“No.” Laksha shook her head again and tapped the table repeatedly to emphasize her point. “I want them all, in case I get a dud.”

“Well, I want to have a chance of living through this if I’m going to consider it. If I steal one apple, I might be able to get away without anyone noticing, because the mythology says she keeps her apples in a basket and it’s always full. But if I steal the whole lot, every single Norse god will be after me—and after you too, I might add. Be reasonable. One apple will suffice.”

“How can I be assured the apple you bring me is Idunn’s?”

“Well, it’ll be golden, for one thing, and after you take a bite of it you should feel pretty f**king good, if reports are to be believed.”

Laksha laughed. “All right. You have proven to be as good as your word in the past. Twelve dead Bacchants tonight in exchange for one of Idunn’s golden apples before New Year’s Day.”

We shook hands on it while Granuaile shook her head in wonder. “I’ve listened in on some pretty weird conversations while tending bar,” she said, “but I think this is the weirdest shit I’ve ever heard.”

Chapter 12

People who don’t live in Scottsdale like to sneer derisively and call it “Snotsdale.” People who do live there tend to call everyone else “jealous.” Both groups have a point.

Scottsdale has more plastic surgeons per capita than anywhere except for Beverly Hills; some high school kids get procedures from their parents as graduation presents. Its wide residential streets of custom homes compete with one another to be featured in architectural and design magazines, and the sleek luxury autos in the garages are testosterone boosters for middle-aged men taking once-a-day Cialis to please their sleek luxury girlfriends. It’s a resort town with much of its real estate occupied by golf courses and egos.

Many of the young and beautiful egos habitually crammed themselves into Satyrn, one of the city’s hotter nightclubs. They would be dressed expensively, scented with something French, scrubbed and primped and teased and pushed-up and bedecked in just the right amount of bling. They were the sons and daughters of affluence, accustomed to excess and looking for more of it—in other words, excellent prey for the Bacchants.

After sending Granuaile home, Laksha and I took a taxi to a Target so that I could buy a couple of wooden baseball bats. The cashier almost cringed as she rang them up, keeping her eyes down and casting only furtive glances at me. She was probably doubting my emotional stability, since I had a sword strapped to my back and I was buying sporting goods at night. Store security belatedly realized I was carrying a weapon around their place of business, so as the cashier held out my receipt in a trembling hand, they showed up and escorted me to the exit from the register. I smiled at them and thanked them for their courtesy, so they wouldn’t call the police and complicate the rest of the night.

The taxi driver decided we were a pretty odd couple and kept asking us questions. We told him we were martial arts experts in town for a convention, and he bought it. Said he was going to be a ninja once, but things didn’t work out the way he planned. We had him drop us off on the far side of the parking lot, as far as possible from the entrance flanked by a velvet rope. There was no bouncer at the door—an ominous sign. A techno dance mix pulsed into the night, promising dark blue lighting and gyrating bodies inside.

“You know they ain’t gonna let you inside with those things, right?” the taxi driver said as I got out and paid him.

“I think it might be anything goes in there right about now,” I replied. “Thanks for the ride. Keep safe.”

As he drove away and I coughed a couple of times from the exhaust, Laksha lifted an arm toward the entrance and said, “Shall we go take a look?”

“You don’t need to say any special incantations or sacrifice a stray cat or something first?”

“No.” She smirked at me and began to walk toward the club.

I followed her and spoke to her back. “Come on. No circles or pentagrams or candles or anything?” I knew Laksha felt confident about her ability to resist the Bacchants’ magic, but I didn’t know how she was protecting herself. Could her ruby necklace have all the defensive power of my amulet and more? I thought she’d need to prepare a ward of some kind, at least. For my part, there was no other defense than my amulet and a grim determination to think about baseball; otherwise, I might well fall into their frenzy.

“Sorry,” she said over her shoulder.

“Wait just a second,” I said as we arrived at the door. “I’m not sure I should go in. I could be vulnerable to their magic.”

Laksha turned and regarded me with a curious expression. “Cannot you control your body?”

“To some extent, yes. Is that your defense against them? Controlling your body?”

“Precisely. I have utter control over this body’s nervous system. In a sense I am outside of it; the input will arrive—these things called hormones and pheromones I have learned about—but I will refuse to allow the body to respond. It will not be aroused unless I wish it to be.”

“That’s all the Bacchants are using? Pheromones?” I had suspected this before, but I thought there must be more to it than that.

“I believe that is what they are doing, yes. Their magic targets the limbic system of the brain in a few people near them, and then these people’s bodies—the expression is “share the love,” I believe, with others nearby, and it spreads until everyone in an area is a slave to their sexual desires. Alcohol reduces one’s resistance, weakens inhibitions, makes it all happen faster. Then they feed on the pheromones and the energy of the group, drink them in, and become impossibly strong by it.”

“That makes sense.” I nodded. “Different from succubi. But it means I won’t have any defense at all. I’m not outside my nervous system in the way you describe.”

Laksha huffed in exasperation. “Fine. At least come in for a brief look around. I will escort you out once you begin touching yourself.”

“What? Hey, don’t let it go that far. That’s not right.”

A flicker of a smile played about Laksha’s lips, then it fled as she returned to the business at hand. “Leave the bats at the door. They’ll recognize them as a threat.”

“And not my sword?”

“It’s not a threat to them. You don’t want to pull them out of their ecstasy. It’ll turn to rage.”

Obeying with some reluctance, I followed her inside to the skull-pounding thump of techno bass beats and the multicolored strobe effect of sequenced lights on a rig high above the dance floor, which was to our left. The bar was to the right, with martini glasses hanging overhead and the premium liquors prominently displayed in front of a mirror. There were a few beers on tap, but since this was not the sort of clientele that drank anything so common, the bar did a blazing business in froufrou drinks. The floor of the bar area was a soft white laminate tile marbled with wispy ribbons of cobalt blue. A few tall white tables sans chairs were scattered around the perimeter, without a single booth or bar stool to be found. Satyrn clearly expected the joint to be standing room only every night, and so it was. Three glass chandeliers with electric fixtures soared high above the bar floor, providing a soft glow in that part of the club. Separating the bar area from the dance floor were five enormous load-bearing white columns, and the dance floor was utterly dark except for the flashes of random lights from the rig. The entire long, narrow space of the club was filled with writhing bodies in various states of undress and abandon. Even behind the bar, the bartenders were shaking and stirring each other instead of customers’ drinks. Still, for all that, the bar area was more restrained than the dance floor, where most clothes had already been shed and the baby-making was unrestrained.

I felt the first twinges of desire myself and reflected that the Diamondbacks really needed base-stealing threats in their leadoff and number-two slots, because until they secured the ability to make pitchers nervous and manufacture runs, they’d be easy prey. They couldn’t rely on their streaky big hitters to win enough games to matter. They had to grind it out every day … Speaking of grinding—no. The bullpen needed a couple of solid guys who could pitch two or three full innings of lights-out ball. They couldn’t keep giving away games if the starter had a bad day.

“The lack of seating is inconvenient,” Laksha complained. “I need someplace to keep this body secure.”

“What? Why?”

“Do you even understand what I am going to do?”

“Not precisely. Push their souls out of their bodies somehow?”

“No, I do that only when I am taking possession. You want me to merely kill them. I will visit one’s brain and shut down the hypothalamus, which regulates the heartbeat, then move to the next as she collapses, and so on. Their souls will leave naturally as a result of their deaths. It will take me less than a minute.”

I frowned. “What will happen to your body while you’re out doing this?”

“This body will be in a vulnerable, vegetative state until I return—which is why I need a place to sit down.” A douche bag drenched in Drakkar Noir approached Laksha from behind, slipped his hands underneath her arms, and cupped her br**sts. She immediately stomped down hard on his foot, lunged a step forward, and twisted to the right with her arm cocked, smashing her elbow into his temple. He went down like a sack of cornmeal. She grimaced in disgust and said, “We need to hurry. It’s already getting ridiculous in here.”

“Where are the Bacchants?” I asked.

“There’s one over there on the edge of the dance floor.” She pointed to a woman in what looked like a sheer white negligee, gyrating her backside sinuously against the h*ps of a young man behind her. She had a drunken smile on her face, and it appeared to me in the dim light that her teeth were unusually sharp. Everyone’s auras were aboil with red carnal lust.

I lost sight of her abruptly as a wanton olive-skinned girl slid up to me and kissed me full on the mouth, her right leg twining behind my left calf and her tongue darting between my teeth. There was a team sport I was supposed to be thinking of at that point, but she tasted like cherries and something else—

She was torn from my arms with a startled yelp, and my head rocked to the right as Laksha slapped my face, hard. Oh, yes, baseball. A home run would be good. Where did that girl go?

“Let’s get you out of here; you’re already useless,” Laksha said, forcefully turning me toward the exit and pushing me firmly in front of her. We hit fresh air before too long, having never penetrated far into the club, but when I tried to stop, Laksha said, “No, keep going. If you stay here you might be tempted to come back in.”

“What about my bats?”

“Get them, quickly.”

I scooped them up, and Laksha escorted me all the way to the edge of the parking lot, proclaiming that I should be safe there until she finished. And then she left me standing there uncertainly, holding two baseball bats with a sword strapped to my back and staring at the entrance to the club. I didn’t think of how unbalanced that made me look to people driving by on the street until the patrol car pulled up behind me, its lights flashing so that traffic would drive around it.

“Good evening, sir,” an officer called out. I nodded back to him and returned my gaze to the club, cursing my stupidity. I should have learned my lesson back at Target, but I’d been too focused on accomplishing the night’s objective to worry about doing it surreptitiously. Wearing a sword was second nature to a man from the Iron Age, but to modern eyes it indicated a need for therapy.

“What are you doing there?” the officer said. I heard the patrol-car door whump closed. I didn’t have the time or patience for this. If these guys hung around, they might wind up in trouble or seriously complicate my ability to deal with trouble if it came boiling out of the club.

“Just waiting for a friend,” I said.

“With a sword and a couple of bats? You sure it’s a friend you’re waiting for?”

Regretting the necessity to use some of my stored power, I quietly cast camouflage on Fragarach and then responded more loudly, “What sword?”

“The sword that’s—hey, what’d you do with it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Officer. I don’t have a sword.” I heard the driver’s-side door whump as his partner got out to join him, no doubt moving to flank me to my left.

“All right, tell you what—why don’t you drop the bats and show me some ID.”

I cast camouflage on the bats and said, “What bats?” Of course my hands were still curled around them, but now it looked as if I was just standing there with my fists at my sides. I should have done this in the first place, and then these lads would never have gotten a call about me. But I knew they wouldn’t just leave me alone now. The man with the disappearing weapons was far too curious a creature for them to ignore, and, besides, I’d made them look stupid. They’d want some payback, sure.

“Show me some ID,” the cop demanded again. He was far too peremptory for my taste. Honestly, I was trying to be one of the good guys here. There were times in my past when I probably deserved to be harassed, but this wasn’t one of them.

I cast camouflage on myself and asked, “Who are you talking to?” before silently stepping forward a couple of paces. That freaked their shit right out. They both put their hands to their guns and asked each other where I went. My camouflage isn’t perfect invisibility, but at night it might as well be. I stepped off to the right about ten yards or so as they looked all around them and called out for me to come back. The driver suggested that they call for backup.