Staked (Iron Druid Chronicles)

by Kevin Hearne

  “O’Sullivan!” he called, and I peeked back around the corner to confirm it was him. Werner Drasche stood among his vampire entourage, looking up and down the intersection, plainly not in custody in Toronto anymore. And while he was no longer an arcane lifeleech, he was still a gigantic thorn in my side and showed a disturbing talent for outfoxing me. He must have been waiting out of sight, perhaps in the bar somewhere, and that was who the goggled vampire had called when he spotted me. I really should have killed him when I had the chance.

  Well, Drasche could have this round; I was so extremely outgunned that there was no use in trying to tilt a lopsided battleground in my favor. I should count avoiding the ambush as a win.

  Oberon, let’s go, I said to him through our mental link. Don’t wait to stop anyone. I’m going to fly out of here, and you follow along on the streets, okay? Try not to knock any tourists over.

 

  I shifted directly from otter to owl, since my arms were in good shape and I wouldn’t have to depend on that damaged left leg. I’d worry about healing it later. As I took wing in the direction of the Vltava River, I heard Drasche launch into a series of taunts.

  “You can’t win this war, O’Sullivan! One way or another, we’ll get to you!”

  He made a good point: My goal was still a good one, but I couldn’t win using current methods. I’d have to try another way to get to Theophilus, because they had been waiting for me at the Grand Hotel Bohemia with guns and infrared and Drasche’s personal force of undead Austrian muscle. Which meant that Leif had betrayed me again.

  CHAPTER 18

  There is a certain freedom granted in privacy—a sense of fulfillment and ease that comes with the simple knowledge that no one is watching. It’s why we feel all right about singing in the shower. And in this modern world, where we are constantly under surveillance of one kind or another, I suppose a compelling argument could be made that both our privacy and our freedom are illusions. Atticus and I don’t worry about conventional surveillance too much; stay off the Internet, use burner phones, and pay cash for everything you can, and that will at least make them work to find you. Using assumed identities is a huge help as well. But I haven’t had true privacy—true freedom—until now, with a divination cloak shielding me from the prying eyes of gods and seers of all kinds. And I know just how I want to celebrate that freedom.

  I want to pluck out the metaphorical thorn that’s been embedded in my psyche for years and then see if I can’t find my way back to a happy place. Laksha’s question about where I am on my own spiritual journey has lingered in my mind, and I’ve been thinking about it—there was a rebuke there, and a well-deserved one. It put me in mind of Whitman’s rhetorical question about judgment in I Sing the Body Electric: Do you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant?

  Nope. I certainly do not. And the primary problem is that I do not know enough of myself. I have old wounds that have never fully healed, and I need to address them before I can move to help others. And in truth there is no balance that I can achieve but my own.

  I have long delayed seeking that balance, in favor of more-pressing business, but I feel that it’s finally time to take care of it. Being able to take care of it was one of the primary reasons I became a Druid, but I have purposely waited since becoming bound to Gaia, to ensure that I would not act rashly. Instead, I have coolly planned a course of action that will serve Gaia and also serve my personal need to give my stepfather the finger.

  As a child, when I came to live at his place in Kansas—the slightly smaller one, not the sprawling monstrosity he bought my senior year—I quickly saw that my mother was a prize instead of a person to him, and I was a burden he had to tolerate if he wanted the prize. He never laid a finger on me—I’m more fortunate than so many others in that regard—but the most love I was able to ever wring out of his face was a look of mild disgust. Never a kind word. Maybe it was because I was a tangible reminder that he had not always possessed my mother. Any interest he gave me was feigned, and that was only in the presence of others. I know my mom must have seen something good in him besides his bank account; her regard for him, at least, wasn’t feigned. I think she admires single-minded determination. My real dad had it and so does Beau—and I suppose I possess a fair measure of it myself.

  The only time I think I ever saw him smile at me was when he was waving goodbye as I left Kansas for Arizona State.

  So, yes: I have hurt feelings, which I probably should have sought to address long ago. His aggressive disdain, heaped on my real father’s distracted abandonment, did nothing good for my psyche. It’s why I took to playing alone outside as much as possible, enjoying an area that wasn’t so firmly under Beau’s control. Later it wasn’t playing but reading in a tree house that my mother had hired someone to build for me—Beau certainly wouldn’t do it. I stayed out past dark and burned through a whole lot of batteries for my flashlight. I felt more at home there than in the bedroom he allowed me to sleep in.

  But there again, Beau Thatcher found a way to be hurtful. He has long regarded the whole world, including the people on it, as resources that exist for him and his cronies to exploit so that they may have their sprawling estates and luxury cars and congressmen in their pockets. His moral compass always points to himself; he is his own true north. He helped fund three or four corrupt scientists who denied the reality of climate change, giving his company a thin shield of shady science to protect his short-term profits.

  And now that the world is racked by freakish storms, convulsing from drought and floods and rising sea levels, with massive die-offs in the oceans and extinctions continuing on land, he still refuses to own up to his share of the responsibility for it, and his money gives him the privilege to ignore the troubles that most people face. The world will never make him pay for his company’s oil spills and carbon pollution, because American laws are written to protect men like him. But Druidic law allows the punishment of despoilers, and I’m a Druid. The application of those laws is up to me.

  Atticus feels that pursuing despoilers of the earth is futile, since there are so many of them and so few Druids, and when I look at cold numbers on paper I see the sense of that. But my heart cannot meekly accept criminal pollution as inevitable. That would mean accepting that Beau Thatcher is a force of nature instead of a single shitty human being. And I suppose that is where Atticus and I disagree.

  “Ready for a bunch of running around, Orlaith?” I ask my hound.

 

  “Probably not so many trees. Lots of plains with prairie dogs.”

 

  “Human language is funny that way. What kind of beef jerky should we pack?” I ask. I need lots of protein to aid in rebuilding my torn tissues. “What’s your favorite flavor?”

 

  “Great. Beef for you, turkey jerky for me.” I fill up a pack with water and jerky at a convenience store and then we shift to Kansas, following a prearranged operating procedure.

  I have memorized the locations of every well and refinery owned by Thatcher Oil & Gas. I contact Amber, the elemental of the Great Plains, and let her know what I’m planning. I’m going to sabotage all the drills by unbinding their inner workings and then, with Amber’s help, I’ll cap the wells with a very hard stone. If they try to drill more, they’ll ruin a few bits in the process and Amber will let me know. I’ll sabotage the refineries and heavy equipment as well so that all the machinery they own becomes useless hunks of metal. Production will shut down and stay that way until the company completely replaces its infrastructure. No one gets hurt. Everything will simply stop and cause the company to spend a huge amount of capital to get going again. But Thatcher Oil & Gas bought that equipment over many years instead of all at once and I’m hoping it’ll be too expensive to refit one of the last remnants of a dying industry. If they do pony up, I’ll crip
ple everything again and again until they go bankrupt and shut down or else figure out that it’s wiser to invest in solar or wind.

  It is exciting at the beginning to shut down the wells, but after a few hours it turns into drudgery. The iron horses aren’t guarded; they’re just doing their monotonous work on the plains, and in most cases we don’t even have to sneak up on them. I’m not able to reshape the iron at all; I can only unbind the carbon from the steel and create a melted slurry inside that becomes a useless, cold slag. It is not challenging and does nothing to undo the damage the company’s already done; it’s simply time-consuming. But the constant shifting, running, and unbinding is mentally taxing, and all that keeps me going is anticipating the look on my stepfather’s face when I appear and tell him it was me. I can see, however, why Atticus never dedicated himself to this sort of work. Cleaning up messes would be more immediately rewarding but would do nothing to prevent it happening again. Sabotaging equipment stops the abuse of the earth but gives very little emotional pay-off, apart from a grim satisfaction that I have taken one tiny step in a journey of many millions.

  At the end of a very long day, Orlaith wants to see llamas for some reason, so we spend the night in Ecuador, in a meadow in the foothills of the Andes, where it’s summertime and the evening is mild. Orlaith stretches out in the grass with me and watches a wild herd of llamas sip from a small lake filled with runoff water.

 

  Or maybe someone took llamas and squished them to make sheep.

 

  That’s an excellent question. Perhaps I’ll ask Gaia sometime.

  It’s relaxing there, and I take the time to meditate a bit after I build a fire for us. Tomorrow will be an important day for me, and I want it to go well. I vocalize with Orlaith what I want to happen, because it helps to say it out loud.

  “I want Thatcher Oil and Gas shut down, and though I know it will be difficult to confront my stepfather, I want to maintain control and not resort to violence.”

 

  “It matters because violence—or the threat of it—is how men tend to solve problems. Like right now Atticus is feeling pushed around by this vampire Theophilus, so he’s pushing back just as hard, if not harder. I’m not sure if there’s any other way to handle the situation, but I don’t think he’s looking especially hard for one. And I admit that sometimes violence is the only option, and for that reason I’m glad I’m quite good at it, but I don’t want to make that my default solution. Whenever I can, I want to win with Druidry rather than asskicking.”

 

  “I probably could. And that’s something I need to keep in mind. I have a lot of options. Violence is a well-traveled road, and I’d rather take the one less traveled.”

  Orlaith is not up to speed on her Robert Frost poetry, so she misses the reference.

  “They do have their charms. Let’s dream about them.”

  We snuggle up together in the grass, and I try counting llamas instead of sheep to get to sleep and continue healing my muscles from that encounter in Germany. When the morning comes, I shape-shift into a jaguar and give the llamas a friendly chase with Orlaith, just to get everyone’s blood pumping. Then I change back, get dressed, and we travel through Tír na nÓg to get to Wichita, Kansas, where the offices of Beau Thatcher, my stepfather, can be found.

  I charge up the silver storage of Scáthmhaide and use the bindings carved into it at Flidais’s instruction to make Orlaith and myself completely invisible. Then we enter the steel-and-glass tower of Thatcher Oil & Gas, travel up to the tenth floor, and stroll right past his secretary’s desk.

  When I open the door to his office, he’s on the phone, red-faced and angry, practically shouting into the receiver. He’s hearing that his entire oil production is at a standstill and can’t be fixed. Customers will begin to get their oil elsewhere when they can’t fill orders. Good: He’s already having a bad day.

  I haven’t seen him in the flesh for more than twelve years, and his flesh has suffered the ravages of time. He used to have very sharp features—bladed cheeks and a keen edge to the ridge of his nose—but the lines have softened and swelled now, there’s heavy luggage under his eyes, and his hair clings to his scalp like thin wavy patches of pond moss, if the moss were pale gray. His mouth still has the same cruel curl to it, though, and it frowns at the door when we walk through and close it behind us. His eyes drop away, seeing nothing, and he resumes his bilious shouting into the phone.

  “Right now I don’t fucking care how it happened; I care about getting it fixed, God damn it! Tell me when you’ll have it fixed!” He pauses to listen briefly and then interrupts. “Hey, are you a fucking engineer or aren’t you? You’re supposed to know how shit works. You can’t tell me you don’t know how to fix it without me suspecting that you’re incompetent, you understand? Now, you’d better know how to fix it and tell me when it’ll be fixed before the hour’s up! Call me then!”

  He slams down the phone and growls, “Shhhhit!” in his frustration. It makes all of yesterday’s work well worth it, and I smile.

  That’s when I drop my invisibility and Orlaith’s and say, “Hello, Beau.”

  He startles, his eyes going wide, and says, “Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m Granuaile. Don’t you remember? The stepdaughter you sent off to college in Arizona oh so long ago?”

  “Bullshit. She’s dead. Tell me who you really are and how you got that big damn dog in here.”

  I walk forward and seat myself in the plush leather chair opposite his mahogany desk. Orlaith sits next to me on the left.

  “Come on, Beau. Believe your eyes. I’m Granuaile and I’m not dead. And, no, Mom doesn’t know. I’d appreciate it if you kept this between us.”

  He takes a good long look at me and shakes his head. “I don’t believe it. Where the hell you been? Why’d you let us think you were dead?”

  “That’s all secret stuff. The kind of thing where if I told you I’d have to kill you.”

  “Whatever,” he says, waving my answer away. His hands drop below the desk after that and I almost comment but he continues to say, “I’m not really interested.”

  “Oh, I know. You never were.” There would be no “Welcome home, Granuaile, I’m so glad you’re not dead!” coming from him.

  He scowls at me. “What do you want? I’m busy.”

  “No, you’re not. You have an oil empire that’s producing no oil right now, so you’re not busy at all. You have me to thank for that.”

  “What?”

  “Every well and refinery owned by TO and G stopped working yesterday, am I right?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I made it happen.”

  “How?”

  “How is not the question you should be asking. You should be asking why. And it’s because enough is enough, or because of karma, or whatever you want to call it. I want you to stop. Reinvest in solar and wind, open a chain of hardware stores, I don’t care. Just stop being a blight on the earth.”

  He sneers at me in disgust. “Oh, you’re a goddamn hippie, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a Druid.”

  “What you are is full of shit and about to be arrested,” he says.

  The office doors burst open behind me, and four security guards rush in, presumably in response to a silent alarm he triggered behind his desk. They’re fit and well-paid professionals, not the slow and soggy kind. Orlaith spins and growls at them, and that makes them pull up for a second. I have Scáthmhaide in hand, and when they see that, along with the tomahawk I have at my hip, they pull out those hard-plastic police batons. The one closes
t to Orlaith looks like he’s going to use it on her, so I slide over there and poke him gently in the gut, forcing him back a couple of steps. “Let’s be kind to animals, sir.”

  They start shouting at me to drop my weapon, Orlaith barks at them, Beau yells at them to stop fucking around and take me down, and I grin. Their uniforms are awful polyester blends and I can’t mess with them, but their shoes are made of leather. Natural material there, even if treated with chemicals. Almost identical to the leather of the chair I was just sitting in. I bind the closest guy’s right foot to the back of the chair, high up, and the binding simultaneously yanks his foot up in the air and the back of the chair down. They rush to meet, both toppling over and dragging across the floor toward each other, effectively blocking the other guards from getting to me. I repeat the binding on the others, and soon they’re all immobilized and cursing, kicking at the chair. They won’t stay that way forever—eventually they’ll slip out of their shoes, but I plan to be gone by then. I turn around to bid Beau a mocking farewell, since I’ve delivered my message, and discover that he’s pulled a gun out of his desk and he’s pointing it at me. My amusement at the guards disappears.