Tricked

by Kevin Hearne

  Manannan is unique among Druids and the Tuatha Dé Danann for being able to draw power from water as well as from earth. It was a gift given to him alone by Gaia, and his tattoos reflect this. He can swim without tiring. We took the shorter distance, heading north up to Iceland, where we spent a few days experimenting with bindings. Iceland was unbound at the time and the various elementals were small, so it was an ideal place for me to learn. Once I got the hang of it and we had shifted planes successfully from Iceland to Tír na nÓg and back, we continued our journey.

  We landed in Newfoundland and made the first binding to Tír na nÓg in the New World there. Once that was completed, Manannan Mac Lir bid me farewell and shifted back to Tír na nÓg. Before he left, he suggested I do all the coasts first and tackle the interior later. So that is what I did; I kept the Atlantic Ocean to my left and headed south, linking the east coast with Tír na nÓg. I met many fine tribes and got to know some magnificent elementals. Gaia’s bounty was made manifest to me all over again; it was like F. Scott Fitzgerald said, a “fresh, green breast of the new world.”

  It was not a week, however, before I grew lonely. I met an animal that was new to me, and only much later did people come to call them wolverines. But I bound my consciousness to his—like I have bound myself to Oberon—and called him Faolan, after the most loyal of the Fianna. It was an optimistic naming, for the wolverine Faolan was not naturally disposed to loyalty, but he was outstanding at warning me about the approach of marauding faeries and unafraid of taking them on by himself. It was also during this time that I began my long relationship with the iron elemental Ferris, who follows me around North and Central America whenever I’m on the continent. But one of the most interesting adventures I had on that initial trip of exploration happened years later in the modern-day state of Florida.

  At that time, everything south of Lake Okeechobee was a swamp, a really lush one we now call the Everglades. The life there made the elemental quite powerful, and once I arrived, it warned me about the dangers you’d expect—gators and poisonous snakes—but then it also mentioned a wild sort of biped living there, albeit in very small numbers. When I ran into a native tribe and stayed with them, trying to learn a few words and communicate with them, they told stories of giant hairy men as well. The giants had been terrorizing them on and off for a year, always attacking at night, usually taking some of their food, and in one case kidnapping one of their women. The woman was never seen again.

  Three nights after they told me this story, I was wakened by screams. I had to speak the binding for night vision—I had no charm for it yet—and then I followed the noise with my eyes to see two enormous figures carrying native women slung over their shoulders. The men were anxious to help, but they couldn’t see well and they didn’t want to hurl spears blindly toward the screams. I was the only one who could do anything. I took Fragarach and gave chase, Faolan keeping pace beside me.

  These giants clearly had fairly decent night vision, but it was not quite as good as my magically aided sight; one of them stumbled on a fallen branch he should have seen and bore his captive roughly to the ground. Her screaming cut off abruptly as the breath got knocked out of her. His companion didn’t spare a backward glance; he kept going with the other woman draped over his shoulder.

  As the fallen giant was clambering to all fours and reaching anew for his stolen goods, I caught up and delivered some frontier justice: I swung Fragarach through his neck, and his head plopped wetly onto the native woman’s chest as his body collapsed. I kept running, because if I stopped to check on her I’d lose the other one.

  Faolan, will you lead her back to camp if you can? I asked.

  he replied.

  Make endearing noises at her.

 

  No, that’s screaming.

  Faolan said.

  Figure something out; just don’t let her get lost or eaten by anything.

 

  Pretend for me, please. I’ll be back as soon as I can.

 

  There are no moose in this part of the world.

 

  The other giant had a good stride and some impressive endurance. Try as I might, I couldn’t close the distance between us. But I wasn’t going to tire anytime soon.

  After a good mile or so, he turned around to check his six. He saw me behind him—one puny man—and not his erstwhile friend. He stopped and tossed his screaming captive to the ground. She scrambled away, but he didn’t care. He roared at me and set his feet. He wanted me to bring it, and I was faintly disappointed; I wanted him to lead me to wherever he lived.

  I stopped about twenty yards away and checked him out. I’d never seen anything like him, unless it was one of the Fir Bolgs back in Ireland. I think the Fir Bolgs might be slightly taller, but this guy would beat them in an ugly contest. He had a broad, sloping forehead, a wide mouth, and a coat of coarse dark hair all over his body, save for the palms of his hands. His lean, muscled limbs were proportioned like a human’s, and so was his reproductive tackle.

  Beyond survival, my first instinct was to find a way to talk to this guy. He was a giant vat of testosterone, so weird, and now that the natives were out of immediate danger, I wanted to learn more about him. He didn’t have similar sentiments, unfortunately. He charged me, naked, armed with nothing but his ferocity and his actual arms, and completely ignorant of what the shiny thing in my right hand could do to him.

  I treated him in much the same way Luke Skywalker handled the Wampa on Hoth: I took off his right arm at the shoulder and then got out of the way. Unfortunately, Fragarach doesn’t cauterize as it cuts, and the wretch pumped out its lifeblood in a matter of moments.

  My examination of the body confirmed that it wasn’t a large, hairy human but rather a different creature. I hadn’t been to Africa or the tropics at that point, so I couldn’t even make a comparison in my mind to the various simian species. He wasn’t precisely like them, in any case; he was fully bipedal and never used his knuckles for support.

  I never did find out where they lived. I suspect, since the elemental told me he didn’t know of any more, that I might have inadvertently killed the last two in existence—both males—and they were trying desperately to find a way to reproduce. Despite my intentions and the inevitability of their doom, it still depresses me to this day that I might be directly responsible for the extinction of a species.

  The two native women got back to their tribe safely and they held a feast in my honor, but here is what I think really happened that night: I killed Bigfoot.

  “No way!” Granuaile said.

  “It’s true. The modern fascination with Bigfoot, I think, all comes from that night centuries ago.”

  “Well, no, that can’t be right,” Granuaile said, shaking her head. “All those Bigfoot and Sasquatch stories come from the Pacific Northwest. There’s nothing about the Florida Everglades in the literature.”

  “In the literature? You are claiming there is such a thing as Bigfoot Literature?”

  “Fine. In the extant documentation, such as it is. None of the sightings occurred in the Everglades.”

  “All right, I will grant you that. Now, who do you suppose started all that stuff about Bigfoot and Sasquatch in the first place, hmm?”

 

  Granuaile’s expression indicated that she was less than credulous. “Atticus. The Patterson film is widely regarded as making Bigfoot famous. But it’s also widely regarded as a hoax.”

  “And it was. It was me in an ape suit. I did a custom job, put some fake hairy breasts on there, and once they lost me, I shifted away and laughed my ass off.”

  Granuaile’s face remained stony. “No, I’m sorry, I’m not buying it.”

&
nbsp; “Who else can walk around in a suit like that and then disappear without a trace?”

  “That’s easy,” Granuaile replied. “Keyser Söze.” She blew on the tips of her fingers. “Poof. He’s gone.”

 

  “No,” I said, thumping my chest, “I did it. It was me.”

  “Whatever, Atticus. Why would you do something like that?”

  “Because I get bored sometimes. I want to see how gullible people are. Come on, a giant apelike creature in the Pacific Northwest, when all the apes in the world live in tropical zones? Who would believe something like that?”

  “A significant percentage of Americans.”

  “Clearly. But the truth is that there were two such creatures, both males, centuries ago just south of Lake Okeechobee. A subtropical zone.”

  Granuaile snorted derisively. “You expect me to believe that after you just told me you made up the whole thing about Bigfoot?”

 

  “Fine. Sit there in your fortress of disbelief. Discovering a true Sasquatch was a tangent to the main story anyway: I bound the New World to Tír na nÓg almost entirely by myself, though it took me many years. Many mind-numbing, lonely years, Faolan’s surly companionship notwithstanding. But there was another benefit to that mission I shouldn’t neglect to mention. There were times when I was blown away by the virgin beauty of the land—kind of like that guy who lost his shit on the Internet at the full double rainbow across the sky. Remember that guy? He kept asking what it meant. And it is not so difficult a question to answer. It means that we are loved, like all living things that Gaia sustains. There is a poetry in the canopies of forests and in the gentle roll of hills, a song in the wind and a benediction in the kiss of the sun. There are stories in the chuckle of waters in creeks, and epics told in the tides of oceans. There are trees, Granuaile, that seem sometimes like they have grown all their lives just to feel the touch of my hand upon their trunks, they are so welcoming to me. You will feel that welcome in your hands someday. You’ll feel it in your toes as you walk upon the earth. I cannot wait to see that love bloom in your eyes.”

  “It’s there already, sensei. Sonora showed me. While you were gone to Asgard.”

  Tears glistened at the edges of her eyes, all mockery of my Sasquatch story forgotten. She knew precisely what I meant—she had changed; she understood. And she became almost unbearably beautiful to me in that moment.

  “So it is,” I said. I sighed and tried to get the train of my thoughts back onto its original track. “After I completed binding the western hemisphere to Tír na nÓg—a process of centuries—I always kept a lookout for additional places to bind to the Irish planes. Lots of those bindings have been ruined by development, but plenty are still around.”

  “Are there any near here?”

  “There are some near Flagstaff. Or we could head west to the Kaibab Plateau. Not much else in the way of forests near here.” She accepted this without comment, and Oberon jumped in with his own question.

 

  That is another story, Oberon, and it’s not a very happy one. He was with me for nearly a hundred years, though. I do miss him, like I miss everyone.

 

  I petted him and kissed the top of his head. No, we have only been friends for twelve years.

 

  Kind of like caribou.

 

  Like elk or deer, just slightly different.

 

  I don’t see why not. It’ll be cold though. They live far to the north.

 

  The fact that the skinwalkers never approached the hogan and asked for a supper of Druid tartare convinced me that Famine’s spell had been successfully broken; Hel now thought I was dead. According to what Frank had shared about them earlier, the skinwalkers were more concerned with defending their territory than with anything else. I knew they would have to be dealt with eventually, but when I thought of how I might be able to match their speed, my lower left eyelid began to twitch. That problem could wait a night or so and stew in my subconscious while I conducted some business in Flagstaff.

  When it was time to greet the sun and the skinwalkers had slunk away to their evil lair—which I imagined was full of bones and skins—I pulled Coyote aside from the others.

  “Need to go to Flagstaff today to take care of a bunch of errands. You’ll be all right, won’t you?”

  Coyote scanned me up and down, searching, perhaps, for signs that I was going to abandon the project. “Well, yeah, but I thought you ran your errands yesterday in Kayenta.”

  “I have a few more to run. Should be back tomorrow.”

  Coyote pursed his lips. “Maybe I should help you run them.”

  “You’re welcome to come along if you want. But I think you’re more needed here.”

  “What is it you need to do, if you don’t mind me askin’?”

  “We gotta make my apprentice disappear. And maybe we can do something about that vampire problem.”

  Chapter 15

  The key to faking deaths is a fine appreciation of arterial spray patterns. One might be tempted to simply smear a bit of blood here and there, but forensics fellows these days are a bit more sophisticated than they used to be. If they figure the scene is a fake, they’ll tell the family and then said family will never hold that all-important funeral for closure. Without a body, the coroner would never issue a death certificate, but the police would at least designate it a cold case if you could convince them there was a high probability of death.

  I have found that blood bags work very well at simulating spray with a strategically poked hole; apply pressure to the bottom of the bag, practice a bit, and before long you will be able to write stories of carnage and odes to gore.

  A small fan brush—the sort that one dude used to paint happy little trees—can paint a picture of blunt-force spatters if you flick the surface properly. Don’t use a toothbrush; those patterns are recognizable. You could even talk to yourself, as that painter did, while you flick blood around: “And maybe over here we have a nice stab wound. And, I don’t know, maybe there’s a few more back over here. Multiple stab wounds. It doesn’t matter, whatever you feel like.”

  When it comes to the actual blood, my former policy was that it was best to use somebody else’s. You could even leave someone else’s hair, as long as it was plausibly the same color, and that was the best practice because magic users would have no way to track you down. Can’t do that anymore, however. Police routinely send all blood and other biological samples to labs for DNA matching, because some of those goodies might belong to the suspect. It’s tougher to fool the coppers these days, but I enjoy the challenge.

  Granuaile wasn’t worried about constructing the crime scene, however. She steered me away from that topic.

  “What I want to know is how you get around the documentation issues,” she said. She was driving us down to Flagstaff as Oberon napped in the backseat.

  “Documentation of what?”

  “Of your life before you take on a new identity. I mean, you can’t just show up. You need all this stuff. A credit history. How do you do it?”

  “The lawyers do it for me these days. Werewolves in general have the inside line on identity changes. Since they have to uproot their entire packs occasionally and move to another territory, they all figure out some efficient way of getting the job done wherever they are. Hal’s operation is among the best, but you can approach almost any werewolf anywhere and get help with IDs if you need to.”

  “All right, that’s good to know, but how do they do it?”r />
  “Well, let’s make a list. You need a birth certificate, to begin with. Then some school records and immunizations. A driver’s license. A passport, a visa, and a green card.”

  “What? A green card? Why do I need that?”

  “Because no matter what names we use, we are always and forever from Panama.”

  “We are? Why?”

  “Because that’s where the corrupt officials are. At least the ones that Hal’s pack uses. So you and I—Reilly and Caitlin Collins—were born in Panama to Irish expatriates who died tragically when we were young. We were raised as orphans. We have birth certificates and transcripts and everything. I got better grades than you in school, by the way.”

  She ignored this gibe and asked, “Did you do this when you started out as Atticus too?”

  “Yep. Mostly all you need is the driver’s license, a Social Security number, and a bank account. Throw cash at a bank and they don’t really give a damn where you come from.”

  “How do you get the Social Security number?”

  “Same thing. Corrupt officials. Kind of determined ones, though. It’s tough to get around the internal security of the feds, but you can do it if you have the money to spend.”

  “But will these IDs stand up under scrutiny? I bet your background as Atticus O’Sullivan is getting searched right now.”

  I shrug. “It doesn’t need to stand up. The moment it comes under serious scrutiny, you move on. It only needs to be good enough to fool people at first glance. If it looks authentic, you don’t get the full background check.”

  “Who were you before you were Atticus?”

  “Still me. Just a different name.”

  “Should I call you something else, like your original name?”