“I have discovered a solution to the old problem.”

“Remarkable that you have found one where I have not,” said the goddess of the forge.

“Have you truly tried?”

“No,” she admitted. “I thought it was impossible.”

“Turns out it’s only next to impossible.”

“Have you tested it against demons?”

“It prevents succubi from casting their charms on me.”

“But you have not had to deal with hellfire or any other hellish attacks?”

“Not yet.”

“You will need to test it soon. You need a way to deal with demons. Lots of them, if I am right about who Aenghus has been talking to.”

“What does this Cold Fire do?”

“It allows you to burn them from within, but it burns like ice burns. It takes a lot of energy and it drains you—even if you draw power from the earth, it will drain you—but it will save you from being overwhelmed in a fight. Alas, I cannot give it to you.”

“Sure you can,” I said, and I took the necklace off. It changed my aura immediately, and I became nervous. She could hurt me as easily as help me now if she liked.

“That is truly wondrous craft, Siodhachan,” she said admiringly, noticing how my aura changed. She’d forgotten my chosen name already and used the one I was born with. “I would have you teach it to me.”

I was afraid of this. “My apologies, Brighid, but I have sworn to keep it a secret.” I left out the rest of the sentence, which said, “except from the Morrigan,” and hurried on before she thought to ask to whom I had sworn. “But now that you know such a thing is possible, I have no doubt that you can figure it out on your own. I counsel patience. This craft took me seven hundred and fifty years.”

She did not appear offended, thankfully. Disappointed, yes. But as she continued to stare at the necklace on the table next to her gauntlets, her expression slowly changed. She looked delighted.

“You have given me a new challenge, Druid, and a most worthy one,” she said. “I will try to fashion my own in a shorter period of time. I know you cannot tell me how it was made without breaking your oath, but will you allow me to inspect it from time to time?”

“Of course,” I said.

“Am I right in thinking this necklace will work for no one but you?”

“Yes. It is bound specifically to me. For anyone else it would simply be jewelry.”

“I see now why you have survived so long.”

I blushed at her compliment and she put out her left hand again, smiling. I placed my right hand in hers, and she held it as she touched her finger to the loop of my tattoo. This time I felt something, a rush of heat and ice through my veins and a spell of dizziness.

“Now you have the power of Cold Fire,” Brighid said. “It works only on hellspawn, and both you and your targets must be touching the earth. Point at your targets with your right hand, collect your will, and say ‘ó’ and they will be destroyed—though I warn you again, it takes a tremendous amount of your energy, so use it sparingly, and remember it will also take a few moments for them to die.”

“Thank you, Brighid.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” she said, giving Oberon a last scratch before donning her gauntlets again. “Despite the advantages you have, you are all that is keeping Aenghus Óg and his allies from moving openly against me. They are legion and you are one man, and I am glad you are so willing to stand in front of them. But I half-expect you to be dead by the dawn.”

On that cheery note, she leaned across the table and kissed me. She tasted of milk and honey and berries, and it was simply blissful.

"You’ve been kissed by three goddesses in as many days," Oberon said once Brighid had left, "so I think you owe me three hundred French poodles. That should make us about even."

Chapter 15

I thought Sundays were supposed to be relaxing. As a male citizen of America, I’m entitled on Sundays to watch athletic men in tight uniforms ritualistically invade one another’s territory, and while they’re resting I get to be bombarded with commercials about trucks, pizza, beer, and financial services. That’s how it’s supposed to be; that’s the American dream.

I suppose I cannot complain, because I’m not really a citizen of America. Mr. Semerdjian called the INS on me once, in fact. I waved my hand in front of the agents’ faces and said, “I’m not the Druid you’re looking for.” They were not amused. I waved my hand again and said, “Move along,” and they got out their handcuffs. That’s when I got out my slightly scuffed yet soigné illegal documents, prepared for me by Leif Helgarson, Bloodsucking Attorney-at-Law. And after the INS agents went away, that’s when I sent Oberon over to poop on Mr. Semerdjian’s lawn for the first time.

We have not been on good terms since then. We never were, of course, but at least for the first few years he cheerfully ignored me. When he began to harass me, I suspected him of being either abysmally stupid or a pawn of the Fae. Turned out he was just mean, and dog shit on his lawn turned him into Flibbertigibbet, a regular Lebanese Tom o’ Bedlam.

Now I suspected I was a pawn of the Fae. I didn’t know whose pawn I was, precisely. I felt somewhat like Korea, with the United States and China fighting a proxy war through me.

I didn’t want to be a pawn. Or Korea. It would be better to be a knight. Or Denmark. The Danes used to kick everyone’s ass—until their victims figured out where they came from.

And that was precisely my problem. People knew where to find me. Especially, it seemed, on this particular Sunday.

I was calling a contractor to do an emergency replacement of my melted shop door when I saw, through the window, a familiar Crown Victoria pull up. Detective Carlos Jimenez climbed out, and shortly afterward a couple more cars screeched into parking spaces, and cops with sunglasses lumbered out of them to adjust their waistbands and check that their shirts were still tucked in. Detective Darren Fagles, the one who fancied himself a Reservoir Dog, had an official-looking piece of paper flapping in his hand, the legal-size sort with lots of fine print.

I hung up the phone as the contractor was in mid-sentence and told Oberon to leap up on top of the far table by the wall. “Curl yourself on top and don’t move a muscle. Not an ear twitch, not a tail wag, nothing until these guys leave.”

"What guys?" he said, as he moved to obey.

“Those cops are coming. If any of them manages to see you somehow, I want you to run out of here and go straight to the widow’s backyard and hide there, okay? Don’t wait for me to tell you.”

"You think they can see through the camouflage?"

“They might be able to. They’ve certainly had help getting this far.” Oberon jumped gingerly onto the table, dwarfing it but just able to coil himself on its top. As soon as he settled down, all hints of his presence disappeared. I shot a quick glance at Fragarach, still resting on the shelf underneath my counter, and cast camouflage on it for insurance.

As the cops grouped together and began to walk toward the door, I wondered if they had decided to come here first or if they had visited my house. If they had visited my house first, where the hell were my lawyers?

A horn honked loudly, demanding attention, as a metallic blue BMW Z4 growled to a halt behind Fagles. Hal Hauk sprang out the door as if summoned.

“Pardon me, are you Detective Fagles?” Hal said, placing himself in the detective’s way perhaps a bit faster than a normal human could. The other officers registered this and tensed. A couple of hands drifted toward holsters.

“Stand aside, sir, I’m on official police business,” Fagles commanded. Hal wasn’t intimidated in the least.

“If your business is with Third Eye Books or its owner, then your business is with me,” he said. “I am the attorney of record for Mr. Atticus O’Sullivan.”

“You’re the attorney of record? Then who was the other guy at his house?”

“One of my associates. He called me and reported that your search of his house was not entirely legal, and I assure you that we will be making a complaint, perhaps filing suit.”

That got the cops’ attention. They glowered at Hal, and Fagles sneered, “We have a warrant signed by a Tempe judge.” He held it in front of Hal’s face to emphasize his point. “Our search was entirely legal.”

“But that warrant gives you permission to search for an Irish wolfhound or similar dog, I believe, and nothing more. Is that correct, Detective?”

Fagles didn’t want to answer with a flat-out yes, so he tried to sound defiant as he replied, “That’s what the warrant says.”

“An Irish wolfhound is a very large breed of dog. I saw the specific dog you’re looking for before he ran away, and I assure you he weighs almost as much as you. That being given, we can assume that the dog could not possibly be hiding in a drawer or a dresser or in kitchen cupboards or underneath a basil plant. Yet you and your colleagues searched through all those things at my client’s house, in clear violation of his civil rights.”

I didn’t need to hear any more than that to know they weren’t looking for just my dog. Aenghus Óg had sent these guys to find Fragarach. And they had torn up my basil in the kitchen—at least I hoped that was all. If they got my whole backyard herb garden, which I had left camouflaged, Oberon would have to make a run for it soon.

“We did no such thing,” Fagles said.

“My associate will testify that you did.”

“His word against ours.”

“He took some video of your search procedure with his cell phone.”

Fagles bit back his initial retort and ground his teeth for a moment. Then he said, “Look, whoever you are—”

“Hal Hauk.”

“Whatever. We have a legal warrant to search these premises. You will stand aside now or we will arrest you.”

“I will stand aside, Detective, but I warn you not to repeat the methods you used at my client’s house. You are looking for a large dog, nothing more, and I will be recording your search. If you look in places where a large dog could not possibly be hiding, then the lawsuit we bring against you will be much, much worse.”

“Fine.”

“Fine,” Hal said. “I’ll take that,” and he snatched the warrant out of Fagles’s hand, faster than the eye could track, before stepping aside. Fagles was . He had probably wanted to slap the warrant against Hal’s chest or something like that, a not-too-subtle push or jab to establish his superiority, but Hal had not only robbed him of that, he had made Fagles look slow and stupid—which, compared to Hal, he was. In Fagles’s defense, he didn’t know he was trying to play dominance games with a werewolf.

Rather than say anything to deepen his humiliation, Fagles stalked forward, with Jimenez and the others close behind. He paused at the door, examining the broken glass around the edges and scattered on the floor inside. He peered through at me before stepping across the threshold. I was standing to his left, behind my counter, access to which was open and visible from the shop entrance.

“What happened here, O’Sullivan?” he said.

“A customer objected strenuously to my returns policy,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” Fagles muttered as he stepped through the door. As soon as he did, wards around my shop alerted me that he had a binding on him. I looked closely at his aura as he gestured for the others to file in and start searching, and I turned on my faerie specs. A band of green knotwork wreathed Fagles’s skull, almost like one of those Roman laurels. That was the primary method by which he was being controlled. But interlaced with those strands, I saw, were very fine blue and red threads. I could not break the green binding without breaking those too, and I didn’t know what those were for, though I assumed they weren’t friendly by their design—fail-safes, perhaps, or magical booby traps, or merely something for me to waste my time on.

The other officers, I noted quickly, had nothing about them beyond their normal human auras—all tinged with aggression and stress, but that was only to be expected after being schooled by a lawyer. Hal followed Jimenez and the other cops as they spread out through the store, which meant I could safely focus all my attention on Fagles. He remained by the door, transfixed by something he saw on my counter shelves.

“What’s that?” Fagles said, jerking his chin vaguely in my direction.

“What’s what?”

“That,” he said, removing his sunglasses and pointing, “That looks like a scabbard. You have a sword behind your counter?” He folded his sunglasses and slipped them into his shirt pocket before looking at me expectantly.

“Nope.”

“Don’t lie to me, I can see it!” Right. That told me quite a bit. If he could see the sword and not Oberon, who truly was sitting in plain sight on a table across the room, then Aenghus had given him a very selective ability: It wasn’t the ability to see through camouflage, which would have instantly revealed to him the purported target of his search; rather, it was the specific ability to see Fragarach, which was supposed to be magically cloaked. That cloak had worked very well on Bres, so it should work equally well on Fagles—except that he seemed attuned to it. How does one get attuned to a cloaked item? You need to have a lot of help from the person who cast the cloak in the first place. That meant Radomila, leader of the Sisters of the Three Auroras. Fagles was walking, talking evidence they were working against me with Aenghus Óg.

“Is it a dog, Detective?” Hal asked, swinging around from surveying Jimenez’s progress to confront Fagles. He stopped a couple of paces away from the detective, far enough into the shop that he wouldn’t see what Fagles was looking at. “Because if it’s not, then it’s none of your business.”