Staked

by Kevin Hearne

  We got polite nods but no names from the rest of the Hammers. They were not anxious to make our acquaintance. We were to be useful creatures rather than friends.

  “Shall we look at our target, then?” I asked. We settled our bills and bundled up against the chill outside. A few hardy tourists determined to get their money’s worth for their air tickets to Rome tried to look cheerful in the gloom. The surface of Bernini’s fountain, I noticed, had a thin coating of ice at the edges.

  Once in front of the buildings in question, Rabbi Yosef Bialik squinted at the wards and muttered in Hebrew to his companions. They nodded and exchanged some words, and then he addressed us. “You are right. These are interlocking trees of the Hermetic Qabalah. But they are collapsible triggers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Upon any tree being dispelled with cold iron—or anything else—the rest are able to isolate themselves and remain intact. You cannot dispel the entire ward, in other words, only the portion of it you walk through with your cold iron. The remaining trees are supposed to note the absence of any around them and trigger a response.”

  “What response?” Granuaile asked.

  “That I do not know. It could be an attack. Or it could merely be an alarm, letting the casters know that the ward has been broken.”

  “Normal folks pass in and out without consequence, then,” I said. “Clever.”

  “I’m normal folks,” Owen said. “No cold iron on me.”

  “They will, however, like us, be able to detect the use of magic nearby,” Yosef said. “If you were to use any magic at all, they would know it.”

  “Fair enough. I should be able to take a look inside, though, to scout. Or any of you lot could do it.”

  “You go,” I said. “But keep your right hand in your pocket so no one spots your tattoos.”

  Owen scanned the three buildings and chose the yellow cream one on the right, with Dolce & Gabbana on the bottom floors.

  “I like that it has a green door,” he said, explaining his choice.

  He walked through the ward without trouble, disappeared into the building, and returned not five minutes later.

  “There’s a hallway that goes back a ways. No place to hide. Elevator and stairs at the back with a man there asking if I was a resident. Both the elevator and the stairs are fecking narrow and I wouldn’t want to go up either one. Anyone at the top would have one hell of an advantage.”

  “What was the man like?” Granuaile asked.

  “Big bastard. Had one of those modern suits and a curly thing coming out of his ear. Clearly security. But there was someone else too. Not a guard exactly, and he said nothing, but he looked at me closely. He was sitting on the stairs, had these loose white clothes on him and an orange sash with symbols sewn on it in gold. And the weirdest hair I’ve ever fecking seen.”

  “How so?”

  “Shaved on the top and above the ears except for a greasy strip all the way around, like a hairy ring.”

  “A tonsure?” I asked.

  “If I knew what a tonsure was, maybe I could fecking answer ye.”

  “So we have bodyguards and spooky cultist types,” Granuaile said.

  “Any other wards inside, Owen?”

  “I’m sure there’s plenty more upstairs, but I didn’t get there. Didn’t want to start a fight without knowing the odds.”

  I turned to the rabbi. “If you have kinetic wards, I’d start with that. If they’re expecting me, then they might come out with guns blazing. Or they’ll use something else mundane that cold iron can’t dispel.”

  “Of course. And then a cloak of indifference. Innocent people will not care about what we’re doing. Not that there are many people out here on a day like this.”

  “All right. We’re going to withdraw out of sight, and then we’ll swoop in if needed.”

  The rabbi had no problem with this and immediately resumed his conversation in Hebrew with the other Hammers of God. Owen, however, had an objection.

  “Why are we hiding? Let’s kick some arses already and go home.”

  “We need to draw them out first,” I said. “The Hammers can ward themselves on the dead land, and their ward moves with them. We can’t do either, and we also can’t afford the energy. If we stay in the open when this begins, the most likely result is we’ll get shot. If we charge in there, the likelihood of getting shot is even higher—that guy with the crinkly thing in his ear probably had a gun underneath his jacket, and there are, without doubt, many more men like him upstairs. You taught me yourself, Owen: Never give the enemy what he wants. They want Druids to walk into that trap, so we’ll give them Kabbalists instead.”

  Owen bared his teeth and growled in frustration. He hated it when I was right.

  With a little bravado and a little luck, we ascended to the rooftop room in Babington’s with a view of the piazza. It was almost like a picnic pavilion, with a low wall, wide-open windows, and fantastic views. Down to our left and proceeding up behind us, the Spanish Steps rose to the church at the top. The piazza in front of us showed the ten Hammers of God aligning themselves in a Tree of Life formation, with Rabbi Yosef at the top, facing the green door near the entrance to Dolce & Gabbana.

  “You’re in for a show,” I said to Granuaile and Owen. “You’ve never seen this kind of magic before. Those beards are going to throw down at some point.”

  “What? Their actual beards?” Granuaile said.

  “You’ll see.”

  The Hammers of God began to chant and move in ritualistic sequence. We didn’t see all of it very well, since we were above and behind them to the left, but we had an excellent view of the three warded buildings. I was watching them more than the Kabbalists, to see what sort of reaction they provoked.

  Part of me wanted to watch in the magical spectrum, but I didn’t want to waste the energy. Within a minute of the Hammers’ chanting, a couple of windows in the buildings flew open and pale, white-clad men with tonsures leaned out to lay eyes on the Kabbalists. They watched for a moment and withdrew, closing the shutters behind them.

  “Okay, they’re aware of the Hammers. Response should come soon.”

  Two men appeared on the rooftop garden of the terra-cotta building and pointed guns down at the Hammers of God. They had large, bulky silencers or mufflers or whatever screwed on to the end of the barrels. I am not a munitions expert. They popped off a few rounds, which ricocheted off the Hammers’ kinetic ward, taking out a window to the north in one case but otherwise embedding themselves in the ancient brick and plaster of the buildings surrounding the piazza. The Kabbalists continued whatever they were doing. And, remarkably, so did the sparse dozen or so tourists in the piazza, who gave no sign that they had heard gunfire. The would-be assassins looked at each other and shrugged, then one held a finger to his earpiece and spoke, obviously reporting to someone via Bluetooth that guns weren’t going to work. They disappeared after a moment.

  “Okay, we’re going to get a different sort of attack next,” I said. That’s when it began to snow in Rome. Big fat snowflakes eager to blanket the Eternal City and paralyze it.

  Tonsured men of assorted backgrounds, dressed in the billowy white clothing Owen had described, with an orange sash crossing from their right shoulders to their left hips, streamed out of the three buildings. They were heading for a spot opposite the Hammers of God, presumably to form their own Tree of Life. Seeing this, the Hammers of God formation flattened into two lines, staggered so that the line in back could see between the shoulders of the front line, and then in sync they drew silver knives out of their coats and threw them at a single target. Some missed, but most didn’t. The targeted man went down with seven knives buried in his torso and one in his throat.

  “Holy shite!” Owen said. “Why did they go after that one?”

  “Align yourself with the forces of hell and you’re fair game in their eyes,” I said.

  “No, I mean, why that one particular man?”

  I shrugge
d. “Random target of opportunity. It was smart, because they disrupted their formation before it got started. The Hammers didn’t want them to get their own kinetic ward, or anything else, going. They need ten dudes to do anything major.”

  “Well, I think they have ten anyway,” Granuaile said. “Another one just appeared—yep. That’s ten. They might have more waiting.”

  “Oh, damn.” The Hammers didn’t have additional guys in reserve. If one or more of them went down, they could maintain what they’d already cast but not do anything in addition. Their strength in formation was impressive, but their weakness was needing to maintain that formation.

  Their cloak of indifference—or whatever they were using to distract passersby—worked astoundingly well. A woman in heels clicked across the piazza, right by the body of the dead Qabalist—who was an obvious murder victim and could not be mistaken for a sleeping vagrant—and walked into Dolce & Gabbana as if she had seen nothing amiss. I wondered what its range was because while Granuaile and I had the protection of cold iron, Owen did not and he had clearly seen that man sprout steel in his body and go down.

  The Hermetic Qabalists began their own chanting and synchronized moves, but the Hammers of God wanted to disrupt them before they completed anything. So Rabbi Yosef Bialik’s beard got unleashed like some hairy nightmare elder god, puffing and expanding and then twisting into thick tentacles, three on either side of his chin. They began to stretch out for the point man of the other formation, and Granuaile gasped while Owen pointed a shaky finger at him.

  “What kind of extra-special batshite is that right there? Gods below, Siodhachan, if Brighid was here I’d tell her to kill it with fire!”

  “Haha. Told you.”

  “I’m gonna have nightmares.” He pawed at his face. “I need to shave.”

  The Hermetic Qabalist had a response to the hairy cables coming his way: His tonsure came alive in much the same way, and a halo of tentacles formed around his skull before rushing to meet the rabbi’s.

  “Oh, yuck!” Granuaile said. The two sets of hairy ropes met in the middle, struggled to get past each other, failed, then entwined and tore at the enemy in an attempt to pull the other out of formation.

  “Are you kidding? This is awesome,” I said.

  “Since I’ve become a Druid, I’ve seen some pretty weird shit, Atticus,” Granuaile said, “but Beardy Baggins there squaring off against Squid Head McGee in the snow might be the weirdest.”

  “Hold up, now, who’s that lad coming out of the building on the left?” Owen pointed to a slim, pale figure wearing sunglasses and a bespoke Italian suit. I recognized him from Berlin; he was one of the gang that got away.

  “That’s a vampire.”

  “How? It’s not night yet,” Granuaile said.

  “Might as well be. No sun’s getting through that cloud cover except the weakest kind.”

  “Easy way to find out,” Owen said, and he began to roll out the words for unbinding. Meanwhile, the vampire moved briskly—not running, just a late-for-a-meeting walk—to position himself behind the rearmost Hammer of God. He was moving too slowly to trigger the kinetic ward, and so he encountered no difficulty. He reached over the shoulder with one hand to grab the Hammer’s bearded chin, placed the other on top of the head, and twisted savagely, snapping his neck. The Hammer’s body went slack and he tumbled to the cobblestones. Just as the rest of the Hammers were becoming aware that their formation had been disrupted and the vampire was moving to take out yet another of them, Owen completed his unbinding, and the contents of that fine Italian suit popped like a swollen tick before collapsing into a dark red puddle on the piazza.

  This caused one of the boys in white to cry out in Italian, “A Druid is here!”

  A window in the terra-cotta building flew open and a voice boomed, “Do not let him escape.” More windows flew open—probably half of the total available flats—and vampires leapt out of them, regardless of how high off the ground they were. This was far more than the eleven who’d escaped in Berlin. I honestly could not count them all because they kept coming. They began to fan out around the plaza to find me, and using camouflage wouldn’t matter. They’d locate me via smell, because my blood and presumably Owen’s were two-thousand-year-old vintages.

  “Shit. Hey, wait: They think there’s only one of us. I’ll be the bait down there on the steps and let them come after me. You guys stay here and pick off all you can.”

  Their protests followed after me as I dashed down the stairs. “If ye cock this up, you’ll be dead!” Owen pointed out helpfully.

  When I plowed through the front door, the first thing I did was slip on the icy steps and fall on my ass. An inauspicious beginning to battle. But I got up and noticed that the Hammers of God and their tonsured opponents had fallen to hand-to-hand—or rather to beards vs. scalp squids. Both formations were broken up now, and it was a brutal hairy mêlée that I might have enjoyed watching under other circumstances. But there were many speedy vampires spreading out over the piazza and I needed to get myself in position to lure them, hoping that Theophilus himself would come out to play eventually. Beginning to draw on the reserves of my bear charm, I increased my speed and drew out my stake, keeping Fragarach sheathed. Then I chose a vamp as I ran over to the bottom of the Spanish Steps and kept my eyes on him as I mouthed the words of unbinding. He was circling around toward the Keats-Shelley House on the other side of the steps from Babington’s, and just as I completed the unbinding, he realized that I wasn’t admiring Bernini’s fountain like a tourist. His mouth formed a tiny o of surprise, and then he turned into mobile slush.

  “He’s there, at the steps!” that same stentorian voice called from the terra-cotta building.

  The vampires began to converge from all sides—some had moved fast enough to run to the top of the steps and cut off escape to the road that snaked beneath the Trinità dei Monti church. Not that I wished to escape.

  I scooted over to the large block pillar of marble at one end of the steps and put myself on the other side of it, facing the stairs, in case they decided to direct sniper fire in my direction from those buildings. Unlike the Hammers, I had no kinetic ward. I’d handle the vampires coming from above and behind Babington’s and trust Granuaile and Owen to take care of threats coming at me from the piazza.

  It was an excellent plan for about ninety seconds. A lot can happen in ninety seconds. I unbound just as many vampires as I did in Berlin, probably more—all their fine clothing ruined by the juicy sounds of their owners’ elements being forcibly separated. Splortches and splashes and gushes ahead of me, even more behind me. So much blood on the steps, splashes of black and sometimes red in the white snow, if the vampire had fed recently. A few vampires got past Owen and Granuaile and rounded the pillar on me, but I staked them and wondered how many Theophilus had brought with him. He was sacrificing a lot of soldiers to get to me. Did he have the guts to fight himself, I wondered? Had he emerged from the warded building, or was he still coldly issuing directions from the safety of his darkened room?

  The vampires figured out that Granuaile and Owen were doing most of the damage, and they sent a few of their soldiers over the rooftops to land on Babington’s and deal with them. Not that I saw that happening from down on the steps—I pieced that together later. The first I realized that something was wrong was when I heard Granuaile cry out in surprise. I looked up at the Babington’s rooftop and saw her twist in midair and just barely catch the tiled edge with her hands. She and Owen had been facing in my direction and leaning out the wide window of the pavilion to target the vampires coming my way, so they hadn’t seen the ones sneaking up behind them, and Granuaile got defenestrated. To keep from falling, she’d had to drop Scáthmhaide—the only source of energy available to her. A vampire danced down the slope of the roof to finish her off, while Owen made the inexplicable decision to shape-shift into a bear to fight the remaining two in the room. He couldn’t unbind any vampires that way, either by unbinding or by
stake. I targeted the one coming after Granuaile and spoke two whole words of Old Irish before an unseen fist slammed into the side of my jaw, both breaking and dislocating it and causing me to bite off the tip of my tongue. It spun me around and I tried to face my attacker, but my balance was a mess, my ears were ringing, and the pain was occupying all my headspaces until I could get it shunted into a tidy screaming box. The result was that I slipped on the icy steps and fell on my ass again. I let go of the bloodied stake in my left hand when a booted heel stomped down on my fingers and broke most of them. The stake got kicked away, and I blinked furiously and triggered my healing charm, trying to focus enough to have a chance at saving my life. A ball of dough sitting atop a pickle laughed at me, and I blinked again. Now it was a pale, bloodless face laughing at me, and the torso was dressed in a hunter green turtleneck underneath a long olive trench coat. Dark eyes and a douchelord’s haircut up top, clean shaven, and a scar that began on his upper lip and continued underneath the bottom one.

  “Thfff.”

  He cupped his right ear and mocked me. “I’m sorry, what was that? Theophilus? Yes. We meet at last, Mr. O’Sullivan. For a very brief time, at the end of your life. You were better than all the rest of the Druids, at least—congratulations on presenting a genuine challenge. Thought I should say farewell in person.”

  I scrambled back and up in a crabwalk to put some distance between us. Pointless, really, when he could close it very quickly. I stole a glance at Granuaile. She was still hanging from the roof, and a vampire was trying to stomp on her hands to make her fall. It wasn’t necessarily a fatal drop—three stories—but there was nothing save unforgiving stone waiting below.