An excellent summation. Make it quick.

"Not so fast. Promise you’ll get me a date with a French poodle?"

Seriously? You’re holding out on me right now? I’ve been shot and I’m coughing up blood and you’re negotiating for some tail?

"Oh, all right. But I totally deserve one and you know it. I’ve been a good widdle doggie."

It was at this moment that Perry, who had slunk out of the shop more than an hour ago under the glowing red eyes of the Morrigan, chose to return from lunch.

“Holy shit, boss!” he said. “Did that big f**king bird do all of this?”

Chapter 17

I beckoned Perry over. “I’ll explain what happened later,” I said as he squatted next to me in the grass. “The bird was just the beginning. But listen—” I paused to cough up some more blood.

“Damn, Atticus, I knew that bird was bad news. I’m sorry, man, I should have stayed to help you out.”

“Don’t worry about it. You can help me now. You’re on the clock until you get a glass contractor out here to fix up the door. Once that’s done, lock up and head home. Open up tomorrow for me and make a cup of Humili-Tea—there’s some sachets already made—you know the one I’m talking about, the one that sorority girls ask for when they want to end a relationship?” Perry nodded and grinned wryly. “Good. Make it for a customer named Emily. Don’t tell her anything about what you saw here or where I’m at or anything, is that clear? If she asks you what the weather’s like outside, you shrug your shoulders and say you don’t know, all right?”

“Got it, boss.”

“That goes for everybody who asks anything. Tell them I’ll be back in a few days. If you don’t know how to make a certain kind of tea for someone, then don’t even try. Just apologize and tell them I’ll be back soon.”

“Is that true?”

I tried to laugh but coughed instead. “What, that I’ll be back? I certainly hope so.”

“You’re not going to be in the hospital for weeks? Because that looks like a bullet hole in your shirt.”

“As the Black Knight famously said, that’s just a flesh wound.”

“The Black Knight always triumphs!” Perry beamed. Monty Python is like catnip for nerds. Once you get them started quoting it, they are constitutionally incapable of feeling depressed.

“That’s right. It would greatly ease my mind if you took care of things, Perry. And if a guy named Hal tells you to do anything, you do it as if it came from my mouth, okay? He’s my attorney. Speaking of whom, here he is.”

Hal returned from the inside of the store, and he had Fragarach clutched invisibly in his left hand. He knelt down on the other side of me, seeming to use his left hand for support, but in truth laying the sword down in the grass against my side. As he did this, he held out his right hand to Perry to distract him. “Pleased to meet you. I’m Hal Hauk,” he said.

“Perry Thomas,” he said, taking Hal’s hand and shaking it. “I work for Atticus.”

“Excellent. Let’s get you inside, then, past all the police. I’ll be right back, Atticus,” he said to me. They rose and left me there, and I took the opportunity to check on Oberon.

Where are you now?

"Where do you expect? I’m totally a ninja wolfhound. This car is ridiculous, though. He has a revolting citrus air freshener in here. Do you know when his birthday is? We should get him one that smells like steak or Italian sausage."

I’m not sure they make them in those scents, Oberon.

"Why not? You’d think they’d sell like Milk-Bones, especially to a werewolf who’s trying to compensate for something with a slick sports car."

Ow! Don’t make me laugh right now!

After giving Oberon a mental scratch on the head, I went to work on Fragarach. I dispelled the camouflage as the ambulance arrived, because I didn’t want anyone to accidentally touch it and freak out, then placed a binding on the scabbard that would prevent it from moving farther than five feet from me. I had wanted to do this in the shop in case Fagles ever got his hands on it, but the binding takes longer to cast than camouflage and requires more power, and I didn’t have access to much of either earlier.

Jimenez came out to meet the paramedics and pointed them in my direction. Hal also came out and asked them to take me to Scottsdale Memorial Hospital, where my personal doctor could operate on me.

I didn’t really have a personal doctor, but the Pack did. Dr. Snorri Jodursson was part of the Pack himself, and he was the go-to guy for the paranormal community in the Phoenix area. He didn’t raise an eyebrow at unusually fast healing, for example, and he was rumored to be an excellent bonesetter and a quick surgeon. He was also willing to do things off the books; he had a whole surgical team who would work off record for obscene amounts of cash. I’d met him a couple of times when I ran with the Pack—he was probably sixth or seventh in their hierarchy—but I’d never had cause to use his professional services until now.

The reason people like me need people like Snorri is because of reactions like the paramedics had when they examined me.

“I thought you were supposed to have been shot,” one of them said.

“I was. Fluid in my lungs,” I gurgled. “I’m stable, but I need to see my doctor.”

“Well, where’s the bullet hole?”

Whoops. In my haste to prevent infection, I probably grew that skin over a bit too fast. It was still angry red, I’m sure, but not an open wound anymore. I’d put all my effort into closing up the skin and the lung, so the muscle tissue on either side was still pretty torn and would take some time to mend—and the skin and lung tissue needed time to strengthen too.

“Um, it was a rubber bullet. Hit me there and caused internal bleeding,” I said.

“Detectives don’t use rubber bullets. And even if they did and it caused some internal bleeding, you shouldn’t have fluid in your lung from that.”

“Tell you what, sport. Put me on a stretcher and get me to my doctor and let him worry about it.” I was ready to go. I had done all I could here, including a recharge of my bear charm. Now I needed a surgeon and some time.

“You mean to tell me your bullet wound healed up that fast?”

“I mean to tell you to give me one of those oxygen masks and get me out of here. And this sword comes with me.” I patted Fragarach and the paramedic looked down, noticing it for the first time. “Doesn’t leave my side.”

“What? We cannot allow weapons in the ambulance.”

“It’s sheathed and it’s incredibly valuable. Look at my shop.” I gestured toward the broken door. “I can’t leave it here.”

Hal, who had been hanging back silently watching the proceedings, loomed suddenly over the paramedic’s shoulder. “Are you refusing to transport my client in a medical emergency?”

“No,” the paramedic replied, squinting up at him. “I’m refusing to transport his weapon.”

“You mean his priceless Celtic art? That’s not a weapon, sir. It’s a family heirloom of intense sentimental value, and the trauma he would suffer by being separated from it would be greater than any physical pain he currently feels. Which, I notice, you’ve done absolutely nothing about since you arrived.”

The paramedic clenched his jaw and exhaled sharply through his nose as he turned back to me. “Effing lawyers,” he muttered quietly, thinking perhaps Hal wouldn’t hear it. But werewolves tend to hear things like that.

“That’s right, sir, I am an effing lawyer, and I will effing file suit against you if you don’t effing get my client and his art to Scottsdale Memorial right now!”

“All right, whatever!” huffed the paramedic, who could not stand to be bludgeoned with lawsuit threats for long. He and his partner went to get the stretcher, and shortly I was being loaded into the back of the ambulance, Fragarach clutched in my right hand. Jimenez and the other cops were so busy worrying about what the press would do when they found out that a Phoenix detective had shot a Tempe detective stone dead that they completely missed the fact that the sword Fagles had been hollering about actually existed.

“I’ll see you there soon,” Hal said with a wave. “Snorri will take good care of you; he knows you’re coming. And don’t worry about these guys,” he said, indicating the paramedics. “Leif will pay them a visit tonight and they won’t remember a thing.” Since the paramedics had finally put an oxygen mask on me, I couldn’t answer, so I just gave a weak nod.

"Hurry back, Atticus. I’m going to be bored. These werewolves can’t talk to me. And this camouflage stuff still kinda tickles."

I’ll probably see you by lunchtime tomorrow, I said back to my dog.

"Will there be sausage?"

Only if Hal tells me you’ve been good.

"I’m going to hold you to that," Oberon said, his mental voice fading as the ambulance put some distance between us.

Okay, be good, then, I projected, and hoped he heard it. We warbled up Mill Avenue and doubtless gave the stoners loitering on the corner outside Trippie Hippie a quick jolt of paranoia. Sirens just harsh on their mellow, man.

Drives in the back of an ambulance are simultaneously boring and stressful. I needed relief from both. Paramedic Man wasn’t about to talk to me anymore, so I decided to mess with him a bit, since Leif would make sure he wouldn’t remember anything later. Am I above immature trickery? No. It keeps me young.

Using a bit of power recently banked in my bear charm, I bound a few of the natural threads in the elastic band of his underwear to the fine hairs in the center of his back about five inches up. The result was an instant wedgie. Those have been funny for two thousand years, but they’re even more hilarious when your victim is sanctimoniously trying to behave like he knows more than you.

I really shouldn’t have done it, though, because his reaction—a girlish squeal followed by a high-octave “Ahh! What the f**k?!?” and an abrupt attempt to stand up, which cracked his head on the ceiling—got me laughing too hard, and that brought on a serious case of bloody hacking and a heaping spoonful of pain. Served me right, I suppose. I messed up the inside of the oxygen mask, then released the binding so he could calm down and help me.

He never saw me laughing, so the poor guy thought his antics had caused me to become upset, and he was very solicitous as soon as he was able to reestablish some room in his shorts. Best ambulance ride ever.

When we got to the hospital and his partner came around to help unload me from the back, he noticed that Mr. Wedgie had a flushed face.

“What happened?” he asked.

“He had a bit of distress during the ride, but he’s stable for the moment,” Wedgie said as they put my rolling stretcher on the ground and started pushing me toward the sterile electric doors of the emergency room.

“But you look like something happened to you,” his partner replied. “Are you okay, man?”

“I’m fine,” Wedgie snapped. “Nothing happened. I—ahh, Jesus Christ!”

Well, I couldn’t resist when he was lying like that, could I? Besides, there’s that saying about laughter being the best medicine. Whoever said that didn’t have blood in their left lung, though, I feel certain.

Dr. Snorri Jodursson got his first look at me while I was in the midst of another hacking fit. He appeared to be in his forties, though of course he was older than that, like all the members of the Tempe Pack. He was dressed in blue scrubs, which drew attention to the startling blue ice of his eyes and the blond eyebrows furrowed above them. His sharp nose and chiseled jaw made him look like a thunder god, though considering his pack’s antipathy for Thor, that wasn’t a compliment I would think of paying him aloud. He had his blond hair cropped fairly close along the sides, but it was tousled and teased on the top after the fashion of frat-boy douche bags—and I wasn’t going to tell him that either.

“Atticus, I’ve seen you looking better,” he said, as he kept pace with the gurney being wheeled into pre-op by a couple of nurses. “Tell me what you can when you feel up to it.”

“Am I able to talk freely?” I asked, tilting my eyes toward the nurses rolling my gurney.

“Oh yes, they’re part of my team,” Jodursson said.

“You can count on their discretion as long as you pay for it.”

“All right, I need blood removed from my left lung, then,” I said, “and use a local anesthetic. I can’t afford to go under.”

“If that’s all you need, we don’t need to cut you open at all. We’ll insert a tube down your throat, charge the liquid, and then use magnets to draw it up out of there. We do it for pneumonia patients all the time. You’ll still need a local, because it tends to hurt like hell, but you’ll remain conscious. Good enough?”

“Perfect. Treat this whole thing as outpatient, because I need you to let me go right afterward, and you should bill full costs to Magnusson and Hauk, no insurance. Include in your records whatever tests and exams you’d do for a normal human. You know the drill, I’m sure. Make sure you mention the bullet hole and what a good job you did patching it up, because this is going to get looked at by the cops. No way around it.”

“Am I removing a bullet?”

“No, it passed through me, and they’re digging it out of my shop somewhere.”

“So you’re sure it traveled cleanly between your ribs? I don’t have to worry about any bone chips floating around?”