Scourged

by Kevin Hearne

  Oh, shit. Something’s up. I take her glass, place it in the sink, and fetch her a fresh chilled one, pulling another pint. She quaffs it just like the first and demands a third. Maciej looks like he might be falling in love just a little bit.

  If it were anyone else, I would have said no. I would have been required to say no; forty ounces of beer in two minutes was going to hit her hard pretty soon—and it’s not like this was some watered-down, mass-produced American swill. That stout has a beefy 11.2 percent ABV. But, like me, Flidais can heal the poison of alcohol anytime she wishes. She must, therefore, be drinking for a purpose, and has come to me to help her achieve it. My duty is clear. But drunken deities are rather infamous for collateral damage. I don’t want to see Maciej—or anyone, really—get hurt over whatever’s bothering her. And that could be almost anything these days, what with the turmoil going on in the Fae planes.

  Normally Flidais is a hardcore soldier type, based both on what I’ve seen and what Atticus has told me. She’s intensely loyal to Brighid, even taking Brighid’s side against her own daughter, Fand. But she has a mercurial disposition, and any reading of her emotions you take in one instant can be null and void the next. Atticus says the thing about Flidais is you never know whether she’s going to want to fight or fuck. Sometimes, he says, it’s both. You simply have to tread carefully, mind your manners, and be prepared for either.

  “So,” I say to her as I put the third pint down and then switch languages again to Old Irish, so that we can talk in front of Maciej in complete privacy. If I had to guess, I’d say the two of us are currently the only speakers of that language in all of Poland. “Tell me in the old tongue, just between us Druids. If you are in the mood to share, that is. What troubles you?”

  I count nine seconds of intense glaring before Flidais replies. “I will tell you, even though you are young and unprepared: Men. Are. Shit.”

  “Oh! Yes,” I say, giving the empathetic bartender nod of acknowledgment, which is not actually the same as agreement, but people who drink a lot tend to miss the nuance. “I’ve actually heard that one before.”

  “Of course you have.” Flidais chugs her third pint and demands another in an utterly sober voice, and it’s at this point that Maciej starts to look a bit scared. I can see that part of him wants to leave, but his desire to see what happens next keeps him firmly planted in his seat.

  Pint four. Flidais curls her hand around it, hunches over somewhat, and only now, it seems, will she nurse it and tell me what happened. But first she delivers a belch that’s long and robust, supporting and sustaining the note from the diaphragm like a trained singer. Maciej nearly swoons.

  “Perun broke up with me,” she announces in English.

  “What?” I’m truly stunned. Perun had been completely besotted with her. “When did this happen?”

  “Couple days ago in Scotland. Some faery stole his thunder and I destroyed her with cold iron and he got mad and turned into an eagle and flew away and now it’s done. All my fault too.”

  “No,” I say. I have so many questions and I can see that Maciej does as well, but job number one here is reassurance, and I throw a warning look at my regular. If he opens his mouth now, it won’t end well for him. “It can’t be all your fault.”

  “Yes. Yes, it is. Because. You know. I betrayed him.”

  “You…did?”

  “Yup. Uh-huh.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “Well, that faery who stole his thunder, I knew she was going to do that. And I knew he was going to get it back! Because I’m a huntress. I hunt shite down, right? Including faeries. Perfectly safe. Kill her”—Flidais brings her fist down so hard on the bar that the wood splinters and Maciej flinches—“and he gets his thunder back. That’s exactly what happened. I had a plan and that plan worked, mostly.” She raises her fist and waggles a finger at me. “But see, I didn’t tell him first.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh is right. I didn’t get his consent. I used him.” She turns to Maciej and leers at him, switching from Old Irish to English. “Usually men like it when I use them.”

  Maciej gulps and slides his eyes over to me for a cue. I give him a tight nod.

  “I can…see how they would,” he manages to say in English. Flidais chuckles, her eyes appraising him, and I quickly step in before she can take it any further, pointedly using Old Irish.

  “But Perun didn’t like it, I guess?”

  That draws her attention back to me. “No! He said he had a good time with me but now the time is over.” She raises her left hand in the air and her fingers flutter in it. “He flew back to Russia or somewhere Slavic, I don’t know. And it happened so fast I didn’t even understand what I’d done wrong. I was still standing there, thinking I’d done the right thing because that faery had been violating treaties with the Scots, and it was only the result that mattered…but he was gone. I didn’t have time to process it, to step outside my own stupid headspace and look at what I’d done from his perspective. I didn’t…I didn’t even get to say I was sorry.”

  Her voices catches at the end and I can see her eyes filling and I am struck by so many thoughts at once: Here is a truly ancient person feeling heartbroken and rejected and it’s no different from the heartbreak someone would feel who was born twenty years ago; and, Oh, baby, you done fucked up bad; and, Oh, honey, at least you know it and you’re going to be a better person from now on; and, Oh, shit, if I say the wrong thing right now, she will kill my ass. I should probably not say, for example, that if Atticus ever did something like that to me, I would most likely do the same thing as Perun. No matter what I say, though, she might pay me a visit later if she feels embarrassed about opening herself up to me, and I think Flidais is probably that sort. It had taken her sixty ounces of beer to relax the tight control she kept over herself, and once she sobered up, she might not want there to be any living witness to her moment of vulnerability. I need to bring my A game.

  I lean over the bar, get as close as I can without touching her, and say, “If you still want to tell him you’re sorry tomorrow or a hundred years from now, you’re going to get that chance. Because you’re going to be around. And maybe when you say it there will be forgiveness and it will be good. And if there isn’t forgiveness, then it will still be good, because you will have done what’s right: He deserves that apology. And in the meantime, there is beer and blood and the songs of bards, the great wide world to live in, and all the planes too.”

  Flidais nods, a tear escapes and runs down her cheek, and she raises her glass. “Beer,” she says, and I rear back, horrified, while she chugs that fourth pint, swaying in her seat as she does so. I have made such an awful mistake. I flick my hand at Maciej and whisper at him urgently in Polish to run.

  “Go, just go. Run! I’m serious!”

  Thank the gods of all the pantheons he trusts me. Maciej slides off his stool and backs toward the door, keeping a wary eye on Flidais. And as he moves away and the goddess of the hunt puts down her glass unsteadily and it topples over, her motor skills deteriorating rapidly, some douchelord moves up on her left and offers to buy her another drink. He even puts a hand on her shoulder. Every word he says is in Polish, but that doesn’t matter. His tone is condescending. He’s clearly a predator. And because I love poetry and alliteration and all the ways in which words can sound delightful when strung together, I had unthinkingly given Flidais the worst possible advice.

  “Blood,” she says, and she promptly spills his by smashing her fist into his nose, a sharp left-handed backhand like she was signaling a right-hand turn on a bicycle. It’s casual so she doesn’t kill him, but he’s knocked out and bleeding on the floor and there are plenty of witnesses. It’s pretty clear I’m going to be fired and quite possibly sued for serving so much alcohol to a customer so quickly.

  Flidais frowns at the man sprawled on the floor. “That was di
sappointing,” she says. “I was hoping for a spirited fracas.”

  “If you’ll forgive me, I think we should have discussed your goals a bit earlier. I was hoping not to have a fracas at all. I’m going to have to change the sign in the back to DAYS WITHOUT A FRACAS: 0.”

  Flidais hears me but does not care, because the man’s friends have lurched from wherever they’d been watching to hurl some choice Polish epithets at her. She can’t understand them—I’m not sure I understand half of them myself—but she can read their aggressive postures well enough. She smiles, sets herself, and beckons them forward. There are three of them, none especially in shape, and I think at least one of them is aware of it. But two charge forward, unable to resist a good goad, and my pleading shouts to stop go ignored. Flidais purposely stops them with a flurry of quick jabs to the face, and when they raise their hands, she sternly rebukes their groins with a powerful fist to the junk. They wilt like cabbage in boiling water and collapse on top of their unconscious friend. The third one prudently decides to preserve his procreative package and backpedals into the bar crowd, which is now aghast and staring.

  “Flidais? Flidais. Let’s talk in the back, okay? Come on.”

  Nope. Too late. The bouncer has come over to bounce Flidais, and she drops him even harder since he’s fairly skilled and able to get at least a single punch through her drunken defenses.

  “Okay, really now, let’s talk. We need to go before the police get here.”

  “The modern police? The ones with guns?”

  “Yes. Your shenanigans will bring them for sure.”

  “Very well. I’m finished drinking anyway.”

  She half-staggers around as I raise the bar flip-top and let her pass through into the back. Maciej is at the door, staring wide-eyed through the glass pane set in the middle of it, and he mouths a thank-you to me for saving him. I give him a salute and follow Flidais into the kitchen area. I guide her to the back, where the employee lockers are and a sign hanging on the walls says in Polish: DAYS SINCE A WORKPLACE ACCIDENT. It has the number 173 underneath it, but I pointedly change it to 0.

  “Half a year since the last fracas, Flidais, and you ruined it.”

  “I dishagree.” Flidais sways as she hooks a thumb over her shoulder. “Man ruined it.”

  “Your speech is deteriorating. Will you please heal yourself of alcohol poisoning? We’re going to need clear heads to get out of this.”

  Flidais delivers a spluttery sigh, like an impatient horse. “Ffffine.”

  Piotr Skrobiszewski, the manager of the pub, storms into the kitchen at that point, shouting in Polish. “Where is she? Where the hell is she?”

  “Pardon me,” I tell Flidais. I dart around her, find the manager, and sweep his legs. He knows English, so I pounce on top of him, pin his arms, and shout in his face, “Hi! I quit! I’m leaving in two minutes. The woman who knocked out three men in the bar will kill anyone, including you, without a second thought. I’m trying to get her out of here before anyone actually dies. So just let us go and you’ll all see the sunrise, okay?” I slap his face companionably a couple of times. “Thanks for letting me work here a while, Piotr. You’re a good guy.”

  I launch myself off my stunned former employer and wave at the slack-jawed line cook as I return to the goddess of the hunt.

  “Feeling better yet?” I ask her as I move to my locker and spin the combination on my padlock.

  “Yes. A moment,” she replies, her eyes closed.

  The tumblers click, I yank open the door, unbind my staff from the back of the locker, and pluck it out. “Let’s go, please. We really can’t stay.”

  Thank the gods of all the pantheons, she follows me out the back door into a dank alleyway. We hear sirens approaching and I lead Flidais to Pole Mokotowskie, the large park in the center of Warsaw where we can find plenty of privacy and a bound tree if necessary. She laughs when we hit the turf of it, feeling safe again with the earth underneath her feet.

  “That was not a fair fight,” she admits, “but I do feel better somehow.”

  “I hope you have an excellent reason for coming into my bar and getting me fired.”

  “Fired? You quit. I heard you.”

  “I had to quit because of what you did.”

  “Oh. Why were you working there anyway?”

  “For many reasons. To learn Polish. To make money. To lure vampires in so that I may unbind them.”

  “Vampires?”

  “That’s what I said, yes. They made a treaty with us and were supposed to be out of Poland by now. But they have refused to leave because of one Kacper Glowa.”

  “He is also a vampire?”

  “Yes.”

  “You should hunt him down and unbind him.”

  “I agree. I would love to do that. I’m not very good at the hunting bit, though, which is why I was working in the pub, hoping he or one of his associates would show up. One of them had appeared there before.”

  “I will hunt him for you. Where was he last seen?”

  “I’ve never seen him, but I can take you to one of his nests. May I ask what brought you to my bar tonight? Something about a message from Brighid?”

  Flidias waves that away. “Later. Let’s hunt a vampire.”

  “He may be many miles away.”

  “I could use a good hunt.”

  There’s a bound black poplar tree in the park that we use to shift to a wooded hill above Krakow, and I feel a grin spread across my face as the two of us jog to one of Kacper Glowa’s safe houses. There were four of them scattered around a block, each one with a concealed stairway leading to an impressive subterranean complex. There is nothing dull about being a Druid. The study period is long and intense, but the payoff is tremendous: Earlier I was pouring beers, and now I’m hunting vampires with a goddess.

  We break into the abandoned house, step past the bloodstains to the staircase, and descend into the dark. At the bottom I find a light switch on the wall and flick it on, gratified to see the electricity still works.

  “There were twelve of them down here?” Flidais asks.

  “Yes. Thralls too, and room for more. Glowa owns all this but wasn’t here himself when we raided it.”

  “All right. We need to pick up his trace somehow. Let us see what can be found.”

  I follow her through the complex, moving from room to room, some of them riddled with bullet holes or smeared with blood on the walls. Flidais grunts periodically but says nothing as she inspects it all. Finally she unslings her bow and removes her quiver, placing them carefully on the ground.

  “Normally I have my own hounds to help me with this,” she says, pulling off her vest, “but in this case I will have to do the thing itself.”

  She strips to the skin and shifts her shape into her predator form, the tattoo for which looks similar to Atticus’s but turns out to be a breed of hound that doesn’t properly exist anymore. Hounds have changed quite a bit since Flidais was first bound to Gaia; she’s not far away from a red wolf, and if I had to settle on a species, that’s what I’d call her since her coat is somewhat tawny.

  The huntress takes another circuit of the compound, her nose down and snuffling as she goes. She has to sneeze several times. I imagine the dusty skin cells of the undead have to be irritating to the nose. I certainly do not want to shift to a jaguar to find out.

  She spends an inordinately long time in one particular room, which serves as a library. Dark cherrywood bookcases line the walls, some of them now splattered with blood. Rich leather upholstered armchairs squat next to varnished tables. They used to have vintage Tiffany lamps on them, but these are now shattered on the floor, colorful shards of the past. I do appreciate the smell of the room with my unenhanced human senses: pipe tobacco and old paper.

  I check some of the titles they have on the shelves, and it’s not
long before my jaw drops. They have first editions of Poland’s finest. I hesitate to touch the four-volume Chłopi by Władysław Reymont, who won the Nobel Prize in 1924, but not for too long: I can’t resist. And once I flip to the title page of volume one and see that it’s signed, my head swims with the treasure and I’m overcome with the temptation to steal it. An old Jane’s Addiction tune starts playing in my head.

  “Do you think anyone would notice if I took this?” I ask, turning to Flidais. She looks up briefly, nods her wolf head slowly and deliberately, then trots out of the room, keeping eye contact with me. She expects me to follow, so I do after returning the book to its shelf, all the way to the spot where she left her clothes. She shifts back to human, puts a finger to her lips, and shakes her head to make doubly sure I know not to speak. I nod my understanding and plant myself in the hallway as she dresses, watching our trail from the library. There would be no reason to be quiet if someone were not here. No one comes, however, and I hear nothing.

  Flidais collects her bow and quiver and gestures that we should return upstairs. She wants me to go first, however; she nocks an arrow in her bow and backs slowly up the stairs, watching our six. That gives me a shiver.

  We emerge from the stairs and I say, “What—” but Flidais draws her hand across her throat to cut me off.

  “Not yet,” she whispers. I follow her outside and she takes us all the way down the block before she halts, kneels, and speaks in very low tones in Old Irish.

  “How well did you search that compound?”

  “We thought we were thorough. I’m sure Leif was too.”

  “So you searched the rooms behind the library?”

  “What rooms?”

  “There are passages behind the bookcases. Tremendous traffic through there, and scents of vampires that did not match the scents of the slain ones. The smells are recent too.”