Staked (Iron Druid Chronicles) (3 page)

I flipped to the
T’
s but found no entry there for Theophilus. Damn. Either he was using a different name or wasn’t listed here at all.

“May I join you, Mr. O’Sullivan?” a voice with a Russian accent asked. I whipped my head around to find the speaker, because no one should be calling me by that name anymore. A Hasidic Jew dressed all in black stood there, cup of coffee in one hand and a small paper bag in the other. His beard had been black the last time I saw him, but now it was shot with streaks of gray that fell from either side of his chin.

“Rabbi Yosef Bialik,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Sharing breakfast, I hope,” he replied. “I assure you that I have no wish to fight. Our past quarrels can remain in the past.”

“You’re alone?” I asked, scanning my surroundings for other figures in black with weaponized beards. The last time I’d seen him, more than a decade ago, he had ganged up on me with the rest of the Hammers of God.

“I’m alone.”

“Well, sit down then, and tell me what you want.”

He tossed the bag down next to me and then used his free hand to steady himself as he half-sat, half-collapsed to the curb with a grunt. “Getting old is no fun,” he said. “You look very well. Unchanged, in fact. How do you do it?”

“I’ll tell you if you tell me how you knew where to find me. I’ve only been in town a few hours.”

“Ah! Easy. The Hammers of God are witch hunters, yes?”

“Yes.”

“We are sensitive to the use of magic. Any kind. So while we cannot track you, whenever you use magic nearby, we can feel it. And your magic I have felt before. It has a particular flavor. You used quite a lot of it a couple blocks away.”

“And you just happened to be in Toronto?”

“Yes. I live here now. Retirement.”

“Retirement? Here?”

He shrugged. “Toronto is great city. Many kinds of peoples, many kinds of food, few evils outside of the local government. The hockey team is bad, but you cannot ask for everything. And I am married now. My wife is from here.”

“Oh! Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“Don’t get me wrong, Rabbi, it’s great to see you when you’re not trying to kill me, but … what do you want?”

He picked up his bag and fished out an everything bagel with cream cheese. The bag crackled loudly, and he didn’t speak until he had crumpled it into a ball and set it beside him. “I suppose what I want is fair warning if something horrible is going to happen here. You and horrible go together like pickle spears and sandwiches.”

I could say the same for him, but instead I said, “Nothing will happen. Nothing I’m planning anyway. I’ll be gone in a few days.”

“Then I wish to deliver an apology.”

“You do? For what?”

He hasn’t even met you yet, Oberon.

We’ll review manners later.

“For my behavior years ago,” the rabbi said. “I did many things for which I may not be forgiven.”

“Like killing the youngest, weakest member of the Sisters of the Three Auroras with your fucking Cthulhu beard tentacles there—sorry, I didn’t mean to get so intense. It’s just that I still have nightmares about that.”

“Understandable. And deserved. It was that episode and the next one, with that man who claimed to be Jesus—”

“Uh, that really was Jesus.”

“As you say.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure he would say it too. And to be clear, Rabbi, his existence doesn’t negate or invalidate—much less eradicate—the existence of your god. Or any of my gods, or anyone else’s. He just is. As is Yahweh and Brighid and Odin and the rest.”

He nodded, and his beard, thankfully, did not move of its own volition. “I can accept that now. I couldn’t back then. It requires a flexibility of thought, yes? A certain openness to the idea that people must walk their own road to salvation and not necessarily follow me on mine. I had taken my faith too far.” He shook his head. “It is difficult for me, now, to think of my younger self. I wince at the memories. I was filled with so much anger and had lost the contemplative peace of Kabbalism. But those encounters with you—and watching, from afar, how the Sisters of the Three Auroras conducted themselves afterward, among other things—caused me to reevaluate. I saw that I was wrong to judge them. I should
not
have judged them. That is the business of a perfect being, yes?”

“I suppose it is. Does that mean the Hammers of God don’t hunt witches anymore, despite that line in Exodus about not suffering a witch to live?”

He sipped his coffee before answering. “Some still do. I personally do not. But I have convinced many of them that focusing on clear evil—demons walking this plane, for example—is much more morally defensible than pursuing witches who may yet be redeemed.”

“That’s good to hear.”

“Yes, I think it is good. I do not know if it will ever be enough to pay for what I did—guilt is a heavy burden. When a man leaps into the fire, how many steps must he take to walk out of it? Have you ever overstepped yourself, Mr. O’Sullivan?”

“Oh, gods below, yes. Horribly. Still paying for some of my missteps. I think there are some I haven’t paid for yet. Trying to make it right, though.”

“What’s the difficulty, if I may ask?”

I made a raspberry noise at the enormity of the question. “I have plenty of difficulties, but right now I’m worried most about the vampires. They all want to kill me, and I don’t think I can talk them out of it. They’re actively pursuing me now.”

The hedge of hair above the rabbi’s eyes dipped, and his mustache drooped in a frown. “There are vampires here? Is this why you are in town?”

“I’m sure there are some here, but I’m in town for this,” I said, pointing to the binder. “The names and addresses of vampires around the world.”

The rabbi froze except for his beard, which began to stir even though there was no wind. I was beginning to recognize that as an emotional tell and I had to suppress a shudder, because semi-sentient facial hair is viscerally disturbing.

“How did you acquire that?” the rabbi asked.

“Using the magic you sensed. I stole this from the bank on Front and York. There are thousands of names here. Maybe tens of thousands—the type is small. I’m not sure which ones are the leaders, though. And I’m also unsure how I’ll make much of a dent in the list before it becomes moot. The leadership will soon know that I have this list and alert everyone to move. But maybe some of them will be stupid enough to keep the same names. I can at least use that to track some of them.”

“Extraordinary.” Keeping his eyes on the binder, his hands moved that sad, smooshed everything bagel to his mouth. The schmear of cream cheese drooped out from the edges and some of it fell, ignored, onto the precipice of his beard, hanging. It bobbed up and down as he ate mechanically, thinking.

You just had five bacon sandwiches for breakfast.

I doubted the rabbi was a Tolkien fan, so I said to my hound,
I don’t think he knows about that.

“Perhaps … well. Mr. O’Sullivan, I would like to offer my assistance if you would accept it.”

“You’d come out of retirement for this?”

“Absolutely. Vampires are one of the clear evils that the Hammers of God still fight. We would relish the chance to take advantage of this.”

“We? You’re speaking for all of them?”

“I believe I can safely say they will join us with enthusiasm. They have been finding more vampires recently in any case. Something has been disturbing them, making them move in the open.”

“That would be my doing. I’ve had mercenaries hunting them, and some are trying to hide while others are trying to fill the power vacuum left by those we already staked.”

“Admirable. We are on the same side, then.” He grinned at me, a brief flash of white underneath the hair. “Is refreshing, yes?” He nodded as he spoke, and the cream cheese fell onto his coat. I wanted to point it out to him but also didn’t want to let slip this moment of accord.

“Yes, it is,” I said. “How many of your friends might join in?”

“There are hundreds of us scattered around the world.”

“All right,” I said. “Rabbi Yosef, I’ll make you a deal. We’ll go scan this and you can send the file to your associates. For every thousand vampires the Hammers of God eliminate, I’ll give
you
five years of youth.”

“How?”

“Immortali-Tea. It’s just natural herbs and some bindings, nothing diabolical about it. You see the results before you.”

“Hmm. We would stake a thousand vampires if we could in any case. It’s our duty.”

“Great, so it’s win-win. I guess you’re not able to sense vampires the way you can sense me?”

“No. Our power comes from the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, so they are invisible to us as dead things. And I should stress that we cannot sense you personally, only the use of your magic, which is very attuned to life.”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling at him, “being bound to Gaia will do that. Hey, uh, you got a little schmear there—”

“Oh! Thanks for telling me.”

We set about the scheme immediately. It would take us hours to scan and get the files out, and before the day was through, Werner Drasche would definitively know I had them. The Hammers of God would have a short window in which to act.

“If you move to catch the ones in this hemisphere before sundown,” I said, “that will be your best chance. The ones in Europe—the really old and powerful ones—are going to hear about the security breach while they’re awake and have a chance to move tonight.”

“We must take what the Almighty offers us, then.”

“Well, caution your people too,” I warned him. “There may be traps waiting at these addresses instead of vampires. I would vastly prefer this strike to be an unequivocal win for the good guys. Just once.”

“May it prove so,” the rabbi said, a quirk in his beard indicating that he might be happy. “Even if we fail to slay a single one, I am glad we met today, Mr. O’Sullivan. It confirms that I have done right to choose a calmer, quieter path. This great good we are about to do would not have been possible had I clung to my zealotry.”

I supposed that was a polite way of saying we couldn’t kill vampires together today if he had killed me twelve years ago, but I wasn’t about to say anything to make him feel more guilty about his past than he already did. I couldn’t judge him; the gods knew I had more to atone for in my long life than he did. We parted amiably and traded phone numbers like old friends.

With the vampires suitably placed in tumult by my actions and perhaps some of them facing a final mortality very soon thanks to the Hammers of God, I went shopping. There was an arcane lifeleech doubtless on the way, and I had preparations to make. Though you never want to be Nigel in Toronto, I would have to become him one last time if I wanted to take care of Werner Drasche. And, with luck, I would never be haunted by that chapter of my past again.

First I visited the Herbal Clinic and Dispensary on Roncesvalles for a few things and then traveled to Jerome’s on Yonge Street for a suitable costume—well, formal wear, which felt like a costume every time I crawled into it and cinched a tie around my neck. I was advised by the haberdasher that ascots were making a comeback, and I said, no, no, they weren’t, he’d been terribly misinformed. I did manage to pick up a gold pocket watch and a shaving kit while I was there—both essential to reprising my role as Nigel.

We took all to a hotel downtown, where in my room, under the glare of a white bulb attacking yellow wallpaper and a sulfurous curdled granite countertop, wearing an expression of acute chagrin, I shaved off my goatee while Oberon tried to comfort me with his improvised singing.

<
In a beefless hotel! Where a man’s got a beard to lose!

Ain’t no gravy nowhere! Cause he’s got the Nigel blues!
>

“Oberon, I appreciate the thought, but you’re not helping me feel any better about this.”

“Please don’t. Have mercy on me.” I washed and toweled off my naked chin and began step two, using my purchases from the Herbal Clinic, one of the hotel’s plastic cups, a few drops of Everclear, and a stir stick intended for coffee.

“No, it’s not a tea. It’s a tincture. Remember when the Herbal Clinic let me use their mortar and pestle?”

Yes, they’d been quite curious and I’d lied and told them it was for a salve, but in truth the blend of herbs would spur my beard growth for a short time. When I needed to age rapidly or grow something ridiculously ursine in a few days instead of waiting a few months, I used this mixture, which I altered with a little bit of alcohol and Gaia’s magic—much in the same way that Immortali-Tea was a blend of fairly common herbs with a little help. Taking an eyedropper and being very careful about where the drops fell, I applied the tincture to my cheek halfway down my jaw on either side. I’d have a few weeks’ growth of hair there in the morning, muttonchops straight out of the nineteenth century. Once I got all dressed up in my formal costume, pocket watch in my gray pinstriped vest, and slicked-down hair—I would look like the lad I’d been in 1953 who got into so much trouble.

“It’s just something to help me get into character. It’s a role I haven’t played for seventy years.”

“Oh, you want a story, do you? Well, we
are
in the bathroom and you
are
quite dirty from all that mud you picked up in Ethiopia…”

Oberon’s tail began to wag.

“Go on, hop in, and I will tell you why you never want to be Nigel in Toronto.”

Oberon’s entire back half began to sway back and forth, and he accidentally tore down the shower curtain in his haste to get into the tub. he explained.