw, you’re just showin’ off for your brother now, aren’t ye?”

  “Perhaps a little,” he says, proud and pleased. “The great drawback to Scáthmhaide is that Granuaile has to find a way to carry it no matter what her form is. Tremendously powerful weapon otherwise—the invisibility binding is incredible—but she can’t shape-shift efficiently with it. In practical terms she’s tied to her human form. I didn’t want you to have to worry about that. These will morph with you and always be useful.”

  “May I try them?”

  “Please do! I would love to see them in action.”

  I pluck them out of the felt and slip them on over me fingers. They are cool against the skin and fit perfectly. I note that they are thin but wide, covering the space between first and second knuckles. I don’t feel any different while wearing them, but I expect that will change once I get outside and charge them up.

  “Very nice. Let’s go outside and give a boulder a bad day.”

  Flagstaff’s at seven thousand feet, and it lets you know it in December. It hadn’t snowed yet but it is certainly cold enough for it. That doesn’t matter; I strip to me skin as soon as I get outside and feel the rush of energy flow up from the tattoo on the sole of me foot. I don’t draw too much—it isn’t necessary. I’m just taking the knuckles out for a test punch. An innocent chunk of rust-colored stone that had never done anything to me is my first target, sticking up out of the pine needles about thirty yards away from Sam and Ty’s house.

  “Will I scratch these or damage them by hitting rocks and walls and things?”

  “They should be fine,” Creidhne says.

  “And me hands?”

  “Should also be fine.”

  Normally I wouldn’t bother punching a stone. Your fingers would break long before the stone would, and rock doesn’t make any noises to let you know it’s hurt. But if you’re going to test a weapon you have to do it right.

  I cock me right fist, half expecting to shatter me hand, and let one fly at the rock. It doesn’t split and turn to dust, but neither does me hand. Instead, the blow turns the top layer underneath the knuckles into a fine webwork of crazed lines. And I feel nothing but fine and powerful.

  Encouraged, I follow up with a combo, more muscle behind the punches this time, and chips fly from the stone.

  “Holy shit, Owen,” Greta says. “Are your hands okay?”

  I show them to her. No blood. No redness signaling an oncoming bruise. “Perfectly fine.”

  I shift to a bear with the knuckles on to see what happens. The brass flows, stretching and shaping itself to me claws. I have brass bear claws! I swipe at the ground with one of them, expecting resistance from the half-frozen, dried-up clay soil, but it scoops away like cottage cheese. Incredible. I shift to a walrus next, just to see the brass on me tusks. I can feel the brass move and flow up my hands to me face as I shift, and then there they are, gleaming brass-coated tusks. I bellow at Creidhne and the wolves to make them laugh, and then I skip the ram form and shift to a red kite. The metal moves from face to feet, and me talons are still very sharp and covered in the brass. Curious as to how the extra weight will affect me flight, I take wing and note that lifting off the ground requires just a bit more effort, but once airborne I don’t perceive a difference; additional strength flows from the brass into me wing muscles and there is no strain. To test the talons, I light on a ponderosa tree branch and nearly snap it off. They will require a light touch, then, when I’m wearing them, or else I’ll damage trees unintentionally.

  It’s a fine gift, far beyond anything I deserve, and I glide to another branch and land gently on it to get control of meself. Kites’ tear ducts aren’t easily triggered by emotions, so it’s a good form for me to have some feelings without leaking them everywhere. It’s been a fine day, what with the possibility of having shiny new apprentices and some knuckles to beat the shite out of a deserving man in a bog somewhere, plus the promise of a run with Greta later. It’s more bounty than I could reasonably expect—more than I ever enjoyed in me old life. I really owe Siodhachan for days like this, damn his eyes.

  When I fly down and shift to me human form again, I take off the knuckles and bury Creidhne in praise.

  “You are the finest craftsman alive! They’re wonderful! Perfect!”

  The son of Brighid bows in thanks. “I trust you’ll do something properly legendary with them. If ye don’t make yourself famous with those, the effort’s entirely wasted.”

  “I’m sure something will come along,” I says, grinning at him.

  “When ye name them, you’ll let me know, won’t ye?”

  “Of course, of course.”

  “I have one more thing for you, and then I’ll take me leave.”

  “Oh, right, there’s another box!”

  We pile inside and I put me clothes back on to warm up. The larger box from Luchta holds three wooden stakes, hardwood beauties carved with bindings.

  “Luchta heard that Siodhachan has yewmen going after vampires and is trying to make the world safe for Druids. So he made these for the three of you.”

  “Hold on a moment now,” I says. “Siodhachan’s doing what?”

  “My understanding is that the vampires have declared open season on Druids again—all three of you. They were the ones who spurred the Romans to wipe ye out, ye know, back in the old days that I guess you missed, and only Siodhachan survived. And you, o’ course, by skipping past it all.”

  “I didn’t know that. He never told me that.”

  Greta breaks in and says, “I thought he told you everything while you were touching up his tattoo.”

  “No, no, he must have left out that part. Mostly he talked about cocking up with the gods, and there was only one vampire he talked about—no, two. One almost killed him because the first one betrayed him.”

  “Right, that was Leif Helgarson who betrayed him,” Hal says. “He betrayed us as well.”

  “But it’s this old vampire named Theophilus who’s out for your blood now,” Creidhne says. “Or anyway he’s the one who’s giving the orders.”

  I turn to Greta. “Well, this changes things a bit, love. We can’t start a grove here when we might have bloodsuckers coming after us. It wouldn’t be safe.”

  Her eyes flash at me and she shakes her head. “They’ll be perfectly safe and you know it. They’ll be inside a warded house at sundown and up at sunrise, all of them protected by us and their parents, and none of us easy to kill.”

  “I don’t know what grove you mean, but look at these stakes, Owen,” Creidhne says. “They can’t be splintered or snapped, just like Scáthmhaide, and they have the unbinding for vampires carved right into them. Stab a vampire anywhere—left hand, right big toe—and they’ll be unbound. You don’t have to hit them in the heart with these.”

  “I didn’t know such a
thing was possible.”

  “Neither did Luchta until he tried. Look, Brighid wants the Druids to win this time. These stakes were her idea, and Luchta made it happen.”

  “Brighid’s idea, eh? Well. I need to pay a visit to your mother in any case. I have to talk to her about starting a grove here, and maybe she knows where Siodhachan is.”

  “I don’t think she does. I brought all the stakes to you because we thought you would know where to find him.”

  “I can try calling him,” Hal says, pulling out his cell phone. We watch in silence as he taps at the screen. He uses the speaker function so we can all hear, but the call goes straight to voice mail. “Nope. Either his phone’s off, or it’s dead, or he’s not on this plane,” he says.

  “Oh, I’ll bet you he’s on this plane,” I growl, feeling the old ire swelling inside when I know Siodhachan’s up to his shenanigans again. “He’s out there somewhere right now with his cheeky hound, doing something dumber than eating a bowl full of llama shite, I guarantee it.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Purposefully seeking out a poltergeist might be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. Well, that and growing muttonchops.

  When I woke and checked the man in the mirror, the areas where I’d applied O’Sullivan’s Patented Miracle Beard Tonic had outgrown the top half of my sideburns by about half an inch. That required some trimming. Then I had to flatten my hair down with some greasy goo, part it on the left, and plaster a curl of it on my forehead.

  Oberon commented when I emerged from the bathroom.

  “Can’t believe it ever caught on with humans,” I said, fetching my gray suit from the closet. It took me a couple of tries to get the tie looking right—it had been a lifetime since I wore one.

  I took Oberon out for breakfast and a walk, during which he got admiring stares and I got furtive, uncertain glances. The morning’s newspaper declared that a strange rash of ritualistic murders had been carried out yesterday in America and Mexico, mostly in the Pacific time zone, where an alarming number of rich one-percenters had been stabbed in the heart and then beheaded. The Hammers of God had managed to score a few for the good guys, I saw.

  I set Oberon up in the room afterward with the DO NOT DISTURB sign and a food channel on the television, his favorite babysitter. He was currently into a show about strange foods from around the world—strange, that is, to American tastes. He would tell me all about them and then demand to be taken to various destinations to try the live squid or the roasted locusts or whatever.

  I was careful to keep from him how worried I was about this operation. There were so many things that could go wrong, and I probably hadn’t thought of them all. My hound was happy when I left him, though, highly amused by Americans trying the Korean dish called hongeo, or skate, which is quite possibly the nastiest food in the world.

  My first stop was a used bookstore, where I found an old edition of the King James Bible with a red ribbon for a bookmark. I brought that with me instead of my sword, Fragarach. Gwendolyn’s fiancé knew nothing of swords but had a thing for gospels.

  Then there was no more time to waste: Werner Drasche was doubtless in Toronto by now and looking for me, so it was time to visit the Royal Conservatory of Music on Bloor Street, specifically Ihnatowycz Hall, the modern, sponsored name of the old building where Gwendolyn had died in the nineteenth century and become the Lady in Red, and where, some seventy years later, she had mistaken me for her fiancé, Nigel.

  Once I walked into the building, a funny thing happened: People stopped staring at me as if I were a walking fashion faux pas and smiled at me instead. In the music world, eccentric dress was a marker of genius. Or something.

  “Must be a pianist,” I heard one student whisper to another as they passed me on the grand staircase.

  “No, he’s gotta be a cellist,” the other whispered back. “They’re all bugfuck.”

  The building had far fewer unoccupied rooms than in the fall of 1953. People were practicing in them or taking in musical theory lectures and living a blissful life of art and chair politics in whatever orchestra or symphony they belonged to. And many of the smaller rooms were faculty offices now.

  There was nothing available on the second floor, where Gwendolyn originally found me, so I climbed the stairs to the third floor and found an unoccupied classroom. The number of desks that could be tossed at me was unsettling, but I chose one near the door and knelt down next to it, Bible in hand, and spoke aloud.

  “Gwendolyn? It’s me, Nigel. I would like to speak with you, please.” I kept going on in that vein for a long while, repeating my name and hers and my wish to speak. My knees began to throb after an hour, and I considered that perhaps Gwendolyn had moved on. It would hardly be surprising—what would keep her lingering here after the supposed betrayal she’d suffered?

  “Well,” I said, getting to my feet. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

  “Sssssorry for what?” an ethereal voice whispered, and there, across the room, a red vision floated above the professor’s lectern.

  “Sorry I wasn’t there for you when you needed me. When you were trampled by that horse in the street.”

  “That is alllll?”

  “I’ve never forgiven myself for that. Your death could have been prevented if I had only come out to meet you.”

  “Annnd what about the other womannnn?”

  “What? There is no other woman. There never has been and never will be.”

  “I ssssaw you, Nigel! I ssssaw you with herrr!” Furniture shifted around, scraping against the tile. I was going to be bombarded with flying desks soon. Before that became too much to bear, I had to convince her that she hadn’t seen her Nigel with another woman—for she truly hadn’t. He’d been faithful to her, as far as I could discover from my historical research.

  My plan relied on the idea that ghosts have one thing in common with hounds—they’re not too clear on the passage of time. As far as Gwendolyn was concerned, Nigel was not only still alive, he was still attending his Baptist seminary in the nineteenth century. Things like cars driving on paved roads outside and electricity inside—those simply didn’t penetrate whatever consciousness she had. The only thing that mattered to her was her relationship with Nigel, which was probably why she ignored or simply did not see minor differences in our appearance and voice. If she was ever to have a chance of moving on, she needed to repair that relationship with Nigel and get a sense of closure.

  So now I had to be the man himself.

  “I don’t know what you saw, Gwendolyn, but whoever it was, it wasn’t me! I would never do that to you. There is a lad here at the college who looks a lot like me, though. Maybe you mistook him for me.”

  “Nnno! It was you! You were wearing that suit! Sssshe kept saying your naaame. Sssshe called you Nigel!”

  Desks levitated off the floor, twitching and spinning, and one of them rocketed at my head as I shouted a desperate response and ducked. It still clipped me painfully on the forearm I had raised to protect my head. “Gray suits are common as corn, Gwendolyn! And whoever the woman was that you saw called him Nigel, not me. Did he say his name was Nigel?”

  That made her pause and she forgot about the desks, allowing gravity to pull them down to the floor again with a crash. “Nnnooo.”

  “What did he say his name was?”

  “Hhhee didn’t. Just that it wasn’t Nigel.”

  “Well, there you have it.”

  “Then whyyyy did sssshe call him that?”

  “I haven’t the slightest notion. People do strange things, Gwen. I have heard—I wouldn’t know, of course—that some people enjoy role-playing. Perhaps that was what you stumbled across.”

  “Rrrole-playing?”

  That was a rabbit hole I didn’t want to explore, especially since I was playing a role at that very moment, so I hurried past it. “Yes. I am so very sorry that you have be
en plagued with doubts, but it gives me so much joy to see you again.”

  “Joy ssssseeing me like thisss? Do you nnnot think me damned?” she said.

  “Not at all,” I replied, which I knew had to be the right answer—one hardly tells one’s fiancée that she’s damned—but then I had to think of why that would be so. Traditionally a ghost would be at minimum cursed if not damned in the eyes of a Protestant minister, provided that a minister believed his eyes. But then I recalled that Spiritualism was quite popular in the Victorian era and was bound to have some influence on the Nigel of the past—the idea that spirits not only could communicate with the living but were predisposed to do so. Nigel hadn’t been a black-clad Puritan and he wasn’t some modern Fundamentalist. He’d been a product of his time. “You’re just waiting before you move on. You still have something to do here—something to teach me, or to teach us all. And I want to help you, Gwendolyn.”

  “Hhhow?”

  “The man who ran you down—I know where to find him. He needs to be stopped before he hurts anyone else with his carelessness.”

  “I don’t want revennnge.”

  “No, no, me neither. This is simple justice. And peace of mind. I worry about who else he might hurt. You can leave this place, right?”

  “Yess, but I don’t want to leave. I want to talk to you.”

  “And I want to talk to you. But I think it’s important to stop this man first, and then we can talk all you want.” She nodded her agreement, and then I held up a finger. “Just one moment while I make arrangements? Wait here for me for a small while?”

  “I willlll wait. I have been waiting allllready.”

  “I’ll be right outside the door and return for you as soon as possible.”

  I grinned at her as I climbed to my feet and scooted for the door. Once in the hallway I turned on my cell phone and immediately got pinged with missed calls. One of them was from Hal Hauk, my attorney, with whom I wished to speak anyway, so I thumbed the callback button.

  “Atticus, where are you?” he said.