Staked (Iron Druid Chronicles) (7 page)

“I can try calling him,” Hal says, pulling out his cell phone. We watch in silence as he taps at the screen. He uses the speaker function so we can all hear, but the call goes straight to voice mail. “Nope. Either his phone’s off, or it’s dead, or he’s not on this plane,” he says.

“Oh, I’ll bet you he’s on this plane,” I growl, feeling the old ire swelling inside when I know Siodhachan’s up to his shenanigans again. “He’s out there somewhere right now with his cheeky hound, doing something dumber than eating a bowl full of llama shite, I guarantee it.”

P
urposefully seeking out a poltergeist might be one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. Well, that and growing muttonchops.

When I woke and checked the man in the mirror, the areas where I’d applied O’Sullivan’s Patented Miracle Beard Tonic had outgrown the top half of my sideburns by about half an inch. That required some trimming. Then I had to flatten my hair down with some greasy goo, part it on the left, and plaster a curl of it on my forehead.

that’s
different,> Oberon commented when I emerged from the bathroom.

“Can’t believe it ever caught on with humans,” I said, fetching my gray suit from the closet. It took me a couple of tries to get the tie looking right—it had been a lifetime since I wore one.

I took Oberon out for breakfast and a walk, during which he got admiring stares and I got furtive, uncertain glances. The morning’s newspaper declared that a strange rash of ritualistic murders had been carried out yesterday in America and Mexico, mostly in the Pacific time zone, where an alarming number of rich one-percenters had been stabbed in the heart and then beheaded. The Hammers of God had managed to score a few for the good guys, I saw.

I set Oberon up in the room afterward with the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign and a food channel on the television, his favorite babysitter. He was currently into a show about strange foods from around the world—strange, that is, to American tastes. He would tell me all about them and then demand to be taken to various destinations to try the live squid or the roasted locusts or whatever.

I was careful to keep from him how worried I was about this operation. There were so many things that could go wrong, and I probably hadn’t thought of them all. My hound was happy when I left him, though, highly amused by Americans trying the Korean dish called
hongeo,
or skate, which is quite possibly the nastiest food in the world.

My first stop was a used bookstore, where I found an old edition of the King James Bible with a red ribbon for a bookmark. I brought that with me instead of my sword, Fragarach. Gwendolyn’s fiancé knew nothing of swords but had a thing for gospels.

Then there was no more time to waste: Werner Drasche was doubtless in Toronto by now and looking for me, so it was time to visit the Royal Conservatory of Music on Bloor Street, specifically Ihnatowycz Hall, the modern, sponsored name of the old building where Gwendolyn had died in the nineteenth century and become the Lady in Red, and where, some seventy years later, she had mistaken me for her fiancé, Nigel.

Once I walked into the building, a funny thing happened: People stopped staring at me as if I were a walking fashion faux pas and smiled at me instead. In the music world, eccentric dress was a marker of genius. Or something.

“Must be a pianist,” I heard one student whisper to another as they passed me on the grand staircase.

“No, he’s gotta be a cellist,” the other whispered back. “They’re all bugfuck.”

The building had far fewer unoccupied rooms than in the fall of 1953. People were practicing in them or taking in musical theory lectures and living a blissful life of art and chair politics in whatever orchestra or symphony they belonged to. And many of the smaller rooms were faculty offices now.

There was nothing available on the second floor, where Gwendolyn originally found me, so I climbed the stairs to the third floor and found an unoccupied classroom. The number of desks that could be tossed at me was unsettling, but I chose one near the door and knelt down next to it, Bible in hand, and spoke aloud.

“Gwendolyn? It’s me, Nigel. I would like to speak with you, please.” I kept going on in that vein for a long while, repeating my name and hers and my wish to speak. My knees began to throb after an hour, and I considered that perhaps Gwendolyn had moved on. It would hardly be surprising—what would keep her lingering here after the supposed betrayal she’d suffered?

“Well,” I said, getting to my feet. “I just wanted to say I’m sorry.”

“Sssssorry for what?”
an ethereal voice whispered, and there, across the room, a red vision floated above the professor’s lectern.

“Sorry I wasn’t there for you when you needed me. When you were trampled by that horse in the street.”

“That is alllll?”

“I’ve never forgiven myself for that. Your death could have been prevented if I had only come out to meet you.”

“Annnd what about the other womannnn?”

“What? There is no other woman. There never has been and never will be.”

“I ssssaw you, Nigel! I ssssaw you with herrr!”
Furniture shifted around, scraping against the tile. I was going to be bombarded with flying desks soon. Before that became too much to bear, I had to convince her that she hadn’t seen her Nigel with another woman—for she truly hadn’t. He’d been faithful to her, as far as I could discover from my historical research.

My plan relied on the idea that ghosts have one thing in common with hounds—they’re not too clear on the passage of time. As far as Gwendolyn was concerned, Nigel was not only still alive, he was still attending his Baptist seminary in the nineteenth century. Things like cars driving on paved roads outside and electricity inside—those simply didn’t penetrate whatever consciousness she had. The only thing that mattered to her was her relationship with Nigel, which was probably why she ignored or simply did not see minor differences in our appearance and voice. If she was ever to have a chance of moving on, she needed to repair that relationship with Nigel and get a sense of closure.

So now I had to be the man himself.

“I don’t know what you saw, Gwendolyn, but whoever it was, it wasn’t me! I would never do that to you. There is a lad here at the college who looks a lot like me, though. Maybe you mistook him for me.”

“Nnno! It was you! You were wearing that suit! Sssshe kept saying your naaame. Sssshe called you Nigel!”

Desks levitated off the floor, twitching and spinning, and one of them rocketed at my head as I shouted a desperate response and ducked. It still clipped me painfully on the forearm I had raised to protect my head. “Gray suits are common as corn, Gwendolyn! And whoever the woman was that you saw called
him
Nigel, not me. Did he say his name was Nigel?”

That made her pause and she forgot about the desks, allowing gravity to pull them down to the floor again with a crash.
“Nnnooo.”

“What did he say his name was?”

“Hhhee didn’t. Just that it wasn’t Nigel.”

“Well, there you have it.”

“Then whyyyy did sssshe call him that?”

“I haven’t the slightest notion. People do strange things, Gwen. I have heard—I wouldn’t know, of course—that some people enjoy role-playing. Perhaps that was what you stumbled across.”

“Rrrole-playing?”

That was a rabbit hole I didn’t want to explore, especially since I was playing a role at that very moment, so I hurried past it. “Yes. I am so very sorry that you have been plagued with doubts, but it gives me so much joy to see you again.”

“Joy ssssseeing me like thisss? Do you nnnot think me damned?”
she said.

“Not at all,” I replied, which I knew had to be the right answer—one hardly tells one’s fiancée that she’s damned—but then I had to think of why that would be so. Traditionally a ghost would be at minimum cursed if not damned in the eyes of a Protestant minister, provided that a minister believed his eyes. But then I recalled that Spiritualism was quite popular in the Victorian era and was bound to have some influence on the Nigel of the past—the idea that spirits not only could communicate with the living but were predisposed to do so. Nigel hadn’t been a black-clad Puritan and he wasn’t some modern Fundamentalist. He’d been a product of his time. “You’re just waiting before you move on. You still have something to do here—something to teach me, or to teach us all. And I want to help you, Gwendolyn.”

“Hhhow?”

“The man who ran you down—I know where to find him. He needs to be stopped before he hurts anyone else with his carelessness.”

“I don’t want revennnge.”

“No, no, me neither. This is simple justice. And peace of mind. I worry about who else he might hurt. You can leave this place, right?”

“Yess, but I don’t want to leave. I want to talk to you.”

“And I want to talk to you. But I think it’s important to stop this man first, and then we can talk all you want.” She nodded her agreement, and then I held up a finger. “Just one moment while I make arrangements? Wait here for me for a small while?”

“I willlll wait. I have been waiting allllready.”

“I’ll be right outside the door and return for you as soon as possible.”

I grinned at her as I climbed to my feet and scooted for the door. Once in the hallway I turned on my cell phone and immediately got pinged with missed calls. One of them was from Hal Hauk, my attorney, with whom I wished to speak anyway, so I thumbed the callback button.

“Atticus, where are you?” he said.

“Toronto. Look, Hal, I need you to get ahold of Leif and ask him for Werner Drasche’s number.”

“What?”

“You can still get in touch with Leif, can’t you?”

“Yes, but who’s this Werner Drasche?”

“Long story. I just need his number right away, okay?”

“Okay, but we’ve been trying to get hold of you regarding something else. Your archdruid wants to start a grove up near Flagstaff, take on six apprentices.”

“Apprentices? Where’d he find them?”

“I found them. They’re the children of pack members, born before their parents were turned.”

“Sounds perfect! Except that things are going to be warming up on the vampire front. You all should look out, take precautions.”

“Were you responsible for this morning’s headlines?”

“Yeah, that was me. Or sort of me. Remember that guy in my shop with the beard who tried to throw a silver knife at you that one time?”

“Oh, yes, that odd rabbi.”

“He’s much more calm now. It was his organization that did all that last night, using information I gave them. I’m moving fast and ambushing them as much as possible, but they’re going to catch up with me eventually. There could be blowback, especially after today, so you guys should watch out.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

A familiar growly voice shouted in the background of the call. Hal said, “Your archdruid says to meet him in Tír na nÓg at the Fae Court. He has something for you.”

“All right, I will, but I have things to do here first. Werner Drasche’s number.”

“Call you back soon.”

It was only five minutes of agonizing waiting in the old chapel before Hal called back with Drasche’s number and gave me Leif’s as well for future reference.

“Leif was only too glad to cooperate,” he said. “Said to tell you to carry on, you’re doing well.”

“Gods below, he’s a smug bastard.”

“What’s he talking about?”

“I’ll have to tell you later. Clock’s ticking.”

We rang off and I dialed the number for the arcane lifeleech. He picked up immediately and answered in German. I replied in English.

“Hello, Werner. It’s your favorite Druid.”

“O’Sullivan! Where are you?”

“Probably not that far from you if you’re in Toronto.”

“I am. Your little stunt will not do you any more good. I’ve sent notice that everyone should move.”

“You must be very popular among the vampires right now, what with compromising their security and making them lug their coffins around. And all those staked vampires on the West Coast. Your people will be scrambling around to keep the reports on all those autopsies secret.”

He cursed in German. “That witch in Africa said you’d never return to Toronto!”

Mekera was a tyromancer, not a witch, but Drasche probably would not care about the distinction. “She told you the truth as best she could see it. I’m just unpredictable. We have that in common, Werner. When you killed my friend Kodiak Black, you left a note that said you wanted to talk, yet all you did in Ethiopia was spray bullets at me. That’s uncommon rudeness, Werner, especially when I spared your life the first time we met.”

“You want to talk? We’re talking now.”

“It’s not good enough somehow. Let’s do it in person. I have something to say to your face, and I bet you’re wearing a fabulous ascot today. Meet me in Massey Hall on the corner of Victoria and Shuter in a half hour. I’ll be inside.”

I disconnected before he could reply. Whether he came alone or with a bunch of hired muscle, the people of Toronto would be safe. He couldn’t leech anything from an empty theatre. I ducked my head back into the classroom and saw Gwendolyn still hovering there, a vision in red.