by Kevin Hearne
Flanagan bobbed his red nose at the Kabbalists and said, “Those boys in black over there want a piece of Atticus.”
“Well, take it outside!” the manager yelled. The Hammers of God weren’t listening. They had taken silver amulets out of their pockets and held them in their raised open palms. They chanted in Hebrew, and the amulets flashed in their hands: “Yahweh, shema koleinu bishe’at hatzorkheinu. Natan lanu koakh l’nakot et oyveikha bishemekha.” I caught less of that, but it sounded like they were asking God to give them strength—and I think there was something in there about smiting. When the flash faded, the amulets still glowed with a pearlescent sheen. The Kabbalists closed their fists around them and their hands began to pulse redly, like when you put a flashlight behind your palm at night. Then, in concert, they lunged forward on their left legs and threw a punch with their glowing right fists—from all the way across the room—and yelled “Tzedek!” (That meant “justice.”)
My cold iron amulet sank into my flesh as if a safe had fallen on it, and I was plowed backward into the bar and cracked my spine painfully. “OW!” I cried. Jesus laughed loudly and slapped his thigh.
“Hey, that wasn’t funny,” I complained, rubbing my back. That blow had clearly been intended to take my head off or punch a hole through my chest—or something equally fatal.
“Are you kidding? I haven’t seen combined channeling like that in a long time. Say what you want about their motives, Atticus, but that was cool.”
I scowled at him. “Did you give them the power for that?”
Christ grinned. “Nah, they’re running on Yahweh juice. You heard them.”
“But aren’t you supposed to be …?”
“Oh, sure, to Christians I am. But not to these guys. Their conception of Yahweh is very different from a Christian’s, so they’re talking to a different god. Check it out, things are starting to get hairy.”
He was speaking quite literally. The Kabbalists didn’t look surprised or dismayed that I was still around. If anything, they looked more determined to give me ouchies. The beards of Yosef and the two Kabbalists immediately flanking him were lengthening and threading themselves into tentacular appendages anchored to their jaws, two on either side of their chins. They knotted and hardened into clouts first, then began to glide through the air toward me, about as fast as a man would walk at a leisurely pace. I’d have plenty of time to duck, but it was far, far in excess of the normal growth rate for beards. Once that registered with the remaining customers, they lost all pretense of behaving calmly in a crisis. There was a general exodus for the patio, with more than a few panicked squeals and impolite requests to get out of the way.
The manager objected and gave chase. “Oi! Pay first, then run away screaming if you want!”
“That’s it,” Flanagan said, his thick hands gripping the bar and his eyes wide. “I’m getting back on the wagon and I’m never getting off again. Oh, Jesus, look at that.”
“I’m looking,” Jesus said. Flanagan flicked an annoyed glance at him but quickly returned his horrified eyes to the facial hair advancing down the length of the bar. I empathized. I’d seen what those beard tentacles could do; they were much stronger than they looked, besides being viscerally dry, itchy, and raspy. Rabbi Yosef had killed an accomplished witch with his beard three weeks ago by strangling her. It had snaked its way past her wards, and now it occurred to me that it might snake past the protection of my amulet as well. Sure, the beard was being controlled magically, but that magic was targeting the hair, not me, and apart from being completely gross, such hair could constrict my windpipe every bit as effectively as a length of rope—and there were twelve such lengths reaching for me now. If even one of them got wrapped around my neck and the iron of my aura didn’t counter the magic controlling it, I could be in trouble.
My options were limited. There wasn’t much room to swing a sword in the bar, and I wasn’t anxious for bloodshed anyway. Besides, after a shot of whiskey and an Irish Car Bomb on top of my Smithwick’s, I wasn’t exactly sober enough to muster the balance required for sword fighting. Trying to lay a binding on any of the Kabbalists was impossible now that they had warded themselves from the earth; running away would make me seem like the mass of cowardly lunchtime patrons fleeing out the back, and I wanted my buddy Jesus to think I was cool too; that left nothing but hand-to-hand combat, and people did that all the time while drunk.
I’ve trained in many martial arts to defend myself against myriad weapons but never against beards. There’s not a whole lot of precedent. I decided to treat them like whips. Stepping forward to meet the first tentacle on my right, I grabbed it out of the air and yanked hard and down, expecting to pull the Kabbalist’s face to the left and perhaps break up their formation.
It didn’t go the way I pictured it in my mind.
Chapter 11
There was no tension at all, no sense that the beard was solidly attached to someone’s jaw. It felt like I had yanked on a piece of fishing line when the reel button was depressed, allowing yards of ten-pound filament to whiz free every second. It threw me off balance, and the other eleven tentacles abruptly reared back like cobras and struck, punching me eleven times with surprising force. Getting hit with something akin to a giant knotted sailor’s rope isn’t as bad as getting hit by a bus, but it isn’t like getting tickled with butterfly wings either. One of them caught me on the cheek and spun me around to face an amused Christian deity.
“I don’t suppose there’s any hope of a deus ex machina right about now?” I said.
“Nope,” he said cheerfully.
I batted away a couple of hairy ropes that were trying to insinuate themselves around my neck and kicked at a few others that were trying to trip me up. “Well, how about some advice, then?”
“Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”
“You’re pulling out the King James?” I cried, incredulous. “I don’t think that’s the verse you ought to be quoting right now. How about ‘I come not to bring peace but to bring a sword’? Remember that one? I liked that one. I have a sword here if you’d like to borrow it.”
“Nay, that is not my will.”
Uh-oh. Code word. What was his will? He’d just told me he didn’t want me messing with Thor because it would upset all the pantheons, and I’d responded by saying I was going to do it anyway. That made me a problem. Maybe he could take care of said problem by letting the Hammers of God have their way with me.
“Think I’ll turn the other cheek after all,” I said, and I bolted to my right and headed for the back patio, where all the other patrons had escaped. As one exits out the back of Rúla Búla, there’s a patio bar to the right, an extensive network of misters overhanging the tables, and a large wrought-iron gate to the left, which leads to the parking lot of the Tempe Mission Palms Hotel. Said hotel is situated directly behind a concrete block wall on the east side of the patio, separated only by a wide walkway paved in red cobblestones. The gated exit wasn’t much of an exit at the moment; another ten Kabbalists were blocking it, letting patrons past but only at a trickle. If I tried to get through there, they’d have me.
The block wall was looking good. It wasn’t terribly high, only four feet or so, and I felt sure I could vault it even in my slightly sauced state. My hopes of dashing over there unnoticed were destroyed by the vanguard of the Kabbalists, who must have been told to look out for the redhead with the goatee. I heard one of them shout, “There he goes!” in Russian, and that was the end of my attempt to “flee casually.” I sprinted full tilt for the wall, half expecting to feel a hit on my amulet as they hurled one of their “Justice!” strikes at me, or some other magical attack. Nothing of the sort happened. Instead, as I caught some air and I cleared the top, pain exploded in my back. Knives whistled on either side of me, and I understood as I fell that a few of the Kabbalists had thrown their silver daggers at me—daggers they all carried just in case they ran into a werewolf. One of the knives sank
into the meat behind my left shoulder blade and another into my kidney on the right side.
Perhaps it would have occurred to someone else—someone from Scottsdale—to bemoan the fate of his leather jacket in such a scenario. But even such slaves to fashion might be distracted from a wardrobe malfunction by a knife in the kidney, because there’s no other pain like it. It’s the sort of pain that freezes every muscle for fear of increasing the pain, and you don’t dare to scream or breathe, because even that much motion will exacerbate it.
I fell heavily to the cobbled walkway on the other side of the wall and nearly blacked out from the pain. I yanked the knife out of my kidney and had a nice cathartic scream of agony, then went to work healing right away, because it could easily be a mortal wound. Poisons seeping into my bloodstream …
Treating the Hammers of God with courtesy, I saw, had been a mistake. Their rules of engagement approved deadly force from the start, while mine had been about disengagement. If I had laid into them with all the gusto they’d shown in coming after me, I wouldn’t be in these dire straits now. I’d be in different dire straits, to be sure, but perhaps not so personally threatening.
It’s bloody difficult to concentrate properly when you’re dying of renal failure and all your brain can do is squeal. I turned down the volume on my pain centers from eleven to one and then refocused on knitting up my kidney. It didn’t leave me much room to deal with the Hammers of God. My clever, half-formed plan to ditch them somewhere in the maze of shops in Hayden Square would never see fruition. Drawing Fragarach and making a valiant last stand wasn’t going to be possible either. One lucky knife throw in a half-assed ambush had put me down for the immediate future, and I still had another knife in my shoulder I couldn’t reach. The cobblestones weren’t letting me get through to the earth; there was cement underneath them, no doubt. Every bit of magic in my bear charm would have to be used in keeping myself alive, so I wasn’t sure what I’d be able to muster as a defense when they came to finish me off.
Raised voices cut with equal parts fear and anger dimly registered in my head, and the clapping of approaching shoes against pavement signaled more grief to come.
“Vot on,” someone said in Russian. Here he is. My field of vision quickly filled with black shoes and the severe garb of the Kabbalists.
Then, suddenly, there were a pair of jeans and Converse All Stars inches away from my nose.
“Hello, gentlemen, can we talk for a second?” a voice said in Russian.
A chorus of heated Russian snarls greeted this request, all of them tersely demanding that the first speaker get out of the way, bugger off, and mind his own business. A couple wondered where he had come from.
“I will move, but we will talk first,” the voice said firmly yet calmly, and I recognized it as that of Jesus. We were completely surrounded by men in black now. I hoped none of them had picked up the knife with my blood on it. That would be bad. Though I couldn’t imagine how it could be worse than sticking it in my other kidney.
The tight whip of Yosef Bialik’s voice lashed out at Jesus. “Why do you interfere? This does not concern you.”
“I beg to differ,” Jesus said, switching to English. “You interrupted my lunch, and my friend has yet to pay the bill.”
“You are a friend to this man? This man who consorts with demons?” Bialik replied in the same language.
“Your mom consorts with demons,” I said, though it came out as more of a phlegmy cough than a confident assertion. That was about all the fight I had left in me. I didn’t have the strength or will to move an inch. The kidney is a complex organ; I’d need a lot more power and leisure than I currently had at my disposal to make it work properly again. I’d knitted it up to keep it from polluting my insides any more, but it wasn’t functional. I already had plenty of nastiness to neutralize in my veins, and that was draining me quickly.
“He no more consorts with demons than you do,” Jesus said. “You have misinterpreted his actions and have harmed one you should help.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Jesus Christ.”
They didn’t even blink. “Step aside or we’ll kill you too.”
“Thou shalt not kill, gentlemen.”
One of the Kabbalists—not Yosef—drew his knife from his coat and brandished it threateningly. “We are serious, crazy man. Get out of the way now.”
“Let us talk about Atticus O’Sullivan first.”
“You asked for it,” the Kabbalist growled. He stepped forward and stabbed Jesus in the shoulder joint—not a kill shot, but still a tad excessive if you want someone to move. I heard the fabric of his shirt tear; I heard the shik of the knife sinking into flesh; yet Jesus didn’t stagger backward or show any sign of the impact beyond the stark fact of the knife protruding from his peace shirt. The Kabbalist might as well have knifed a wooden post for all the recoil he got.
“I tell you truly, that was extraordinarily rude,” Jesus said. “I begin to think you do not keep your covenant.” He calmly removed the dagger from his shoulder, as you or I might remove a seed stuck between two teeth. He was as immune to the enchantment on the hilt as I was. It came out cleanly, without a trace of blood; I noticed that last bit when he dropped it to the ground.
“What are you?” Rabbi Yosef demanded. “Are you a demon?”
“Hardly,” Jesus said. “Rather the opposite. I’ve already told you once. But no one believes words anymore. I imagine you will need visual proof.”
A new source of light blazed above me—not hot, just bright—and I squinted upward to see a white glowing circle hovering above Jesus’s head. It began to rise in the air, and then I belatedly realized that Jesus himself was rising. I darted my eyes back to the ground and saw that his shoes had left it. He was levitating.
“I am the Christian god,” he patiently explained. “A prophet to your people, Rabbi Yosef. I am a Jew. Will you not pause to listen? I promise you that Mr. O’Sullivan will not be going anywhere.”
No one said anything for a few seconds. It’s not every day you see a tie-dyed man with a halo floating above the ground. You want to take time to let that shit sink in, store it in your long-term memory.
“We will listen,” Rabbi Yosef finally said, working through what he was seeing. Demons can’t manifest a halo—it’s against the rules. Angels can do it, but they’re not the sort to lie and say they’re something they’re not. Jesus nodded once before descending back to earth. Once his shoes touched the cobblestones, he turned off his heavenly neon.
“You have sensed traces of my friend’s magic in places where demons have been, but rather than consider he may have been fighting them, which was the case, you assumed instead that he was summoning them.” Jesus continued to explain that it was Aenghus Óg who’d opened a portal to hell in the Superstition Mountains, and I had not only sent most of the demons back to hell personally, I’d also taken care of the fallen angel Basasael.
“But he has befriended a vampire and a pack of werewolves! Witches too!” the rabbi said. I took that as my cue to speak up, albeit weakly.
“I am removing the vampire and the alpha wolf tonight,” I said, which was technically true. The Hammers of God would interpret that to mean I’d be killing them, but that’s why I enjoy ambiguity. “Or at least I will if I feel up to it. And the witches have agreed to leave the state.”
“There, you see?” Jesus said. “You have been persecuting a man who is playing for our team. He offered to buy you beer and you tried to kill him.”
“They might still manage it,” I said, wincing. I couldn’t afford to suppress the pain anymore; I had to use my last dregs of magic to pay attention to blood toxicity. It’s just very hard to focus through a haze of torment. “Hey, Son of Man, a little help here?”
“Please be patient, Atticus,” he replied. “I need to get an answer from the rabbis before we proceed. Will you, sirs, leave this man alone henceforth? He has done us all great service.”
The rabbis all lo
oked at Yosef. He was the one who had called them here. He glared down at me with hatred in his eyes. He didn’t want to let me go. Or perhaps he didn’t want to admit he’d been wrong. He was having trouble coming up with a reason to pursue me, however. What was he going to do, call Jesus a liar to his face?
“There will be a vampire war for this territory,” I said by way of a peace offering. “Pick up today’s newspaper and you’ll see it’s already begun. If you’re all about killing the evil minions of the dark lord, there will be plenty coming here in the next couple of weeks.”
All the other rabbis looked a bit excited about that. They were nodding their heads, and fires lit in their eyes. They probably already had wooden stakes hidden in their jackets.
Yosef saw that he could do no more. “Very well,” he groused. “I suppose this man is free of hell. We will pursue other prey for now.”
“Excellent!” Jesus beamed at him. “Now go and stake some vamps. Especially the sparkly emo ones.”
Yosef and the other rabbis just looked at him with dumb incomprehension.
“Never mind,” Jesus said, waving them off. “Go in peace.” A couple of them bent to get their knives, but Jesus requested that they leave them behind as a gesture of goodwill.
The Hammers of God turned and walked away as sirens began to wail and police drove into the parking lot. They didn’t say good-bye and they didn’t say they were sorry for ruining everyone’s lunch. They didn’t even tell Jesus it was nice to meet him.
Jesus watched them go and then clapped his hands together once, keeping them clasped together in front of his chest. “Right. Well, they’re certainly filed in the right folder, aren’t they? Skilled magicians, but sour dispositions. Let’s get you out of sight of the police so we can talk.” He bent down to pick up all the silver knives, including the one with my blood on it, but left the last knife lodged in my back. I felt this was an egregious oversight at first. Then I realized what he had in mind as he picked up my left wrist and began hauling me prone along the cobblestones toward the Mission Palms Hotel. New pain exploded inside me, and I felt something tear loose in my shoulder where the knife blade had given the muscle a head start on a trial separation. I lost a few minutes there.