Three Slices (3 page)

Tell you what. If you see them, I’ll let you join in.

We crept as best as we could through the marsh; my feet would occasionally make squidgy noises in the sucking mud, and without the covering drone of the local fauna, it sounded abnormally loud. I was grateful that we had a blanket of darkness to disguise us.

I had cast night vision on us both so that we could see well, and we were alert for any noise above the swish of our own passage. Something else was alert to us.

Hey, Oberon. I’ll bet you a sausage it’s a cheetah.

I swear I don’t. I’m not cheating. You will probably figure it out before I do just based on what you smell.

That was all the warning I got before a vampire leapt at me out of the grass from the left, arms outstretched, and tackled me into the mire. I threw up a forearm to prevent access to my throat but couldn’t manage anything else, as my sword arm was trapped beneath me. I got fangs in my arm and long, sharp nails digging into my shoulders.

Stay back, Oberon!
A vampire would kill him without a thought and I didn’t want to give him the chance, especially when I might be able to kill the vampire with nothing more than a thought. Since vampires weren’t living creatures, Gaia let us unbind them to their component parts. The trick to it was staying alive long enough to speak the unbinding. I’d almost died that way at the hands and fangs of a vampire almost as old as I was. Since then, I’d been working on a charm like the others around my neck that would execute a binding via mental command. The problem was, I had so few vampires to practice on to perfect it.

Granuaile, my partner, asked me why I couldn’t simply practice on dead bodies, since that’s essentially what vampires were.

“They’re a bit more than that, though,” I replied. “A mere dead body doesn’t walk around and consume blood. Vampires have magic to them that gives their bodies animation and strength, and that gray aura with the two red power centers in the head and heart. You have to unbind that as well as the raw matter of the body. That’s in the Old Irish words of the spell, remember—it attacks their magic first and
then
their bodies so that the magic cannot rebind to them. So, I need real vampires to practice on if I want to make this work.”

On my single previous attempt, I’d caused the targeted vampire to experience something akin to mild digestive discomfort. He looked surprised but not especially pained. That had been encouraging, though—the targeting was working, at least, and having some effect. I’d adjusted the binding and craftsmanship of the charm since then and hoped it would work now. I triggered it as the vampire withdrew his fangs from my arm and dove again for my throat. The spell hit him like a punch to the solar plexus.

He coughed blood and convulsed, his eyes squeezing shut for a second and then opening wide in surprise. He clutched his chest like he was having a heart attack, and I was able to push him off and roll away, muttering the words to the unbinding. The vampire recovered quickly and got up in time to launch himself at me once more, but now I had my guard up and I wasn’t going down again. I sidestepped his charge and finished the unbinding, after which he came apart with a splash inside his clothes and his head exploded into a mist of blood and bone dust.

A better question would be “What’s a vampire doing out here?”
Or maybe how I’d get clean anytime soon. I was covered in mud, which tended to happen when you rolled around in it, and I had some wounds that needed healing; I tripped my healing charm and let Gaia get to work on me.

Yeah, thanks, I’m all right. His bite will heal up quickly. But we’d better move a bit faster ourselves. I’m worried about Mekera now.

And my charm wasn’t quite there yet. It had clearly impacted the power center around the vampire’s heart but hadn’t destroyed it, and nothing happened to his head until I completed the full unbinding verbally. I would just have to keep working on it. Changing a structured verbal unbinding to a mental one in close proximity to the cold iron of my amulet was so tricky that it usually took me years to perfect a charm.

Keep your nose open for more vampires,
I told Oberon,
but let’s pick up the pace a little.

My hound easily lengthened his stride to match mine and we emerged from the marsh into a slightly dryer grassland that would, at a higher elevation, turn into a shrubby savanna. It had been so long since I’d been to this part of the world that there were few tethered trees nearby, and the Fae rangers had apparently ignored their duties here to some extent, necessitating a long run to our destination.

Mekera lived off the grid by choice. She’d tried modern conveniences and said, “Yep, that’s convenient,” but pointed out that all electricity did was keep her in cities around lots of other people, and she liked her people in very small doses. After World War II and the Italian occupation of Ethiopia, she didn’t even want a small dose—I think something happened to her during that time, and I missed it since I’d been busy in the French Pyrenees helping people escape the Third Reich. She wouldn’t talk about it when I came to visit her, either. I got the sense from her glare that she couldn’t believe that the world had come to ask one more thing of her. But since I was one of the few people who could grant a particular wish of hers, she offered me a deal: Set her up someplace where she could do the hermit thing right for a while, and she’d practice her art on my behalf, predicting the safest places in the world to hide from Aenghus Óg in the coming decades. A lone rocky outcropping in the middle of the savanna, a sort of rebel hill that looked down on herds of ruminants, practically begged to be a secret lair. And so, with the help of the local elemental, I created one for her, carving an entrance out of the rock that would be invisible from the air and provide her with a shaded front porch. Everything else was underground, cool and sealed with nonporous stone so that she didn’t get flooded during the rainy season. She had a well of clear, clean water, the bottom level of her hideaway was cold enough to keep her perishables safe, and she did quite well for herself.

In the nineties, before I moved to Tempe and adopted Oberon, she gave in to modernity and sent me a letter in San Diego—a feat in itself, since I had only been there a couple weeks and told no one where I was—asking me to upgrade her place with electricity. She wanted a stove and some other modern accouterments and needed windmills to make it happen. It was a challenging project to create a functional kitchen and laboratory for her, but thoroughly enjoyable. Especially since my reward for this work was a precise divination on where to find my best friend. I had spent too long without an animal companion and felt it was time to do things right with a hound. Without a friend to trust you could sour on modern life, sour on the world, and withdraw from it like Mekera had.

“There is an Irish wolfhound rescue ranch in Massachusetts,” she told me back then, when the United States was consumed with its president’s infidelities. “And if you arrive there on this precise date, you will catch him immediately after he arrives.”

That last part was important because rescue ranches always spay and neuter the animals they take in. I caught Oberon before his trip to the vet, and Granuaile similarly caught Orlaith before she could be spayed. The two of them would have puppies someday and I was looking forward to it.

I’d never told Oberon how I’d come to find him there or what fate awaited him had I been a day or two later. I figured he would have nightmares about it.

Even though it was early morning and the sky was still gray with only the barest hint of sunrise, Mekera was sitting outside in a sling chair when we arrived on her front stoop, our chests heaving from a pleasant run unaided by the earth.

“Hello, Mekera.”

There was no welcome for an old acquaintance in her expression, and her voice was sullen. “Huh. Thought you’d be along sooner rather than later. Maybe not covered in mud, but still: good timing. The coffee’s almost ready. And there’s cheese and injera if you’re hungry,” she said, referring to a sourdough flatbread popular in Ethiopia. She rose from her chair, dressed in a long white linen tunic that split at the sides past her hips, with a two-inch-wide band of green and gold embroidery around the neck that met in the middle, fell in a single strip down to her knees, and then exploded into an Abyssinian cross design. It was a style of clothing favored by Habesha people, who were among the world’s first converts to Christianity long ago. Mekera had at one time been a
debtera
in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, though I think she gave that up at the beginning of the twentieth century. She kept her hair natural and maintained the appearance of a woman in her forties. She had something like khakis tucked into worn and scuffed calf-high, dark brown boots that she wore as low-grade armor against snakebites. She paused with her hand on the door handle and glanced back at Oberon. “Big dog. That the one I told you about last time I saw you?”

“Yes.”

“He won’t be eating my breakfast or peeing on it, will he?”

“No. He’s very well-behaved.”

I’m sure there are wild dogs about. Not sure if they’re that wild, though
.

“Well, come on in and sit down, then,” Mekera said, pulling open the steel door and audibly releasing a puff of coffee-scented air from inside.

Yes. She’s the reason I found you when I did.

We followed her down a stairway into the main living area, which was comprised of a stone table and four wooden chairs I had bound together myself, and which led to the kitchen that I had expanded in the nineties to include modern appliances. She still had a stock of candles, I saw, but had switched to lamps with high-efficiency bulbs for the majority of her illumination.

“You were expecting me?” I asked, washing mud off my hands and arms in her sink while she poured coffee. We both took it black.

“Yes,” she said, and then took the mugs over to her table and waited for me there while I dried off with a kitchen towel. We took appreciative first sips before she continued. “I didn’t see you in a divination, though—it was just a logical probability based on past events. Did you catch the thrall outside?”

I frowned at her. “No. What thrall?”

“The vampire thrall. He’s been stalking me despite my strict no-stalking policy. Watches me during the day. Watches my door, anyway. Probably saw you come in here.”

“No, I didn’t see him,” I said, cursing myself for not being more cautious in my approach. “But I think we got the vampire before dawn—that’s why we’re muddy.”

An eyebrow rose on Mekera’s face to indicate mild surprise. “You got the vampire? Well, it won’t matter. The thrall will call you in and we’ll have a whole bunch more vampires here before the night is through. Probably just saw my last sunrise. It’s no wonder I couldn’t see what was going to happen today with you around. That amulet of yours messes everything up.”

“I know. That’s partly why I’m here. I don’t trust my own divination anymore. I was never terribly good at it to begin with.”

Mekera pointed with a finger at the base of my throat. “It’s that cold iron. Don’t you ever take it off?”

“I can, but then I have to forgo its protection. Risky business for me these days. And since I’d like to know about my own future and I’ll certainly be wearing it in the future—”

“You can’t rely on what you see while you don’t have it on,” Mekera finished.

“Right.”

“You came a long way to get your fortune told, my friend. All the soothsayers on the other side of the planet too busy?”

I’d been listening to the Morrigan most recently, but she was gone, and the situation amongst the Tuatha Dé Danann right now was less than optimal. “I don’t trust them.”

“Huh. Meaning you trust me? You shouldn’t.”

“Why not? That tip you gave me in the sixteenth century regarding coffee as the next big commodity was spot-on.” I jabbed a finger at my mug. “This made me the bulk of my fortune. I was the world’s quietest coffee baron.”

Mekera grunted. “That so? And what happened to all that fortune?”

“It’s a long story, but a man named Werner Drasche got access to my accounts and liquidated them. The money’s all gone.”

“Don’t have to tell me the story. I already know it. I’m the one who told him to go after Kodiak Black if he wanted to get to you.” I flinched and a cold feeling collected in the pit of my stomach.