by Kevin Hearne
“I’ve never used it,” I admitted. “I don’t even know if it works.”
“What is it supposed to do?”
“It’s supposed to save my life. But in order to test it, I’d have to die.”
“Oh!” she laughed. “Well, I can see how you’d be reluctant to give that one a test-drive.” She frowned abruptly as something occurred to her. “Why have it at all, then? I mean, why not put on a different charm, like one for unbinding vampires?”
“I think I’m going to pursue that,” I said. “Recent events have pointed out how useful a charm like that would be. But still, if I start now, even with all the experience I’ve had, it’ll be at least fifty years before I can complete it.”
“Why so long?”
“Trial and error. I have to construct those macrobindings to execute from a silver charm via mental command in close proximity to a cold iron amulet. There are no instructions in Druidic lore to guide me through how to craft such a thing. Each of these charms is unique. So each time I test it, I’ll have to have a vampire in front of me to target. That’s going to be a bit dangerous. I didn’t realize how dangerous they were, honestly. I’d always avoided them as a matter of course in my efforts to keep myself inconspicuous whenever I tried to settle somewhere. But to answer your earlier question, I mostly keep the soulcatcher around because I worry about accidental deaths. When I began working on it, the Morrigan and I weren’t quite as chummy as we are now, and Aenghus Óg was still a dire threat.”
“I see. Do you think it’ll work?”
“Honestly? Considering how many times I’ve failed with other charms, no. I had to test them multiple times and change the bindings until I figured out something that worked. This hasn’t been tested at all. It’s kind of a Hail Mary.”
Granuaile smiled. “But you’ve hailed Mary before.”
“Not through my own efforts,” I reminded her. “Ready for poison?” I darted a quick finger at the mixing bowl.
“Yep. Let’s do this.”
I spoke the binding that allowed Granuaile to see with my eyes in the magical spectrum, and then I gradually zoomed in my focus until I could see the various alkaloids on the molecular level—or, rather, a magical proxy for them. I couldn’t really zoom in my eyes like a microscope.
“Okay, have you ever worked with design software where you can do a series of actions, record them, and then bundle them together for later use?”
“Yeah, I’ve done that. Photoshop.”
“Exactly. So that’s what I’m going to do here. See this molecule? That’s atropine. This one’s scopolamine, and this is hyoscyamine. It’s all just carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen in a specific configuration. We have plenty of those elements around. The inactive ingredients in the pills, which form the majority of the material you see in the bowl, are full of those same elements. So we construct a macro that says to rebind the available material here until it’s all one of those three poisons.”
“Won’t there be leftover stuff?”
“Yes. A few bits of carbon or hydrogen. Neutral non-active ingredients.”
I painstakingly constructed the macros and then, before energizing them, zoomed back out and turned off the magical spectrum so that Granuaile could see what happened.
“Watch closely.”
“Watching.”
I energized the bindings and the powder in the bowl stirred and poofed a wee bit.
“Wait. Is that all?” Granuaile said. “Nothing happened.”
“Everything happened. That was a bowl of three percent poison and ninety-seven percent random crap that they put in pills to make you feel like the price you’re paying is worth it. Now it’s almost one hundred percent poison. I never would have been able to do that before I took chemistry.”
“You got a degree?”
“No, I sat camouflaged in the classes and bought the texts. This is now an extremely toxic mixing bowl. Would you mind terribly opening a bottle of olive oil? I don’t want to risk tearing these gloves at all.” She returned shortly with an opened bottle for me. “Pour slowly while I stir?”
“Sure,” she said. “Why the olive oil?”
“It acts as the carrier. This is basically going to be a thin ointment. Once this is all mixed and the alkaloids are distributed evenly, we’ll coat the caltrops with it and we’ll be good to go.”
We worked in silence for a few minutes as we mixed the alkaloids with the base. When I was satisfied, I said, “Lovely. Now we just have to coat the caltrops with it without accidentally poisoning ourselves.”
“That sounds perfectly relaxing, sensei,” Granuaile said. She put on two pairs of gloves, and we arranged a procedure where we coated small batches of caltrops in the bowl, fished them out with the slotted spoon, let the excess oil drain, and then placed them into the second bucket. It was monotonous labor made edgy by the knowledge that a careless splash could kill us. We finished with only a couple of hours to spare before sundown. We hauled the weaponized caltrops up to the hogan, where Frank was sitting cross-legged on the floor in some kind of meditation. We tried to be quiet as we raided the cooler for cheese and crackers and ice-cold cans of tea.
Frank heard us anyway and grunted as he opened an eye. “You all ready, Mr. Collins?”
“As ready as I can be,” I said, nodding.
“Good. So am I.” His other eye opened and he began to clamber to his feet.
“You are? For what?”
“For killin’ skinwalkers, o’ course,” he said, brushing dust off his knees.
I held up a hand. “Frank, I didn’t ask you to take part in this. You oughtta get out of here, actually; give your nephew a call.”
“Naw, I’m doin’ this with you. How many more chances am I gonna have to get me a piece of skinwalker? Think I’ll keep my gun. You slow ’em down for me and I’ll plug ’em good.”
I exchanged a worried glance with Granuaile. “Frank, I can speed myself up enough to have a chance of hitting them. You’re not going to have an advantage like that. You only had the one chance to call Monster Slayer.”
“I know. But you can’t speak my language. What if they wanna talk before killin’ us? Whattaya gonna do then, play charades? Look, son, this is what bein’ a hataałii is all about. I’m s’posed to protect my people from evil. Now, this evil comes from First World; it’s a Diné thing, and it’s threatening Diné people, and I’m damned if I’ll let someone else take care of my problems for me. I’m goin’.”
There is no arguing with pride. Jesus and the Morrigan couldn’t talk me out of going to Asgard, and I wasn’t going to be able to talk Frank out of doing this. I gave him a tight little nod and began to worry about how I would protect him.
“All right, Frank,” I said. “I have a bit more business to conduct before we do this. Excuse me?”
He and Granuaile nodded at me and I exited to find a shady spot—not too tough near sundown. Underneath a shaggy-barked juniper, I sat on the ground and took the opportunity to have an overdue conversation with Colorado.
//Druid greets Colorado / Harmony//
//Harmony// came the reply.
//Coal mine stopped / Will monitor / Query: Move gold now?//
//Yes / Coal stopped / Gratitude / Keep coal mine quiet
/ Will move gold//
//Harmony// I said.
Colorado agreed.
Not for the first time, I reflected that the earth is so much simpler to deal with than people. On the other hand, the earth never gets my jokes.
Chapter 28
Frank and I chose a spot near the south butte, facing the north butte from whence the skinwalkers always appeared. With the approach to our backs defended, I took the five-gallon bucket of poisoned caltrops and carefully scattered them in front of us in a half circle, backing up as I went. I spread them out over fifteen feet or so to make sure the skinwalkers would not leap over them. Frank surveyed the scatter pattern uncertainly.
“Awful lot of places for them to step w
ithout hitting any,” he observed.
“You can head back into the hogan if you want,” I said. “Granuaile would probably appreciate the company.” Her SUV in the roof was still a weakness, but the hogan provided more protection than did the open air. We had re-rigged the fire trap on the roof, and she was ready with a lighter if she needed it.
“Hell with that,” he said, his bravado returning. Then it faded as he considered the caltrops again. What looked like a lot of defense confined in a bucket was somewhat sparse when spread out on the ground. “Are you sure that’s the whole buttload?”
“Yep. Look. Let’s say they get through—I don’t think they will, but let’s pretend. You stand sideways and protect your throat and guts, okay? You also protect your femoral artery that way. Just try to push or roll them into the caltrops.”
“And shoot ’em.”
“Right. And I’ll try to stab ’em.” I had Moralltach with me, but I hadn’t told Frank about its magical properties. It occurred to me that perhaps I should. “Frank, whatever you do, don’t cut yourself with my sword, okay? Even by accident.”
“Is it poisoned too?”
“Something like that. It’s enchanted with some Druidic hoodoo. You won’t walk away.”
“So if you hit ’em with that, they’re dead?”
“Right. Not instantly, though. Takes a few seconds to work.”
“Huh. What happens if the skinwalkers push us onto the caltrops?”
“Then we are most likely not going to live much longer, because they will tear us apart if we’re on the ground. However, if you find yourself with the luxury of time, you can try this.” I pulled from my pocket one last unopened box from my drugstore raids: a single disposable dose of physostigmine salicylate. It was the only one I’d found. “That contains a syringe with the antidote for tropane alkaloids. Stab yourself with it and press the plunger.” Frank grunted, shoved it into his front pocket, and then thought better of it and moved it to his back pocket.
“Shouldn’t ever have a needle next to your johnson,” he explained.
We watched the shadows lengthen as the sun sank below the sandstone of Tyende Mesa. It was beautiful and quiet and hid an evil against which I had no magical defenses.
Frank looked down at his shoes and scuffed the ground a bit. “I’m gonna say some stuff. Prayers. Get myself in balance, hózh, in case this don’t work out the way we want. So, you know. Don’t mind me.”
“Good idea,” I said. I could probably do with some prayer myself. But praying to Brighid or any of the Tuatha Dé Danann would probably be unwise at this point, since I was supposed to be dead to them. Praying to the Morrigan would probably do me no good. I noticed that she hadn’t shown up to help out when that one skinwalker snacked on my neck. True, I hadn’t died, thanks to Coyote, but she had warned me before about much lesser threats than that one. It suggested that I’d failed somehow to be specific enough in the wording of our deal. She had already made clear that she preferred to honor the letter of agreements rather than the spirit of them. If I called to her now, she might think I wanted her to pay a social visit, and that sounded about as blissful as cuddling with a porcupine.
I could certainly use some balance in my life. There had been little enough of that since I’d decided to fight Aenghus Óg—though even the smidgen of balance I’d achieved as a fugitive was a joke: If my inner peace was a calm sea, then my constant paranoia was the wind that chopped the surface. My two centuries with Tahirah were probably the closest thing to peace I’ve ever had.
Once the sun set, I cast night vision on Frank and myself. He stood as I had suggested, protecting his vitals. He held his gun in his right hand. I centered myself and placed myself en garde with Moralltach.
“Here, kitty kitty,” I said softly. “Come on, evil kitties.”
They attacked a few minutes later. We heard them snarl, and that was all the warning we got before a couple of blurs rushed at us, so fast that we didn’t have time to say anything obvious to each other like “Here they come” or “Weapons hot!” It was more of a single Doppler-shifted cat screech; we heard them from a distance and they seemed to nearly catch up with the sound and bawl right in front of us with that unholy, shorn-steel sound. Suddenly they were visible, scrabbling and braking on the dirt not ten yards away and trying to backpedal as they hit the caltrops and the maddened charge died within them. Frank raised his gun and fired six times, but they saw his arm move and they actually dodged, their bodies blurring and sustaining those feline rrreoowr sounds you hear in catfights. They came to a halt outside the range of the caltrops, two panting bobcats with problems in their paws. They rolled onto their backs and began to shake and twitch all over. At first I thought they were trying to dislodge the caltrops in their paws, but then I saw the bobcat pelts slough away and two naked men remained on top of them, steaming in the cool night air, as if they’d been born that way. They had caltrops stuck in their palms and on the soles of their feet, but these they calmly plucked out and tossed away, ignoring the blood and making no further sounds of pain. They stood, picked up their bobcat skins, and regarded us with orange glowing eyes. It was my first really good look at them, and I was surprised at their slight stature. They were extremely lean, with the physique of long-distance runners, so bereft of fat on their frames that their muscles looked a bit too well defined—I thought I could see individual fibers, and there were definitely prominent veins standing out against the skin. They probably weighed a hundred pounds, if that. But I don’t think I’ve ever seen more burning hatred in a pair of eyes, not even those of demons. One of them spat out something in Navajo.
“Frank. What did he say, Frank?”
“He said, ‘You and the white man will die tonight.’ ”
The two skinwalkers turned and jogged back the way they came, carrying their bobcat skins rolled up underneath their arms. They showed no ill effects whatsoever from the caltrops.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “They should be staggering around and having trouble breathing at this point. They each had four or five caltrops in them, enough poison to kill them twice. They should be dying, not trotting away for a bottle of Gatorade or whatever it is they’re doing.”
“I told ya it probably wouldn’t work, but you wouldn’t listen to me.”
“Well, now what?”
“Well, now we’re fucked, white man.”
Chapter 29
From the unnatural quiet, a thin, muffled voice rose in query. “Sensei?” It was Granuaile in the hogan. “You still alive out there?”
“Yes!” I called, my voice echoing back to me off the butte in front of me. “For the moment, anyway,” I added in softer tones.
Frank snorted and said, “You got that right.” He pulled some bullets from his jacket pocket and began to grimly reload his six-shooter. “Don’t know why I’m reloading. It ain’t like I’m gonna hit anything.”
“Is it safe to come out?” Granuaile called.
“No! Stay in there until sunrise unless I say it’s safe. We’re not finished. Round two coming up.”
The metallic click and whir of Frank’s gun served to order my thoughts. I had clearly underestimated the powers of those First World spirits. Physical healing, like what they did after getting shot and speared, is a very different process from breaking down invasive poisons, and I hadn’t thought they would be able to do it. Their magic was so alien to me, and I had to admit I was outclassed by it. Those First World spirits were able to turn very wee men into killing machines … which made me wonder.
“Frank?”
“Yeah?”
“Why did they take off? I’m asking because I figure you must have better insights into First World psychology than me. I mean, after they casually plucked my brilliant plan to destroy them out of their hands and feet, why didn’t they dance past the remaining caltrops and take us out?”
His gun now fully reloaded, Frank squatted down on his haunches to consider. I could hear everything, from the rustle
of his jeans to the slight shift of gravel underneath his boots. Places like this, so far from the ambient noise of cities, were a feast for the ears.
“ ’S a good question, Mr. Collins.” He peered up at me. “That name of yours don’t suit you very well. Ain’t your real name, is it?”
“No. I don’t tell many people my real name. But you can call me Atticus if you want, when we’re alone like this.”
“Atticus? What kind o’ name is that?”
“Ever read To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee?”
“Naw, but I’ve heard of it.”
“Well, there’s a man in it named Atticus Finch. Brilliant man—and a brave one. Stood for justice in the face of sheer stupidity, despite what it cost him and his family. I know he’s just fictional, but he was the kind of man I’d like to be. It’s the kind of name that leaves you room to grow. I need a name like that. Reminds me that I’m not perfect.”
Frank sounded mildly incredulous. “You need a reminder of that?”
“Well, yeah,” I admitted. “Sometimes I get to feeling pretty smug, because I’ve managed to dodge the wrath of a few gods. But days like this remind me I’m not all that hot. And the name helps. No matter how old I get, I keep running into people who are smarter, nobler, and kinder. I really ought to start listening to them and telling my pride to shut up. I had gods tell me not to go to Asgard. I had witches tell me not to go to Flagstaff. You told me this plan wouldn’t work. But I barreled ahead anyway for my own reasons. I still have plenty of growing to do.”
“How old are you, anyway? Twenty-two?”
“I know I don’t look it, but I’m older than you, Frank. Quite a bit older.”
Frank grunted and considered my original question. “All right, Atticus who’s older ’n me. The only reason I can think of for them leavin’ like that is that they’re cookin’ up some other way to kill us. Some way they think will work better, more surefire. Because there’s one thing about those caltrops, something I didn’t think about before: Those skinwalkers are gonna have to look where they step if they wanna get through ’em. And if they have to do that, then they can’t be lookin’ at us at the same time. That ain’t somethin’ they’d be willin’ to risk, not with you standin’ there with a badass sword in your hand and me with a gun in mine. So they’re gonna come back soon with some way to get around the caltrops.”