A couple of seconds later her upper body was thrown painfully forward into her steering wheel, which caused the car’s horn to beep. Ha! She had tried to blow the spoon out of my hand—and knock me down in the process, off the grass strip and my source of power. Clever. But not fast enough. The binding I had performed was actually a ward, which meant that any spell she sent against me would rebound against her. The only way she could get out of it would be to get herself some new blood.

She leaned back slowly and clutched her chest. Probably bruised a rib or two. On top of a broken nose and wounded pride, she’d had a rough day visiting the local Druid. It made me wonder what she’d been told about me. Did she know how old I was? Did she think I was some sort of lame-assed neo-Druid, mucking about with holly branches and mistletoe? She turned around to stare daggers at me, and I gave her a jovial wave, then blew her a kiss. She flipped me off—a gesture that had zero cultural relevance to me—and then started up her Beetle and screeched away toward University Drive.

Chuckling to myself, I reentered the store, and Oberon came over and nuzzled against my legs, which was somewhat startling when he was in camouflage. "Nobody’s here now. I want a scratch behind the ears." I searched and found his head and gave him a good head rub for a minute or so. “Yes, you’ve been very patient, haven’t you?” I said. “Tell you what. Next time we go hunting, we’ll head down to the Chiricahua Mountains. That’s south of here and I think you’ll like it.”

"What’s down there?"

“Mule deer. Maybe some of those bighorn sheep, if we get lucky.”

"When can we go?"

“Probably not until this business is over,” I admitted. “I know it will be a long wait for you, but I promise we’ll do nothing but hunt once we go. The trip will be for you. But that’s not to say you’re going to be totally bored in the meantime. We’ll probably get attacked at any moment.”

"Really?"

“Well, it’s more likely going to be after we leave the store.”

Oberon’s ears perked up and he turned to the door. "Someone’s coming."

A customer walked in, looking for a copy of The Upanishads, and after that a fairly steady stream of people were either browsing or buying something. The lunchtime lull was over, and soon enough Perry came back to help out. After giving a regular his customary cup of Daddy’s Little Helper (my code for a tea designed to promote prostate health), the phone rang. It was a call from one of Radomila’s coven.

“Mr. O’Sullivan, my name is Malina Sokolowski. May I speak to you about what occurred between you and Emily this afternoon?”

“Well, sure. But I cannot speak frankly right now. I have customers in the store.”

“I understand,” she replied. She had a warm voice and a faint accent that had to be Polish, judging by her name. “Let me ask you this: Do you consider the contract between you and Emily to still be in effect?”

“Oh, absolutely.” I nodded as if she could see it. “Nothing happened to nullify that.”

“That is reassuring. Would you mind terribly if I accompanied her for tomorrow’s tea?”

“I suppose that would depend on your intentions.”

“I will not fence with you,” Malina said. What was this coven’s obsession with fencing? “My intention is to defend Emily in case you attack her again.”

“I see. And, according to Emily, how many times have I attacked her so far?”

“Once physically and once magically.”

“Well, at least she got that part right. But in both cases, Malina, it was she who initiated the attack. I was able to redirect both attacks against her; hence the injuries you have no doubt seen.”

“So it’s her word against yours,” she sighed.

“Yes. And I understand that you must take her word against mine. But you must understand that she told me her lover is a sworn enemy of mine. By doing so, she has allied your entire coven with him.”

“No, that’s unthinkable!” Malina objected. “If we were allied with this individual, then we would not be trying to humiliate him.”

“Why  you trying to humiliate him?”

“That is a question better answered by Radomila.”

“So put her on. Is she there?”

“Radomila is indisposed.” For normal people, that would mean she was taking a shower or something. In Radomila’s case, it probably meant she was in the middle of a complicated spell involving tongue of frog, eye of newt, and maybe a packet of Splenda.

“I see.” A customer with greasy black hair hanging over his face came up to the counter with a bulk bag of incense sticks. “Look, I have to go. You’re welcome to come with Emily tomorrow, but it would be best to counsel her to keep silent around me. I can make her tea in silence, and she can drink it in silence; that way no one will get offended or injured. If you’d like to stay behind afterward, perhaps we can talk without coming to blows.”

Malina agreed, said she looked forward to it, and we rang off. The greasy man asked me if I had access to medical marijuana as an apothecary, and I pasted a sorrowful expression on my face and told him no as I rang up the incense he needed to mask the stink of his habit.

Drug addicts perplex me. They’re a relatively recent development, historically speaking. Everyone has their theories—monotheists like to blame it on Godlessness—but I think it was a plague that developed in the sooty petticoats of the Industrial Revolution and its concomitant division of labor. Once people specialized their labors and separated themselves from food production and the daily needs of basic survival, there was a hollow place in their lives that they did not know how to fill. Most people found healthy ways to fill it, with hobbies or social clubs or pseudo-sports like shuffleboard and tiddlywinks. Others didn’t.

Perry finally found some time to mess around with the Tarot decks and had a serviceable display up by closing time. I rode quickly to the widow’s house after locking up the store and retrieved the push mower from her shed in the backyard.

“Ah, yer a fine boy, Atticus, and that’s no lie,” she said, saluting me with her whiskey glass as she came out to the front porch to watch me work. She liked to sit in her rocking chair and sing old Irish songs to me—old for her, anyway—over the whirl of the lawnmower blades. Sometimes she would forget the words and simply hum the tune, and I enjoyed that just as much. When I was finished, I always spent a pleasant time with her, hearing stories of her younger days in the old country. That day, as the sun was setting and the shadows were lengthening, she was telling me something about running around the streets of Dublin with a bunch of ne’er-do-wells. “This was all before I met me husband, o’course,” she made sure to add.

I had Oberon stationed as sentinel on the edge of the lawn, close to the street. As the widow regaled me with tales of her Golden Age debauchery, I was depending on him to tell me of approaching danger.

"Atticus," he said, as the widow was winding up her tale with a sigh over better days in a better land, "someone comes on foot from the north."

Is he a stranger? I had put Fragarach aside while I talked with the widow, but now I stood and slung the scabbard back over my head, causing the widow to frown.

"Yes. He is very strange. I can smell the ocean on him from here."

Uh-oh. That’s not good. Stay still and try not to make any noise.

“Excuse me, Mrs. MacDonagh,” I said, “someone’s coming and he might not be friendly.”

“What? Who is it? Atticus?”

I couldn’t answer yet, so I didn’t. I kicked off my sandals and drew power from the widow’s lawn even as I walked toward the street and peered northward. One of the charms on my necklace has the shape of a bear on it, and its function is to store a bit of magical power for me that I can tap when I’m walking on concrete or asphalt. I topped off the magical tank as a possible antagonist approached.

A tall, armored figure clanked noisily on the asphalt a couple of houses away, and it raised a hand to hail me when I came into view. I activated a different charm that I call “faerie specs,” a sort of filter for my eyes that lets me see through Fae glamours and detect all sorts of magic juju. It showed me the normal spectrum, but then there was also a green overlay that revealed what was going on magically, and right now the two layers showed me the same thing. So whoever he was, I was looking at his true form. If he had something similar to my faerie specs, he might be able to see through Oberon’s camouflage, but then again, he might not.

He was wearing rather gaudy bronze armor that no one would have worn in the old days. The cuirass, faced in hardened leather dyed with woad, covered too much and restricted movement. He had leaf-shaped tassets hanging down over a bronze mail skirt. He also had five-piece pauldrons and matching vambraces and greaves. It would have been hot enough to wear such armor in Ireland, but here the temperature was still in the low nineties, and he must have been broiling in it. His helmet was beyond ridiculous: It was one of those medieval barbutes that didn’t become popular until a thousand years after his halcyon days of slaughter, and he must have been wearing it as a joke, though I did not find it especially funny. A sword hung in a scabbard at his side, but thankfully he did not carry a shield.

“I greet you, Siodhachan Ó Suileabháin,” he said. “Well met.” He flashed a smug grin at me through his helmet, and I wanted to slay him on the spot. I kept my faerie specs on, because I simply didn’t trust him. Without some way to pierce his glamour, he could make my eyes think he was standing three feet away with his hands on his head while he was really plunging a dagger into my belly.

“Call me Atticus. I greet you, Bres.”

“Not well met?” He tilted his head a bit to the right, as much as the barbute would let him.

“Let’s see how the meeting goes. It’s been a long time since we have seen each other, and I wouldn’t have minded if it were longer. And by the way, the Renaissance Festival doesn’t arrive here until next February.”

“That’s not very hospitable,” Bres said, frowning. Oberon was right: He smelled of salt and fish. As a god of agriculture, he should smell of earth and flowers, but instead he retained the stink of the dockside, owing perhaps to his Fomorian ancestors, who lived by the sea. “I could take offense if I wished.”

“So take it already and be done. I can’t imagine why else you would be here now.”

“I am here at the request of an old friend,” he said.

“Did he request that you dress like that? Because if he did, he’s not your friend.”

“Atticus, who is that?” the widow MacDonagh called from her porch. I didn’t take my eyes off Bres as I called back to her.

“Someone I know. He won’t be staying long.” Time to set up my flanking maneuver. Speaking mind to mind, I said to Oberon, ’.

"Got it," Oberon said.

Bres continued as if the widow had never spoken. “Aenghus Óg wants the sword. Give it to me and you’ll be left alone. It’s that simple.”

“Why isn’t he here himself?”

“He’s nearby,” Bres said. That was calculated to ratchet my paranoia up a few levels. It worked, but I was determined it would not work in his favor.

“What’s your stake in this, Bres? And what’s with the armor?”

“That does not concern you, Druid. Your only concern is whether you will agree to give us the sword and live, or refuse and die.” The last fingers of the sun were waving good-bye over the horizon, and twilight was upon us. Faerie time.

“Tell me why he wants it,” I said. “It’s not like Ireland has a High King who needs the Tuatha Dé Danann to help him out uniting all the various tribes.”

“It is not for you to question.”

“Sure it is,” I said, “but I guess it’s not for you to answer. Fragarach is right here.” I gestured to the hilt peeking over my shoulder. “So if I give it to you now, you walk away, and I never hear from you or Aenghus again?”

Bres peered intently at the hilt for a few moments, then chuckled. “That is not Fragarach. I have seen it, Druid, and I have felt its magic. You have nothing in that scabbard but an ordinary sword.”

Wow. Radomila’s magical cloak just rocked.

And then the green overlay in my vision started to differ from the normal spectrum. Bres was pulling his sword out of his scabbard in a leisurely fashion and watching my face to see if I reacted, so I tried to stay relaxed and let him think I was clueless. Either he knew that I really had Fragarach on my back and he wanted to double-cross me, or he simply wanted to kill me to burnish his reputation. He’d make a fine tale of the battle, no doubt, in spite of the fact that he was planning the equivalent of a stab in the back.

“I assure you it’s the real thing,” I said to him, and to Oberon I said, ’.

"Okay."

Bres’s glamour form shrugged and said, “You can give your cheap sword to me if you’d like. It will only delay things, and I’ll have to come back again with another offer. But I can guarantee that offer won’t be as generous as the one I’m giving you now.”

And that was when the true Bres on the green overlay grinned wickedly and raised his sword over his head in a two-handed grasp, ready to split me in two.

Now, Oberon, I said, keeping my face pensive as if I were thinking over Bres’s words. I started talking out loud to hopefully mask any sounds Oberon made as he moved.