Staked

by Kevin Hearne

  “Atticus, what’s going on?” Granuaile said. “I thought you hated him.”

  “Not as much as I hate the thought of a never-ending war.” I waved Leif over. “Shometimes a deal with the devil is better than an eternity of righteous shuffering.”

  “Good evening to you all,” he said formally, pulling out his chair and seating himself. “I am grateful for the invitation to join you. Congratulations on your victory against the Druids’ oldest enemy.”

  “Thank you,” I said. Granuaile and Owen just stared at him in silence, their muscles tense and ready to lash out.

  “I have the document you requested, Atticus,” Leif said. “It is in my coat pocket.” His eyes latched on to Owen. “I am going to remove it very slowly.”

  “Aye. Ye take your fecking time with that,” Owen said.

  Leif’s pale hand crept slowly toward his jacket pocket, and Owen’s grip on the stake tightened. The hand disappeared, the faint rasp of fingers against paper could be heard, and then a single folded sheet emerged in his hand. He extended it to me.

  “If you will, Atticus.”

  I took it from him and unfolded it, as Leif crossed his arms across his body, where Granuaile and Owen could see them. They relaxed infinitesimally.

  “Thish ish a treaty,” I told them. “To be shigned by the four of ush if you are willing.”

  “I’ll donate me bollocks to charity first,” Owen said.

  “You’re not required to shign it,” I said. “Just lisshen.” Looking at the text, I became daunted. My jaw and tongue were in no shape to read this well. “Granuaile? Would you mind?” I offered the paper to her and she snatched it from me without looking, keeping her eyes on Leif.

  “You stay super fucking still,” she told him.

  “As you command,” he said.

  Her eyes dropped to the contract and scanned it while Owen remained on guard.

  “It says we’re to help him eliminate competitors among the vampire leadership,” she said.

  “We will give addreshes to the Hammersh of God,” I explained. “We don’t have to do it ourshelves.”

  “And you have already completed most of the work with your efforts to date,” Leif added. “I anticipate few if any obstacles at this point. I am, to the best of my knowledge, the oldest vampire in the world now.”

  Granuaile continued, “It says that from now on, vampires may not occupy any part of North America west of the Rocky Mountains.”

  “And?” I prompted.

  “…And Poland.” Granuaile looked up at me.

  “I do try to keep my promishesh.”

  Leif pointed out, “The detailed language beneath says that vampires are to be given a month to evacuate those territories. After that, they may be unbound or staked on sight.”

  Owen growled, “What do we have to give up for that?”

  Granuaile dropped her eyes back down to the paper. “Everywhere else we have a truce. Live and let be undead, I guess. We don’t unbind vampires on sight; they don’t attack us. The war is over. Each side is allowed to defend itself in the case of physical attack.”

  “Bah. That’s ripe for abuse. Kill a lad and then say he attacked ye and it was self-defense.”

  Granuaile nodded once to acknowledge that and kept reading. “The vampires agree to maintain their population in the allowed territories in keeping with the Accords of Rome, which specifies one vampire per one hundred thousand humans.” She looked up at the ceiling, considering. “If you subtract the population of just Poland and the West Coast, that means a significant net reduction of vampires worldwide.”

  “It’s all shite,” Owen said.

  “Your Grove will be shafe, Owen,” I said. “Even when they are bound someday.”

  He glares at me, but I know from experience that it means I’ve gotten through to him. If he isn’t yelling at me, at least he’s thinking about it.

  Granuaile cocks her head to the side and points at the treaty. “If I’m going to sign this, I want additional clauses.”

  “What did you have in mind?” Leif asked.

  “Vampires agree to immediately divest their significant financial holdings from fossil fuel investments. Any energy investments will be in renewable, sustainable sources.”

  “I see. What do we get in return?”

  “The gigantic hint that fossil fuel investments are going to pay terrible dividends from now on.” She smiled at him. “I guarantee it. Sell while the selling’s good.”

  “Done,” Leif said.

  “And I want regular updates on the progress of Poland’s evacuation until it’s complete. Names of the vampires who leave and the cities they used to occupy.” She turned to me. “I’m going to see the sisters often, Atticus, and they’ll want to know.”

  “The contract already specifies that you will get a full report at the end of the one-month grace period,” Leif replied. “After thirty days I will verify that every vampire has left Poland or else give you their location so that they may be unbound in accordance with this contract.”

  “Ah. Good enough.” She set down the contract and drained her espresso. “Well, I’m satisfied. I’ll sign it.”

  “Me too.” We both turned to Owen, who shifted his eyes between us.

  “Ye really think this shite is worth signing?” he asked.

  “I do. Join ush, and with our combined shtrength, we can end this deshtructive conflict.”

  I did not add that we would “bring order to the galaxy,” but Granuaile put her hand up to her mouth to cover a smile anyway.

  Owen missed it entirely. He said to Leif, “Add Ireland to the list of vampire-free zones and I’ll sign it. If there’s any arse-kicking to be done in Ireland, I want to be doing it meself, not leave it to some dead lad.”

  “Done.”

  “Good,” Owen said. “Let’s get this over with and start staying far away from each other.”

  “Wait! One more thing!” Granuaile said. “A condition of my signature is that you have to finally answer this question, because I’ve been so curious: Do vampires poop?”

  Leif slumped in his chair and rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “Please, no. Leave me with some dignity.”

  “You can be as dignified as you wish when you’re leading the vampire world. We want to know.”

  He gave a dramatic sigh and covered his eyes with one hand while he spoke so he didn’t have to look at us. There was pain in his voice as he explained, “There is not really any excrement per se, nor any contraction of the bowel. There is just … this…” The fingers of one hand flailed about like lost moths, as if in search for the proper words, and then clenched upon finding them. He nearly wept: “…unseemly discharge.”

  Granuaile promptly threw her head back to laugh and fell backward in her chair. She rolled over and slapped the floor with her palm, carried away not so much by the content but by Leif’s evident disgust at speaking the truth aloud.

  Owen and I had a good chuckle out of it too, and I was glad Granuaile had remembered to ask him. He would never have answered except at that very moment.

  Leif produced a pen and wrote in the addendums to the contract, while we tried to get control of ourselves. We all signed and he countersigned and then we schooled our expressions to look dignified, though for our parts it may have come across as three parts pain and two parts weariness.

  “Thank you all,” he said, folding the contract. His gaze turned to me and he smirked. “We should not part without a few words from the Bard. Now breathe we, lords: good fortune bids us pause, and smooth the frowns of war with peaceful looks. Who said it?”

  “King Edward IV in Henry VI, Part III.” I spoke the next words slowly, making a special effort to enunciate clearly in spite of my injuries. “I will raise you a quote from Cymbeline: Laud we the gods; and let our crooked smokes climb to their nostrils from our blest altars. Publish we this peace to all our subjects.”

  “Well spoken,” Leif said, his smirk widening to a broad smile. Waggling the
contract, he said, “I will send you copies of this wherever you wish. For now I have much to do. A publishing of the peace, as you said.” He rose slowly from his chair, so as not to alarm Owen or Granuaile, and bowed. “Do keep in touch. Farewell.”

  Once he was out of sight we all visibly relaxed, but we didn’t say anything until we were sure he couldn’t overhear us. I closed my eyes and gave silent thanks to Brighid, the Morrigan, and all the gods below for this moment of peace that was centuries in the making—not that they had anything to do with it, apart from Brighid’s idea about the stakes. Sometimes you simply need to say thank you to someone, to be grateful for the road behind and the road ahead and the place you’re at, and gods are very good at accepting those feelings. And for all that humanity asks them for intercession with this crisis or that, it’s important when things go well to be thankful or at least conscious of your good fortune, whether the gods deserve the gratitude or not. We strive so much to achieve these small slivers of balance that it would be a shame not to look around and appreciate them when they happen.

  “We did it,” I said, a tinge of wonder in my voice. “Three Druids againsht the vampire who nearly wiped ush out and we finally got to him. Two thoushand years of hiding and waiting and then a lot of maneuvering and blood, but we got him.” I turned to the others. “Thank you both for your help.”

  “Right. Can we fecking leave this festering shite of a city now?” Owen asked.

  “Yeah,” Granuaile said. “Let’s get our bruised and battered asses to a green place and stay there for a while.”

  Well, maybe it wasn’t such a great moment for them. They didn’t have to live through the two thousand years to get here. They also couldn’t grasp the sheer number of lives lost to Theophilus’s war—only Hal Hauk, I suspect, mattered to them, as he mattered to me. Yet so many others had fallen and they deserved to be remembered too, so I would do it. And I still had a huge debt to work off for the yewmen’s aid, and the Rabbi Yosef Bialik was due some remuneration. But I will pay it all gladly and be rid of this old fear. It had shackled my consciousness for so long that I didn’t realize how much it weighed until I won free of it.

  “Good idea,” I said, a painful grin spreading my smashed lips. “I think I’d like nothing sho much as to play with my hound right now.”

  EPILOGUE

  Three weeks later, after the winter solstice and the New Year, it was such a clear blue day in the Pacific Northwest that I didn’t mind the winter chill. Thanks to the new treaty with Leif, Owen would be able to get to the serious business of training apprentices in peace—which included the peace that came with my absence. And since Granuaile, like me, was effectively shielded from divination, Fand and Manannan Mac Lir wouldn’t be able to find us at the new place in Oregon, if that was on their list of things to do. I hadn’t heard anything about their recapture and didn’t plan to inquire. My plan was to ignore them until I couldn’t.

  Magnusson and Hauk finalized the closing of the property for us and then gave me papers terminating me as a client. The termination saddened me, as did the cause for it; since I’d never gotten a chance to attend a memorial for Hal I held my own private one in the woods, shed tears at his passing, and hoped that wherever his spirit was he would forgive me.

  But the property, at least, was worth the wait: an isolated spot in the Willamette National Forest, a legacy homestead with a wraparound porch and one of those steep green roofs. There was even a greenhouse for growing herbs in the winter, a new addition to the property that was Granuaile’s idea. She had paid for it out of her own funds and said I should consider it a housewarming present. And an investment.

  “I think you should get back into the tea business,” she said upon revealing it to me, draping her arms around my shoulders and kissing my cheek. “But do it online this time. Sell your Mobili-Tea and so on and we’ll ship it.” It made me happy that she was thinking about the long term. The first-person plural made me happier.

  Maybe my worries about us as a couple were unfounded, but … well. Doubt is a pernicious, invasive weed in the mind that is nigh impossible to destroy once it germinates. You can pull it out and think it’s gone, only to find it growing again after weeks or even days. Not that Granuaile had given me doubts about her fidelity; I’m not particularly jealous in that regard anyway—we are made to enjoy the bodies of other people, and I’ve long thought it silly to condemn another for acting according to their nature. Passion, though: That’s entirely separate from lust. Granuaile is still in her thirties and hasn’t lived long enough to know what a slow burn is. So when we first made love after Rome and it was different than before, damn if doubt didn’t sprout in my mind with the speed of a time-lapse video and wave hello like an improbably cheerful hostess at a steak house. The last thing I wanted was Friar Laurence from Romeo and Juliet in my head, reminding me that These violent delights have violent ends and in their triumph die, like fire and powder, which, as they kiss, consume, but there the bastard was, schooling me as if I were a horny young Montague instead of someone far older than he was. And he kept at it too, into the next day, until I said aloud, “Hey, fuck you, Friar Laurence, okay?” and Oberon heard me through our mental link.

 

  No, I was just worried because it was different and I’ve had more than my fair share of relationships. I can read the signs, and I’m not ready for it to end. But I also know from a surfeit of experience that people outgrow each other, and she still has plenty of growing to do. I can’t teach her Polish, so she’s been spending lots of time in Poland with the Sisters of the Three Auroras. She already scored a bartending job in Warsaw to get the immersion she needs, and she also spent time monitoring the activities of Thatcher Oil and Gas. I only see her now when she comes home to sleep and on her weekends, which are Mondays and Tuesdays.

  But it was entirely possible—even probable—that my worries were unfounded and magnified out of proportion by the infamously fragile male ego. Apart from my imagination, she had given me no cause to fear. What I should be doing was the same thing everyone should be doing: enjoying the blessings I have while I have them, instead of worrying that one day they will be gone. I fought to keep that thought foremost in mind rather than the poisonous words of that fucker Friar Laurence.

  The pine and Douglas fir lent a crisp scent to the air on a January Monday, and down by the McKenzie River the air was especially fresh. We took a walk down there with the hounds for what we assured them would be a memorable occasion.

  “Granuaile and I would like to try something,” I said to the hounds. My tongue, jaw, and lips had healed to the point where I could speak without impediment. “A new kind of binding. But we need you to be still for a few minutes while we do it.”

  Orlaith asked.

  Granuaile answered her, “Wagging your tail will not be a problem. But if you could keep the rest still, that would be great.”

  Oberon said.

  “No, Oberon,” I said. “There is no food involved here at all. But we’re pretty sure you’re going to like this. Just be patient and enjoy the sun while it lasts, okay?” It was a rare clear day for an Oregon early winter, but in a few hours a storm system would roll in from the Pacific and it would get even colder.

  Oberon and Orlaith sat down side by side in the grass, tongues lolling out and tails wagging like the happy hounds they were. Granuaile and I sat down facing them, legs crossed beneath us. I nodded at her and we both flipped our vision to the magical spectrum, where we could see the hounds’ auras and the bindings that linked their minds to ours. We had long promised the hounds that we would bind them together eventually so that they could hear each other, but since we had never actually done it before, we didn’t tell them what we were planning, in case it didn’t succee
d.

  We began to work on the new binding in tandem, Old Irish streaming out of our mouths in almost identical patterns. The only difference was in our targets: I was starting with Oberon and binding his thoughts to Orlaith, and Granuaile was binding Orlaith to Oberon in turn. For now they were also connected to us: We’d be able to hear both sides of their conversation, but out of necessity we would soon give them the equivalent of their own private line, or else we’d constantly hear them chattering when we were trying to sleep or concentrate on something else. When the bindings were complete, no chimes or sirens went off in their heads. They would have to be told the link was there and then discover that they could use it. We had agreed to tell Oberon first and let him be the uncertain one.

  “Okay, Oberon,” I said aloud. “You should be able to talk to Orlaith now. Go ahead and try it. Think something at her rather than at me.”

 

  Granuaile’s hound replied and got to her feet, her entire rear end shaking back and forth in her excitement.

  Oberon got to his feet too, every bit as excited.

 

 

 

  Oberon reared up on his hind legs and pawed at the air in Orlaith’s direction, and she mirrored his action, as if they were boxers instead of wolfhounds. Then they jumped around in tight little circles. my hound said.

 

 

  And then the two of them tore off through the forest, carried away by their joy, leaving Granuaile and me behind, facing the river. We exchanged a glance and laughed at our hounds for a few seconds, and then Granuaile leaned over and kissed me. She pulled away an inch and murmured in a low voice, “I knew we’d get along too, you know.”