The detective ignored him and said to me, “That’s a deadly weapon you’re hiding, and you need a permit for that. Do you have a concealed-weapons permit?”

“Don’t answer,” Hal told me, and pointed his cell phone at Fagles. “I am recording this, Detective. According to Arizona Revised Statute 13-3102, Subsection G, a permit is not necessary for weapons carried in a belt holster that is wholly or partially visible, or carried in a scabbard or case designed for carrying weapons that is wholly or partially visible.”

Whoa. That’s why Hal gets $350 an hour. Quoting Arizona statutes, complete with their soul-destroying legalistic sentence structure? That’s Druidic.

“That is not a concealed weapon,” Hal continued, “nor is it a dog, which is all you are authorized to search for.”

I tuned the two of them out as they continued to wrangle over whether the scabbard was concealed or not on my shelf and turned my attention to the bindings floating about Fagles’s impeccably coiffed dome.

My hunch was that the blue knots represented the binding that allowed him to see the cloak—which was, in turn, allowing him to penetrate the camouflage—so if I unraveled that particular binding, the problem of my sword would quite literally disappear. The trouble was that breaking the blue knots would snap the red ones too, and while I could appreciate the craft that went into these particular bindings, I still had no way of telling precisely what Aenghus had wrought there. Perhaps the Morrigan or Brighid could tell me precisely what spells the knots represented and how to deal with them safely, but the best I could figure was that the red knots were bad juju. If I took time to deal with it, it might “go off” in response to my tampering anyway, and I would still need to deal with the blue knot afterward, because I could tell Fagles wouldn’t give up until he tried taking the sword from me—Aenghus wouldn’t have it any other way. And the green knot? That would be a direct magical battle with Aenghus Óg for control of Fagles, during the course of which he would learn quite a bit about my abilities, and I didn’t want to tip my hand quite that much yet.

Here, then, would be a true test of my wards and bindings: I decided to activate all the magic dampening I could from my shop’s wards, then go after the blue knots and let the red knots do whatever they were designed to do, damn the consequences. It was one of those decisions you make when you have too much testosterone bubbling around in your system, or when you’ve been raised in a culture of ridiculous machismo, as I was.

The blue knot was absurdly fragile—it snapped almost immediately with the gentlest of mental tugs, and the red one snapped along with it: definitely a trap, the concussive sort. I felt a whump against my face, like getting hit unexpectedly full force with a pillow, and I saw Hal’s head snap back abruptly. He fell over backward, snarling in surprise. Fagles yelped and grabbed at his head, and then as Hal and I were recovering—Hal red-faced and eyes a bit yellow, his wolf close to the surface—Fagles went completely batshit and drew his gun on me.

“Hands up!” he yelled, and of course that brought all the other cops running over, Jimenez in the lead, drawing his gun out too. I raised my hands and wondered what would have happened if I hadn’t activated the shop’s wards first. Hal might have had his head taken off. He had taken a good shot as it was, and I got only a fraction of the power thanks to the stronger protections of my necklace. Fagles was reacting to some magical feedback, nothing more, and it looked like none of the other cops farther away had felt a thing—they were just backing Fagles’s play.

"What happened?" Oberon asked.

It’s okay. Don’t move, I told him.

“Whoa, Detective, that’s not necessary. You’re pointing a gun at an unarmed man who’s cooperating with a legal search!” Hal said, panting a bit.

“Bullshit! He assaulted me!” Fagles spat.

“What? That’s nonsense, man. He’s been standing there passively more than five feet away from you the entire time!”

“He just hit me upside the head!”

"Well, I’m sure he deserved it, Atticus."

Hush, I didn’t hit him.

“He most certainly did not, and that security camera right there will prove it!” Hal exclaimed, pointing at the camera. All eyes followed his finger and saw that it would most definitely prove whether or not I had moved to slap Detective Fagles upside the head. Fagles heard the certainty in Hal’s voice, saw the doubt in his colleagues’ faces, and practically stomped his foot as he cried, “Well, something hit my head, and it sure as hell wasn’t me!”

“Something hit me too, Detective, but it wasn’t my client, and there’s no reason to keep pointing your gun at him. Let’s all calm down now.”

“I want to know what hit me!” Fagles insisted. “And hey! Where did the sword go? It’s gone!”

It wasn’t gone. But he couldn’t see it now that I had snapped that blue knot—the camouflage was in effect.

“What sword?” I said, playing dumb.

“The sword that we were just talking about!” Fagles screamed. “The one that was on that shelf!” He pointed impotently at the spot where my sword still lay, hidden from his unaided vision.

"Now that’s funny," Oberon said. "I think his panties are getting twisted. If I had any sausage to spare, I would give you one for that right there."

“You saw it too!” Fagles accused Hal, looking around at the other cops who were eyeing him a bit uncertainly.

“How could I have seen it, Detective? I’m on this side of the counter,” Hal pointed out, the very picture of reason and affability.

“But you argued about it with me!”

“That’s because I’m paid to argue about things. But I never saw this sword you’re referring to. I merely objected to you taking anything not included in the warrant. Speaking of which, has anyone found the large dog yet?”

Detective Jimenez sighed and put away his gun, and all the other cops relaxed too, save for Fagles. They were beginning to look a bit embarrassed.

“I still don’t know what hit me, and I want an answer,” Fagles ground out, his chin lifted obstinately.

“I think it was a freak gust of wind, Detective,” Hal said, “coming through the broken door. I felt it too.”

That did it for Detective Jimenez. “The dog isn’t here, Fagles,” he said. “Let’s go; put the gun away.”

Fagles gritted his teeth in frustration, and the green wreath around his head flared menacingly. And that’s when he shot me.

Chapter 16

You know that old saw about your life flashing before your eyes at the moment of death? Well, if you’ve lived more than two thousand years, it’s going to take a while for your subconscious to put together a decent retrospective, and I imagined that there must be one of those “spinning beach balls of death” hovering over my head like when I asked my computer to do too many things at once. But that’s not the first thing I thought about as I fell to the ground with a hole in my chest; it was the second.

The first thing I thought was, “Oh no! I’ve been shot!” in the immortal words of the golden protocol droid when he got lased with special effects in a mining colony.

As I waited for my life’s highlight reel—much like those tributes they play at the Oscars every year—to play in my mind, quite a few people became excited in my shop.

All the cops, led by Jimenez, pulled their guns back out and pointed them at Fagles, shouting at him to put his gun down now. And Oberon wanted to start tearing into him right away.

"ATTICUS!"

It’s okay, buddy, stay there. I’ll be fine.

Poor Fagles. Even as I watched from flat on my back, the green binding about his head dissolved. He came back to full conscious control of his mind to find himself standing over me with a smoking gun hanging from his hand and five cops pointing their guns at him.

His voice, thin and trembling, said, “It wasn’t me.”

“Drop the gun, Fagles!” Jimenez commanded. Fagles didn’t seem to hear.

“There was someone in my mind. Telling me what to do. He wanted the sword.”

“There is no sword!” Hal spoke up. “Only my unarmed client bleeding on the floor!”

That drew my attention back to my condition and how very, very much it hurt. Thanks a lot, Hal. I was bleeding out pretty good, and I had a punctured left lung that was filling up with blood as well. I reached for some power to begin healing … and didn’t have any to tap. I’d used everything I had stored in my bear charm on casting camouflage and dealing with Aenghus Óg’s bindings. I needed to get outside, where I could touch the earth, but Fagles was still standing there and the cops were still telling him to drop the gun, and no one was dialing 911 while they had an armed rogue cop to deal with. Owie.

“But I didn’t shoot him. It wasn’t me,” Fagles pleaded. “You don’t understand.”

“There’s a security camera and six witnesses who watched you pull the trigger on an unarmed, unresisting man,” Jimenez said. “You know what that means. Drop the weapon now, Fagles.”

Tears began leaking from Fagles’s eyes, and his chin quivered. “I don’t understand how this happened,” he said. “I would never do something like this.”

“We all saw you do it,” Jimenez said. “Last warning. Drop the weapon or we will be forced to shoot you.”

The direct threat jarred Fagles out of his self-pity. “Oh, you’re going to shoot me, are you?” he sneered, and then he became unhinged. “Well, that’s better than going to prison! And even better than that would be taking you with me!”

“Fagles, don’t—”

And then there was a lot of noise. Fagles’s inchoate roar of rage against what he knew to be injustice, his brief attempt to raise his weapon, and then the percussive explosions of five guns going off, sending Fagles howling backward through the door, and finally the curses of the cops who knew they’d all be sitting on their asses for days, pending investigation.

“Somebody get the paramedics here and some black-and-whites to block off the street,” Jimenez said. “And we’re going to need that security tape.”

Hal rushed forward and knelt down to see how I was doing.

“I need to get outside to draw some power,” I whispered at him. “Lung filling up with blood,” and then I coughed some up for him by way of punctuation.

“How’s he doing?” Jimenez asked, looking over Hal’s shoulder.

“Help me move him. He needs air,” Hal said, and the detective backed off.

“Whoa, we need to wait for the paramedics. We’re not supposed to do anything.”

“Fine, I’ll do it myself,” Hal said, and he hooked an arm under my shoulders and knees and scooped me up as effortlessly as he would an Italian runway model. Silly cop, I don’t need your help; I have a werewolf on retainer.

“Hey, if he dies, it’s going to be your fault.”

“If he dies, he can sue me,” Hal said. “Get out of the way.” He sidestepped through the broken door, over the body of Detective Fagles, and then placed me down on the grass strip outside my shop. I gasped in relief as I immediately began to draw power from the earth. Between bloody coughs, I spoke quietly so that only Hal would be able to hear me as I began closing my wounds.

“I need the sword. It’s invisible, but you can feel it on the shelf. Bring it to me. And get someone over here to clean up all of my blood, completely sanitize the place, every drop. Including your clothes.”

Hal looked down and saw my blood all over him. “This is a three-thousand-dollar suit.”

“I’m good for it. Gotta get the door fixed too. And Oberon will need looking after.”

“Ah, I thought I smelled him,” Hal said.

I nodded. “He’s in the shop. Camouflaged like the sword. I’ll tell him to jump in your Beemer.”

“Okay, I’ll go open the door and leave it open. But tell him to be careful on the leather seats.”

“Sybarite,” I said.

“Ascetic,” he retorted, and he got up to go open his car door.

I heard sirens wailing in an urban imitation of the bean sidhe, and as I poured everything I could into accelerating my healing, I reached out to Oberon.

Okay, Oberon, I’m healing up fine, but they’re going to come take me to the hospital for a while and I need you to go with Hal for now. I should be back tomorrow.

"Why do you need to go at all?"

There’s some fluid in my lungs and I can’t get that out without some help. Hal has opened the door of his car for you. Try to get out of the store as quietly as you can and watch out for blood on the ground, because your paw prints will give you away. There’s a dead body right outside the door, so be careful.

"There are a lot of people milling around by the door."

There’s going to be more of them soon. The longer you wait, the more there will be. I’m outside on the ground to the right.

"Wait."

What’s wrong?

"Is that tiny little toy car Hal’s?"

It’s a very expensive toy. You’re supposed to be careful with the leather seats.

"So I’m supposed to ninja past these cops, tread across the broken glass—you remember the broken glass, right?—avoid the buckets o’ blood outside the door, and jump silently into that puny car without saying hello to the upholstery?"