The Iron Druid Chronicles 6-Book Bundle
Page 58
Malina clearly found this suggestion distasteful. She wanted to kill his ass right then and there. “What do you propose?”
“Take a few nice locks of his hair while I’ve got him here. He’ll know he’s in your power then. You can send him some explosive diarrhea or something like that, something painful and humiliating yet short of death, and you can also set up a dead man’s enchantment so that if you die, he dies too. And then we’ll explain to him, in small words, how he killed a very nice witch who was trying to help us kill all the evil witches upstairs, and he and his Hammers of God should just leave us the hell alone from now on, because we have the East Valley well under control.”
Malina weighed my words. She knew that she was more than a match for the rabbi, but he’d been stronger than Bogumila. Twenty more of him against the five remaining members of her coven weren’t good odds, and she understood this. She agreed, albeit with great reluctance, and dispelled the light show swirling around her. Her sisters accepted the decision without comment, but I could tell they didn’t like it either.
“There, Rabbi, you see?” I said. “Heinous witches don’t let asspuppets like you live. Only merciful ones who understand, like me, that you’re trying to do the right thing but you’re just too dim to understand what it is. So we’re going to show you. Right after Malina takes some of your hair.”
Malina flipped off his hat and tore a giant handful from his scalp, stuffing it into the pocket of her leather jacket. We all enjoyed his pain. Then I released the rabbi from Fragarach, bound his sleeves firmly behind him in a similar fashion to what I’d done in my shop, and we led him through the building and explained how we’d completely eliminated die Töchter des dritten Hauses, a coven that had hunted Kabbalists like him for centuries. While he was busy fighting Bogumila, Malina had personally taken care of a large demon ram and another in utero. Klaudia had eliminated two more. Leif and I had accounted for the rest between us (I confirmed that we had slain twenty-two), and the vampire disdained demonkind so much that he’d refused to sink his fangs into any of the witches.
To the rabbi’s frothing accusations, I replied that, yes, I tended to enjoy the company of vampires and werewolves and witches, because all the ones I knew were extraordinarily well scrubbed and had fantastic taste in automobiles; but none of us suffered a scrap of hell to dwell in our territory unmolested, and we had, in fact, been far more effective against them than the Hammers of God had been so far. So please you, good rabbi, get the fuck out of our town and stay out.
He agreed to leave, albeit with much grumbling and resentment. I figured it was even money he’d come back with friends. We did not wish him farewell.
I found my missing teeth and felt certain I could heal them back into place with a good night’s sleep on the earth. I recovered Moralltach and its scabbard near the hole in the floor. Of Leif, however, there was no sign.
Malina joined me at the spot where I’d seen him leap from the building. We looked down at the the rocky landscaping below and saw no sign of disturbance there.
“I’m so sorry about Bogumila,” I said to her in low tones. “And Waclawa.” I said nothing about Radomila or Emily or any of the others who’d died in the Superstitions.
“Thank you,” she said, almost too quiet to hear.
“Did you chance to see what happened to Leif?” I asked.
“I saw him fall,” Malina said, sniffling a bit. She wiped at the corner of her eyes and nodded. “He was right between me and Bogumila. I don’t think the rabbi even noticed, though how he could miss a flaming vampire is beyond me. He ran east down Pecos; that was the last I saw of him. I remained at my station in case any more hexen fell down.”
I looked off toward the east. Lights on the north side of the road indicated buildings, but, after a few lots down on our side of the street, there was nothing but darkness.
“East, you say? Is that undeveloped land over there?” I pointed.
“I don’t know,” Malina said. “We should probably check it out.”
Antoine’s refrigerated truck rolled into the parking lot as our small convoy of sports cars pulled out onto Pecos, steering carefully around the golem’s head that Leif had thrown through the roof. Bogumila’s body was bundled gently into Roksana’s Mercedes. We waved and wished Antoine and his ghouls bon appétit. His gang would have the place cleaned up before sunrise, leaving nothing but property damage and a large pile of rocks behind for the police to wonder over.
I was riding with Malina and Klaudia in the Audi. Klaudia sat on my lap, her torso twisted around to face me and a leather-clad arm draped around my shoulder. With her other hand, she was caressing my injured jaw with a delicate tip of a fingernail. She made cooing sounds of sympathy, and I couldn’t take my eyes off her lips.
“Klaudia, stop that,” Malina said. “Now is not the time to tease Mr. O’Sullivan.”
My head cleared immediately, and I shuddered at Klaudia’s knowing smile. She had enchanted her lips like Malina did her hair.
I was glad the ride would be brief; Klaudia had discovered a loophole in our nonaggression treaty already. It was the second time an attraction charm of the Polish witches had worked on me. My amulet had eventually shut down Malina’s, and I had no doubt it would have done the same to Klaudia’s, but in each case it had worked long enough for them to do me harm if they had wished it.
“It’s all right,” Klaudia said brightly. “I think he and I understand each other.” She patted my chest with the hand that had been caressing my jaw. “Don’t we, Mr. O’Sullivan?”
I nodded and turned my gaze to the darkness outside. She was letting me know for future reference that she was every bit as dangerous as Malina.
A quarter mile east on Pecos, we found a charred and blackened Leif facedown on an empty expanse of gravel, next to a trench of violently churned earth. He’d obviously managed to quench the hellfire engulfing him and drag himself a short distance away, but now it appeared he’d reached the end of his strength.
“He’s not dead,” I said to the witches assembled around his body.
“Yes he is.” Berta begged to differ.
“Well, yes, you have a point, but I mean he’ll be okay. Still dead. But fine.”
“What about you?” Malina asked. “Your face looks like someone took a meat tenderizer to it.”
“I’ll be fine too,” I assured her. I was already feeling marginally better now that I had contact with the earth. “Just help me get Leif back to his car.”
Parts of Leif flaked off and blew away when we moved him. One of his fingers crumbled and fell like the tightly packed ash of a hand-rolled cigar.
“Eep!” Kazimiera cried when she saw this.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’ll grow back. I think.”
We fished Leif’s keys out of his burned jeans and decided, for his own safety and mine, that he should make the return trip to Tempe in the trunk. Klaudia volunteered to run back and get his car. “Don’t ever tell him we did this, though,” I said as we stuffed him into the ass end of his Jaguar. “I don’t think he’d take it well.” Berta tittered.
I bade the witches farewell and expressed my hope they would prosper and grow strong again. It was the language of diplomacy and we all knew it, but it was the proper language in that time and place.
Dr. Snorri Jodursson was already at my house, watching The Fellowship of the Ring with my apprentice, so it wasn’t tough to find someone to take charge of Leif’s recovery. Snorri said he’d simply raid the blood bank, and he was nice enough to put my teeth back in place for me before I lay down to heal in the backyard. Said he wouldn’t even charge me this time.
As I stretched out gratefully on the familiar grass of my lawn with a worried Oberon nestled against my side, I hoped the near future would bring me a small portion of peace. I was tired of these constant distractions and the alarming rate at which I seemed to be losing my ears, and if the chaos would consent to desist for a while, I would heal and mourn and focus pro
perly on what to do next.
There was a parcel of wilderness that needed my attention, which I had neglected for far too long.
Epilogue
It’s rare that I take the form of a stag. Though it’s the largest shape I can take, it’s still a bit lower on the food chain than I would like, and rare is the occasion when one of my other forms will not serve me better. But when the job at hand was lugging fifty-pound bags of topsoil miles across rugged terrain, it was the best option I had.
Granuaile and Oberon followed along and hauled a few things of their own as we hiked out to the blighted zone around Tony Cabin. They were carrying tools, our lunch, a set of clothes for me, and a five-gallon blue agave plant. I had a harness and travois hooked up to my shoulders so that I could drag 450 pounds of rich topsoil, teeming with all sorts of bacteria and nutrients, along the ground.
When we reached the edge of the blighted zone, my heart nearly broke; we were still four miles away from Tony Cabin, and there was so much to heal. If the cabin was at the center of a perfect circle, that meant we had fifty square miles to mend. The trees were little more than standing dead wood, and the cacti were lumps of desiccated tissue stretched over dry wooden ribs. The brush was all kindling now, lifeless and essentially petrified: There were no ants, no beetles, no bacteria or fungi to break down the plants and nourish new growth in the spring. But we had to start somewhere.
I unbound myself from the stag form and put on the clothes we’d brought along. Using the shovels Granuaile had carried, we dug up a few dead plants just off the trail and resolved to compost them. Then we excavated a small trench that led from living land into the drained area, much deeper than it was wide, and filled it with all the soil we’d hauled in. We spread the dead soil we’d dug up across the living, so that leaves and bugs and grasses and so on would fall or crawl upon it and gradually reinvigorate it.
We planted the agave in the trench and had to satisfy ourselves with pouring a couple of bottles of water on it to help it make the transition and take root.
“This is just the beginning, Oberon,” I said aloud so that Granuaile could hear. “It’s an important first step.”
“Maybe next time. That might be too much of a shock right now.”
“Eventually I can get the earth’s attention and help it along, but there’s nothing for it to work with right now. Life is its medium, and there’s no life in that area, not even bacteria. We need to keep bringing in the raw material.”
I laughed. “How would I get heavy equipment here? There are no roads to this place. You know what the trail is like. It’s too rough. And most of this land is wilderness—completely untamed bush.”
Oberon looked down the trail toward Tony Cabin, still some four miles distant, then considered the lone agave near his feet.
“Yeah, it’s a big job, but I won’t feel well again until it’s finished. When I stand here and call to the earth, nothing answers.”
Thanks, buddy, I said silently as I tried to surreptitiously zip up my jeans.
For my father,
who never saw these books in print,
but at least left us knowing
his son had achieved his dream
Acknowledgments
I know not how it goes with other writers, but for me, five months to finish a novel is akin to Maximum Warp, and it would not have been possible without my primary readers: Alan O’Bryan, Andrea Taylor, and Tawnya Graham-Schoolitz took time out of their busy lives to read each chapter as it was produced and give me valuable feedback. Allen Rouser, Mike Ruggiero, and Nick Steinkemper also read the work as early fans and gave me their thumbs-up.
Katarzyna and Leszek Rosinski were invaluable as translators for the Polish and Russian passages, and Andrea Hümer helped me out with the German. Any mistakes are mine, of course, and the accuracies are theirs.
Detective Dana Packer of the Lincoln, Rhode Island, Police Department helped by discussing what police procedures would be in a case like Perry’s. If the fictional Detective Geffert strays in any way from what he should have done, it’s because I didn’t hear Detective Packer correctly.
Evan Goldfried is my agent extraordinaire at JGLM, and I’m always appreciative of his tireless efforts on my behalf.
My editor at Del Rey, Tricia Pasternak, is undeniably the hoopiest frood in North America—but that’s not all! She’s also brilliant and helpful and I trust her judgment utterly. Her assistant editor, Mike Braff, deserves a proper spangenhelm for enduring the many slings and arrows of my outrageous pranks, and I am thankful for his help as well.
My wife and daughter were extremely supportive during the process, and words cannot express the depths of my gratitude for their love, encouragement, and curiosity about what Atticus and Oberon would do next.
The three-story building described in this book’s climactic battle is actually located on a street in Gilbert called Germann, rather than Pecos. I changed the name of the street because the locals inexplicably pronounce it like the word germane, which bears no phonetic relationship to the spelling, and I also did not wish to suggest, even by implication, that the German witches had chosen it as a forward base because of its seemingly close ties to their nationality. The building will most likely be occupied by the time of publication, but it did spend many months unfinished and unoccupied at the time of this writing, just as described.
You can follow me on Twitter (@kevinhearne) and GoodReads.com, and I have a spiffy website at kevinhearne.com with a link to my blog. Hope to say howdy to you there.
Hammered is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2011 by Kevin Hearne
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-345-52254-2
www.delreybooks.com
Cover illustration: Gene Mollica
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Contents
Master Table of Contents
Hammered
Title Page
Copyright
Pronunciation Guide
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Short Story: A Test of Mettle
Pronunciation Guide
One of the problems you run into when using Norse mythology is that you’re
messing with the languages of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland—plus Old Norse. Old Norse hasn’t been spoken aloud by the hoi polloi in seven centuries or so, but scholarly folks like to think they have a decent clue about how things might have sounded. I’ve used Anglicized spellings for Odin and Thor so that English speakers will have a pretty decent shot at saying them correctly by getting hooked on phonics. And though I use the Icelandic spelling and pronunciation for most things, it’s not universal. Sometimes I use what the Old Norse pronunciation would be, and here and there I mess with the vowel sounds merely because I want to. You’re free to do the same; this guide is not intended to be prescriptive but rather descriptive of the way the author would say things, and you are welcome to adopt them or to make fun of me on language bulletin boards.
The Norse Gods
Baldr = BALL dur
Bragi = BRAH gi (I use a hard g sound so that the last syllable rhymes with key. In Icelandic, the g is pronounced like a y when it’s between a vowel on the left and the letters i or y on the right—but I’m doing the Old Norse thing here. God of poetry)
Freyja = FRAY ya (goddess of beauty and war, twin to Freyr)
Freyr = FRAYr (I’m using an Old Norse/Icelandic spelling. There’s a rolling of the first r, which makes the f sound like its own syllable, sort of like a musical grace note. Sometimes the last r is dropped in spelling and pronunciation and it’s simply FRAY. God of fertility)
Heimdall = HAME dadl (Icelandic looks at a double l and pronounces it like a clicking dl sound, much like the English word battle. Heimdall is kind of like a watchdog god, amazing senses.)
Idunn = ih DOON (goddess of youth, keeper of golden apples)
Odin = OH din (allfather, runecrafter. You’d actually say the d like a th if you wanted to get old school, but most English speakers say it with the d sound.)