Staked (Iron Druid Chronicles) (28 page)

Atticus feels that pursuing despoilers of the earth is futile, since there are so many of them and so few Druids, and when I look at cold numbers on paper I see the sense of that. But my heart cannot meekly accept criminal pollution as inevitable. That would mean accepting that Beau Thatcher is a force of nature instead of a single shitty human being. And I suppose that is where Atticus and I disagree.

“Ready for a bunch of running around, Orlaith?” I ask my hound.

“Probably not so many trees. Lots of plains with prairie dogs.”

“Human language is funny that way. What kind of beef jerky should we pack?” I ask. I need lots of protein to aid in rebuilding my torn tissues. “What’s your favorite flavor?”

“Great. Beef for you, turkey jerky for me.” I fill up a pack with water and jerky at a convenience store and then we shift to Kansas, following a prearranged operating procedure.

I have memorized the locations of every well and refinery owned by Thatcher Oil & Gas. I contact Amber, the elemental of the Great Plains, and let her know what I’m planning. I’m going to sabotage all the drills by unbinding their inner workings and then, with Amber’s help, I’ll cap the wells with a very hard stone. If they try to drill more, they’ll ruin a few bits in the process and Amber will let me know. I’ll sabotage the refineries and heavy equipment as well so that all the machinery they own becomes useless hunks of metal. Production will shut down and stay that way until the company completely replaces its infrastructure. No one gets hurt. Everything will simply stop and cause the company to spend a huge amount of capital to get going again. But Thatcher Oil & Gas bought that equipment over many years instead of all at once and I’m hoping it’ll be too expensive to refit one of the last remnants of a dying industry. If they do pony up, I’ll cripple everything again and again until they go bankrupt and shut down or else figure out that it’s wiser to invest in solar or wind.

It is exciting at the beginning to shut down the wells, but after a few hours it turns into drudgery. The iron horses aren’t guarded; they’re just doing their monotonous work on the plains, and in most cases we don’t even have to sneak up on them. I’m not able to reshape the iron at all; I can only unbind the carbon from the steel and create a melted slurry inside that becomes a useless, cold slag. It is not challenging and does nothing to undo the damage the company’s already done; it’s simply time-consuming. But the constant shifting, running, and unbinding is mentally taxing, and all that keeps me going is anticipating the look on my stepfather’s face when I appear and tell him it was me. I can see, however, why Atticus never dedicated himself to this sort of work. Cleaning up messes would be more immediately rewarding but would do nothing to prevent it happening again. Sabotaging equipment stops the abuse of the earth but gives very little emotional pay-off, apart from a grim satisfaction that I have taken one tiny step in a journey of many millions.

At the end of a very long day, Orlaith wants to see llamas for some reason, so we spend the night in Ecuador, in a meadow in the foothills of the Andes, where it’s summertime and the evening is mild. Orlaith stretches out in the grass with me and watches a wild herd of llamas sip from a small lake filled with runoff water.

Or maybe someone took llamas and squished them to make sheep.

That’s an excellent question. Perhaps I’ll ask Gaia sometime.

It’s relaxing there, and I take the time to meditate a bit after I build a fire for us. Tomorrow will be an important day for me, and I want it to go well. I vocalize with Orlaith what I want to happen, because it helps to say it out loud.

“I want Thatcher Oil and Gas shut down, and though I know it will be difficult to confront my stepfather, I want to maintain control and not resort to violence.”

“It matters because violence—or the threat of it—is how men tend to solve problems. Like right now Atticus is feeling pushed around by this vampire Theophilus, so he’s pushing back just as hard, if not harder. I’m not sure if there’s any other way to handle the situation, but I don’t think he’s looking especially hard for one. And I admit that sometimes violence
is
the only option, and for that reason I’m glad I’m quite good at it, but I don’t want to make that my default solution. Whenever I can, I want to win with Druidry rather than asskicking.”

“I probably could. And that’s something I need to keep in mind. I have a lot of options. Violence is a well-traveled road, and I’d rather take the one less traveled.”

Orlaith is not up to speed on her Robert Frost poetry, so she misses the reference.

“They do have their charms. Let’s dream about them.”

We snuggle up together in the grass, and I try counting llamas instead of sheep to get to sleep and continue healing my muscles from that encounter in Germany. When the morning comes, I shape-shift into a jaguar and give the llamas a friendly chase with Orlaith, just to get everyone’s blood pumping. Then I change back, get dressed, and we travel through Tír na nÓg to get to Wichita, Kansas, where the offices of Beau Thatcher, my stepfather, can be found.

I charge up the silver storage of Scáthmhaide and use the bindings carved into it at Flidais’s instruction to make Orlaith and myself completely invisible. Then we enter the steel-and-glass tower of Thatcher Oil & Gas, travel up to the tenth floor, and stroll right past his secretary’s desk.

When I open the door to his office, he’s on the phone, red-faced and angry, practically shouting into the receiver. He’s hearing that his entire oil production is at a standstill and can’t be fixed. Customers will begin to get their oil elsewhere when they can’t fill orders. Good: He’s already having a bad day.

I haven’t seen him in the flesh for more than twelve years, and his flesh has suffered the ravages of time. He used to have very sharp features—bladed cheeks and a keen edge to the ridge of his nose—but the lines have softened and swelled now, there’s heavy luggage under his eyes, and his hair clings to his scalp like thin wavy patches of pond moss, if the moss were pale gray. His mouth still has the same cruel curl to it, though, and it frowns at the door when we walk through and close it behind us. His eyes drop away, seeing nothing, and he resumes his bilious shouting into the phone.

“Right now I don’t fucking care how it happened; I care about getting it fixed, God damn it! Tell me when you’ll have it fixed!” He pauses to listen briefly and then interrupts. “Hey, are you a fucking engineer or aren’t you? You’re supposed to know how shit works. You can’t tell me you don’t know how to fix it without me suspecting that you’re incompetent, you understand? Now, you’d better know how to fix it and tell me when it’ll be fixed before the hour’s up! Call me then!”

He slams down the phone and growls, “Shhhhit!” in his frustration. It makes all of yesterday’s work well worth it, and I smile.

That’s when I drop my invisibility and Orlaith’s and say, “Hello, Beau.”

He startles, his eyes going wide, and says, “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Granuaile. Don’t you remember? The stepdaughter you sent off to college in Arizona oh so long ago?”

“Bullshit. She’s dead. Tell me who you really are and how you got that big damn dog in here.”

I walk forward and seat myself in the plush leather chair opposite his mahogany desk. Orlaith sits next to me on the left.

“Come on, Beau. Believe your eyes. I’m Granuaile and I’m not dead. And, no, Mom doesn’t know. I’d appreciate it if you kept this between us.”

He takes a good long look at me and shakes his head. “I don’t believe it. Where the hell you been? Why’d you let us think you were dead?”

“That’s all secret stuff. The kind of thing where if I told you I’d have to kill you.”

“Whatever,” he says, waving my answer away. His hands drop below the desk after that and I almost comment but he continues to say, “I’m not really interested.”

“Oh, I know. You never were.” There would be no “Welcome home, Granuaile, I’m so glad you’re not dead!” coming from him.

He scowls at me. “What do you want? I’m busy.”

“No, you’re not. You have an oil empire that’s producing no oil right now, so you’re not busy at all. You have me to thank for that.”

“What?”

“Every well and refinery owned by TO and G stopped working yesterday, am I right?”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I made it happen.”

“How?”

“
How
is not the question you should be asking. You should be asking
why
. And it’s because enough is enough, or because of karma, or whatever you want to call it. I want you to stop. Reinvest in solar and wind, open a chain of hardware stores, I don’t care. Just stop being a blight on the earth.”

He sneers at me in disgust. “Oh, you’re a goddamn hippie, aren’t you?”

“I’m a Druid.”

“What you are is full of shit and about to be arrested,” he says.

The office doors burst open behind me, and four security guards rush in, presumably in response to a silent alarm he triggered behind his desk. They’re fit and well-paid professionals, not the slow and soggy kind. Orlaith spins and growls at them, and that makes them pull up for a second. I have Scáthmhaide in hand, and when they see that, along with the tomahawk I have at my hip, they pull out those hard-plastic police batons. The one closest to Orlaith looks like he’s going to use it on her, so I slide over there and poke him gently in the gut, forcing him back a couple of steps. “Let’s be kind to animals, sir.”

They start shouting at me to drop my weapon, Orlaith barks at them, Beau yells at them to stop fucking around and take me down, and I grin. Their uniforms are awful polyester blends and I can’t mess with them, but their shoes are made of leather. Natural material there, even if treated with chemicals. Almost identical to the leather of the chair I was just sitting in. I bind the closest guy’s right foot to the back of the chair, high up, and the binding simultaneously yanks his foot up in the air and the back of the chair down. They rush to meet, both toppling over and dragging across the floor toward each other, effectively blocking the other guards from getting to me. I repeat the binding on the others, and soon they’re all immobilized and cursing, kicking at the chair. They won’t stay that way forever—eventually they’ll slip out of their shoes, but I plan to be gone by then. I turn around to bid Beau a mocking farewell, since I’ve delivered my message, and discover that he’s pulled a gun out of his desk and he’s pointing it at me. My amusement at the guards disappears.

“Aha! Not so funny now, is it?” he says. “You shoulda stayed dead, Granuaile. Pretty thing like you is gonna hate what’s left of your life in prison. Now, put that fucking stick down slow or I’ll pop you in the knee. My boys there will testify I had no choice. And drop that axe too; then we’ll talk about what you’ve done to the wells.”

His condescending sneer—a frequent nightmare from my youth—sets off a rumbling quake of rage inside me, and the careful admonitions I had made to myself last night float down the River Lethe.

“Okay, okay,” I say, and slowly begin to sink to my knees, seeming to comply. Then I mutter the words to trigger invisibility, and as soon as I wink out of his sight I drop down behind the desk and roll out of the gun’s line of fire, moving to my right and his left, away from my hound.

“Hey, now,” he says, standing up and waving that gun around, searching for me. Orlaith is growling at him, and through our mental link I tell her not to move.

“Don’t fuck with me. No telling who could get hurt,” he says, the gun barrel drifting in Orlaith’s direction.

It’s not a direct threat, but it’s not subtle either, and if I was angry before, now I’m ready to erupt. I come up on his left, raise Scáthmhaide, and bring it down hard on his extended right wrist. It’s a blow across his body, but that’s why long staffs are handy. He shoots a round into the top of his desk before letting go, at the same time making a high squeal of pain because I’ve shattered the bones in his wrist. He clutches it, takes a step back, and I drop Scáthmhaide to lay into him with my fists. Doing so makes me visible and he sees me coming but not in time to do anything about it except reflexively widen his eyes. I crunch my fist into his face, and he lets out another cry as he collapses. I follow him to the ground and keep punching him in the body as I shout.

“No!”
Whud.
“Telling!”
Fump.
“Who!”
Thud.
“Could!”
Smack.
“Get hurt!”
Whump.

Orlaith’s voice intrudes, and I look up at her.

“Oh,” I say in a tiny voice, rearing back and realizing that Beau has curled up into a defensive fetal position. I have just beaten the hell out of an old man. An evil old man, to be sure, but I’ve failed miserably at keeping the moral high ground. Now the entire confrontation will be about my violence instead of his decades of ruining the earth for profit. I’m torn, because it felt so good to lay into him like I’ve always wanted to, but I also wanted to be better than that.

Looking up, I see that a couple of the guards have won free of their shoes and one is circling around the desk to get behind me while the other is moving to the door. He opens it a crack, shouts to the secretary to call for backup, and closes it again. The other two guards will be free in another couple of seconds. I need to leave.

The guy who’s trying to pounce on me from behind moves too slow; his body language screams that I spooked him with the shoe thing. He can’t explain that shit with science so he’s got a clenched-teeth aggro face and nostrils flaring like a bull. Still, when I scramble to my feet, retrieving Scáthmhaide, he somehow summons the courage to try to bash me in the head with his baton. I knock it aside and then before he can swing it back around I whip the bottom end of my staff up into his unprotected groin. He goes down with a whimper, all the aggro gone and the totality of his existence now consumed with the throbbing of his bruised balls.