chapter 9
This Hal Hauk lad is more than he seems. I mean beyond the werewolf business. Or maybe that’s precisely it. In the first few seconds I can tell that he is an older, tougher dog than either Sam Obrist or Ty Pollard, and he hides it extremely well. He is all manners and easiness on the surface, but there’s a punch in the teeth waiting to strike under that suit and handshake. I get the feeling he would rather avoid fights if he can, but once he’s in one, he’ll pound and tear you until you’re bloody paste, and that’s the kind of lad I admire.
Siodhachan introduces the two of us and then he putters away in that horrible car he rented, off to visit a country where women dress in colorful robes and turn into foxes with five tails. Are they women first and foxes second, or is it the other way around? He called her a kitsune, so I guess that’s not human. I’m not too clear on what exactly I witnessed there. I must investigate that country when I can.
Hal walks me up to his office, a second-floor suite off Mill Avenue, situated on a balcony that overlooks a red brick courtyard. In the middle is a solid sphere of stone with water bubbling out of the top. It cascades down the sides into a pool, but the level of water never rises. How is such a thing possible, I wonder? Are werewolves water mages?
The door of his office is made almost entirely of glass, and black letters floating on the surface say MAGNUSSON AND HAUK, ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW. Siodhachan told me that the Magnusson fellow used to be the alpha but died in Asgard, killed by the golden boar of a Norse god. If he was tougher than Hal, I would have liked to meet him.
There are pictures of wolves on the walls of the office, but they are somehow idealized and not a true likeness. I learn later that they are called paintings. There are sculptures too, cast in bronze. A woman with an unnaturally pale face and lips the color of roses sits behind a gigantic block of wood, and I cannot imagine why. When I ask Siodhachan about it later, he says that she is probably something called a receptionist. She smiles at Hal and says, “Good afternoon, Mr. Hauk,” and he grunts at her as we walk down a hallway to the left and enter a room lined with shelves of books. He sits behind a large block of wood and invites me to sit in a chair on the other side of it. He presents me with a driver’s license, a birth certificate, and a passport. From what I can tell, I will never need to use these things for their intended purpose—I will never drive or check in at an airport in other countries. But together they establish to modern humans that I was born forty-three years ago and am therefore permitted to work in this country and participate in the international banking system and be taxed until I die. There is also a fictional work history that I am supposed to memorize.
“So I take these in to a bank and they give me money?”
“No, the money is paid to you in return for work that you perform. What that work might be is up to you. If Atticus is willing to support you for a while, let him. He can afford it. Are you hungry? Let’s go to lunch and bill it to him.”
I chuckled. “I like you already.”
He takes me to a pub called Rúla Búla, claiming that it’s Irish. I had no doubt that it was, but in my day the Irish didn’t have fecking pubs; they had fires. Still, I like the place. It’s furnished in wood and smells of whiskey, and the people are ready to pour you plenty of it. Hal recommends a particular whiskey, and I order it along with lamb stew. He tries to talk me into ordering the famous fish and chips, but that involves a process called frying, which I don’t understand. Stew is something I understand. I’m glad people still eat it.
“So what are your plans?” he asks me.
“I need to absorb and adjust more than anything else,” I says. And, of course, at the time of that conversation I wasn’t all that fluent in English yet. In these writings I am making myself sound more clever than I actually was at that point. But whatever I said made sense to Hal.
“Where are you planning to do that?” he asks. “I mean, I presume you will be on your own for a while. So where are you going after this lunch?”
I shrug. “I have to go to Tír na nóg and say hello to the Tuatha Dé Danann. And while I’m there, I have to figure out who’s trying to bend over me apprentice.”
“You mean Atticus or some other apprentice?”
“Siodhachan, aye. I know he’s been a proper Druid now for longer than I’ve been alive, but I still think of him as me apprentice.”
“And you were speaking metaphorically about the bendingover thing?”
“Aye. But it’s not all that far from the truth if ye think about it. If the Tuatha Dé Danann haven’t changed much since the old days, then there will be lots of drinking and sweating underneath the blankets together. Probably won’t learn a thing while I’m there.”
“Not much of a detective, eh?”
“What’s a detective?”
His eyebrows shoot up and then his mouth spreads into a huge smile, which tells me I’m in for something. “It’s someone who looks at a crime scene and figures out from clues who could have committed the crime. If they’re successful, they accuse someone and try to prove that they are guilty and deserve to be punished. It’s my job to defend the accused and prove that they are innocent—or at least cast doubt on their guilt.”
“You’ll have to define a lot of words for me there,” I says, and he smiles again and spends the rest of lunch giving me a basic introduction to criminal justice. Then he says to hell with it, I’ll call it a day, why don’t you come over to my house and I’ll show you the most famous detective in human history.
“He lives with you?”
“No, he’s a figure out of stories. Think you’ll like it.”
I see no reason to refuse, because while meeting with the Tuatha Dé Danann is necessary, it’s not an urgent business. Hal settles our bill with a rectangle of plastic called a credit card, says I’ll need to get one of those soon, and then we walk to his car: a wee silver box, low to the ground and more pleasing to the eye than the thing Siodhachan rented. The paint job matches his tie, and I remember Siodhachan saying something about how the leaders of werewolf packs often wear silver for symbolic reasons. Sam Obrist didn’t, but maybe I caught him on his day off.
When we get in and fasten the seat belts, he presses a button on the steering wheel and then says, “Call office.” I’m wondering if he’s talking to me when a ringing noise comes from the middle of the car, clicks off, and then a woman’s voice says, “Magnusson and Hauk.” I try to conceal my surprise and casually look around the car to see where she might be hiding. There’s no room for anybody in the car but us.
“Nicole, it’s Hal. Clear my schedule for the rest of the day, please, and invite the pack over to my place at their convenience to meet Owen Kennedy.”
“Absolutely, Mr. Hauk,” the woman says. Where was she? Behind the console? Siodhachan said there was an engine in the front part of a car underneath the hood, and this was supposed to give the car its animating force, but her voice seemed to be coming from there. Then I realize that this is the voice of the woman with rose-red lips in Hal’s office.
“Thank you.” There’s a beep, and then he looks over and smirks as he puts the car in gear. “Don’t worry. She’s part of the pack.”
That wasn’t my worry at all. My worry was that my ignorance had me stuck in a bog when everyone else was on dry land and dancing to pipes. It’s no fun being stuck in a bog.
Hal’s house is perched on a hill of granite and sandstone that the locals call Camelback Mountain. Big sprawling place with a swimming pool in the back. He talks to the house as he walks through, and lights come on even though it’s not dark outside yet, then strange music plays, using instruments I have never heard before. He gets me a cold beer in the kitchen and leads me to a room with couches and a large-screen television.
“You’ve seen one of these before?” Hal asks, and takes off his coat but leaves the shirt and silver tie. I reply, yes, they had some smaller ones in that brewery in Flagstaff. “Good. I’m going to show you a chap who uses his mind, his vast knowledge of facts, to deduce what is going on around him. Might strike you as Druidic. Maybe.” He speaks into the air, and the music stops and the television turns on. It’s like he’s creating bindings but without any help from the earth, following no laws of Druidry. The magic of these people is a wonder.
Siodhachan tried to explain some of it to me—made me say electricity and technology three times each. But he pointed out that I can make their magic technology work without understanding exactly how it works, and this is largely how people function now. That idea—the idea that you can use magic without knowing how it works—is fundamentally different from how Druids do things. There is no way to perform Druidry without knowing how first. To even attempt it would be dangerous. I am beginning to think that much of what these people are doing in the name of convenience might be dangerous also. Magic does not happen free of cost.
Hal explains that the show is called Sherlock and that it was made some years ago by the Britons, some tribe from the island next to Ireland that rose to prominence after my time. A Roman outpost called Londinium grew into a huge city called London, and this Sherlock Holmes solves crimes there. Except not really.
It opens with explosions and people diving to the ground, and Hal says that’s how modern humans conduct wars, with guns and with vehicles that carry bigger guns around on them. So this war veteran, John Watson, joins up with Sherlock to solve crimes.
The plot of the first episode involves phones—more modern magic—and the sending and receiving of messages on them. I keep making Hal stop the show and explain what I’m looking at.
“Do I need to get myself one of those fecking phone things?”
He considers and then says, “I wouldn’t imagine you’d need one in the short term.”
“Good. If you had said yes, I would have shat kine.”
Sherlock’s a clever lad, no doubt, and I think that Hal is right: He takes a Druidic approach to his problems. Unlike Watson and the other people around him, he pays attention to how things work and how humans behave.
“What did you think?” Hal asks after it ends, and I wonder aloud if there are any more of these shows. He says, aye, there are more, and he puts on the next one. I don’t have to interrupt him quite as much this time to ask questions, but we are interrupted by the arrival of Hal’s pack members, who trickle in as they get off work and make their way to Camelback Mountain. The first to arrive is a healer, but they’re known as doctors now and you’re supposed to call them Doctor before you say their surname. He’s a handsome lad named Dr. Snorri Jodursson, and I can tell he spends more time than he should styling his hair. He doesn’t have a wedding ring—something Siodhachan said I should look for—and once I meet more of the werewolves, I notice that almost none of them do. Apparently, only shallow, informal relationships with humans are allowed, to preserve the secret of the pack. And when a human gets too close to the truth or starts to notice how the werewolf is never seen during full moons, the relationship is over. If the human persists, then the werewolf in question is uprooted and sent to join another pack—new identity, new job, the works. On a somewhat regular basis, entire packs trade territories with another. A werewolf who wants a lasting relationship must find one in the pack, therefore, or perhaps with another creature of the magical world that already knows about them and is used to keeping secrets. Dr. Jodursson’s hair tells me he isn’t looking for a lasting relationship. It’s flashy and indicates that he might belong to a tribe of modern men that Siodhachan told me about called the Douchebags.
Turns out the doctor is a big fan of Sherlock too. His favorite character is the woman who works at the hospital morgue. I cannot stand her. I am not sure if this reveals more about him or me.
One of the things Siodhachan told me to expect after meeting the fox lady from Japan was a greater range of skin tones and bone structures than I was used to seeing in the old days. He was nervous about it, like he expected me to disapprove of the way Gaia had created people.
“Is there something wrong with them? Are they witches? Abominations?”
“No, no,” he says.
“Why are you so worried, then?”
“I … well, you see, history …” Then he stops and shakes his head. “Never mind.” He smiles, relieved now, and says, “That’s perfect.”
Punch me stones if I know what he was talking about. But I finally get to meet a variety of people, once the rest of Hal’s pack shows up. The core of his group is from Iceland, of “assorted Scandinavian stock,” he says, but over the years the pack has taken on new members from everywhere, transplants from this part of the world or that. Efiah is a tall woman from someplace called C?te d’Ivoire; Farid is originally from Egypt, where his brother, Yusuf, is the alpha of the Cairo Pack; and Esteban is a small, quick man from Colombia. I have to admit that me heart beats a little faster when I meet one of Hal’s original pack, a tough woman named Greta with braided yellow hair that falls down to her waist. When Hal introduces me as Siodhachan’s archdruid, her eyes flash with anger and her mouth presses together as if she’s biting her tongue. It can’t be me causing a reaction like that, so it must be Siodhachan.
At first I think maybe he’s broken her heart at some point, but then I remember him mentioning her in that endless story of his while I was fixing his tattoos. Greta had been there at Tony Cabin and was wounded by the Sisters of the Three Auroras, who had kidnapped Hal and used silver weapons when the pack came to rescue him. She watched several of her pack mates die that day. And later Siodhachan had taken off to Asgard with her alpha, Gunnar Magnusson, and come back with his body. She had good reason to despise him, and now I had just been introduced as the man who taught him everything he knew. Fecking wonderful.
Siodhachan’s advice about disguising my loyalties from the Tuatha Dé Danann comes back to me, and I figure it might be wiser here as well. I couldn’t deny any connection with him, but it would be best to bury any notion that I thought him incapable of doing any wrong. We pause the video and I announce my need for another beer. Everyone congregates in the kitchen around an island of granite, and I tell them stories of Siodhachan’s greatest cock-ups back when he was me apprentice, asking them to forgive me poor skills at the language. When I tell them about that one time with the goat and the Roman leather skirt stolen from Gaul, they laugh so hard that some of them cry, and Greta simply gives up trying to stand and falls down on the floor, rolling around and laughing until she’s gasping for breath. She almost drops her beer and creates a minor tragedy, but thank goodness she has the sense to hand it off to Hal before she loses it completely.
This is reassuring to me. Amidst all the fancy plastic and unnatural materials of the modern world, some things still endure. Goat shenanigans are still fecking funny.
The sun set without me noticing, and it feels wrong when I finally figure it out; you can’t tell time well inside these modern buildings. Farid asks Hal if he should throw together some dinner. Hal says, sure, Farid, dazzle us. Farid raids the refrigerator and recruits Efiah to help him. He’s a chef at some restaurant that specializes in “Sino–Mexican fusion cuisine.” I have no earthly clue what that means and they chop up vegetables I have never seen before, but when the food is finished, it tastes good to me. We drink more and the wolves all share how they were first transformed. Most of them admit that they shat or pissed themselves when they were first bitten and that at the beginning they considered the moon’s light to be a curse, but with the gift of the pack and the fullness of time they came to view it as a blessing.
I nod and approve: This should be the nature of power. It must always be acquired at great personal cost. Thus the Druids have the Baolach Cruatan, and the twelve years of training, and the three months of binding to the earth. After the dinner, we are faintly exhausted from entertaining one another and ready to be entertained by other means. We return to the sitting area and spread ourselves around. Farid brings around glasses of whiskey, and I enjoy the sound of ice clinking against glass. Greta sits next to me on a couch and answers my questions in a low voice, and I keep asking them so that she will keep talking. Laughter swirls around the room like the ice in me drink, and though there is much in this time that confuses and worries me, I have to admit that I like werewolves. They’re hearty and loyal and believe in the many benefits of recreational arse-kicking.
After the second episode of Sherlock concludes, everyone goes into the kitchen for refills or visits the bathroom or goes outside for a smoke. Greta remains with me on the couch.
“So,” she says.
“So.”
“You’re not a smart-ass know-it-all like Atticus.”
“Ha! You mean Siodhachan? He’s a thief, is what he is. Robs you of your patience within five minutes of meeting him. The fact that he’s still alive is a testament to me restraint. I wanted to thrash the shite out of him on so many occasions, and only did it maybe ten percent of the time, heh heh.”
Her eyes twinkle, and her mouth, which had been drawn tight in disapproval at our introduction a few hours ago, relaxes and widens in a smile. “Yes, I think it’s true that he’s a thief of patience.” She looks down and her expression twists at a sudden thought, and she spends a bit of time involved with some kind of internal struggle. I wait in silence until her eyebrows fly up and she shrugs, as if to say, “To hell with it.” She moves closer to me, puts a hand on my shoulder, and whispers in my ear. “Tell me: Is it also true that you haven’t had sex for more than two thousand years?”
From my point of view, of course, it hadn’t been that long. But I didn’t need Siodhachan to tell me that she had just made the first move.
“It sure feels like it,” I says.