Besieged

But by the time he got there in the fall of 1849, the easy grab-’n’-go gold was all gone. You had to dig a shaft or pan for it, and there was plenty of competition. Stefano Pastore didn’t have the patience for such labor. Once the snow fell in the Sierra Nevada, he spent the winter in San Francisco, watching the miners who struck it rich burn away their fortunes in gambling or grow them by investing in large chunks of real estate or business ventures. He didn’t think them particularly brilliant or deserving of their fortunes: They’d just been lucky enough to get there first. That thought festered and convinced him that working hard for his fortune was a sucker’s game. So when spring arrived in 1850 and the miners headed for the hills again with picks and pans, he stayed behind to make his own luck, with the help of a pet demon. He probably thought, What the hell, my last summoning gave Sicilians sixteen months of freedom under the rule of Ruggero Settimo, and I could use sixteen months or more of being ridiculously rich.

So he got his candles and salt and all the other paraphernalia he needed for a major summoning and carefully inscribed his circles and wards on the floor and waited for the proper phase of the moon to spin around on April 26. He completed the summoning just fine—I was chilling out at the southern tip of South America on that date and got the report from Sequoia, the elemental for that stretch of California coast from the Bay Area up to the Klamath Mountains.

But it wasn’t long before the report stating the simple fact of the summoning became an outright request for aid. Sequoia woke me in the dead of night, in fact. //Druid required now// the call came, shuddering up my body and filtering into my consciousness. //Large demon free//

I’d been staying out of North America as much as possible once the Old World discovered the New World, because it quite frankly depressed me. Gripped by the unshakable conviction that they were perfectly justified in doing so—that, in fact, it was all their god’s plan somehow and he’d be pleased by their behavior—Europeans were busy wiping out Native Americans and enslaving Africans and doing whatever they could to exclude all nonwhite people from sharing in the riches to be gained by exploiting the continent’s abundant natural resources. I would have been in a constant rage if I had to deal with that level of stupid cruelty on a daily basis—and there was nothing I could do about it if I didn’t want Aenghus óg to find me and deprive the earth of its only protector or get myself killed some other way while trying to protect humanity from itself—so my best option for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to chill out where other people were not.

Sequoia’s call forced me to shift into the redwoods near San Francisco and witness the great American Gold Rush. Once I got into town, I noticed immediately that I wasn’t dressed properly, and so did everyone else: It was the rare individual who wore a sword instead of a six-shooter. But I’d worry about blending in later.

I made my way to the boardinghouse where Stefano Pastore had taken a room. Sequoia directed me to where the portal in the planes had been opened. She could tell me the equivalent spot on the earth where the drain on her resources had occurred, but I discovered that it was a three-story building and had to search the rooms on each level until I found the gory aftermath on the third floor.

Stefano Pastore’s body lay sprawled in a pool of his own blood, his throat crushed and his blue swollen tongue hanging out of his mouth, eyes staring at the ceiling. The blood originated from a bonus and unnecessary disembowelment, considering his crushed airway. It had congealed and darkened now, the oxygen all gone, and stained the ring of salt he lay in. There was another, smaller ring nearby, into which he had summoned the demon. This was the setup diagrammed in The Greater Key of Solomon, albeit with some minor changes. He was supposed to be protected in one ring of salt while the demon was supposed to be contained in the other, but both rings had been deliberately broken by the toe of someone’s boot. That spurred plenty of questions. Had it been Pastore’s own boot? If so, he’d win an award for one of the most elaborate ritual suicides in history. But if it hadn’t been Pastore, who had broken the rings and gotten away with it? There weren’t any other bodies in the room. So the demon either purposely let the person live or he possessed the person. I was betting on the latter, because so-called “large demons” are rarely up for buddy capers with a random human. Tying up victims with their own intestines is much more their idea of a good time. And besides, demons can’t walk around without people noticing the smell. The only way they can pass undetected is to do what we saw them do in Kansas: possess a human, or animate a person’s corpse, and let the human fa?ade disguise the demon’s true nature. And as long as that possessed human wore boots or walked on a floor separated from the earth, Sequoia wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the demon’s location for me.

I needed more information, but there wasn’t a convenient journal lying around in Pastore’s hand to tell me which demon he’d summoned. Which meant I’d have to wait for the demon to start whipping up some chaos and try to catch up.

There were two problems with that plan: One, San Francisco was already pretty chaotic without demonic help—there were sixty thousand men and two thousand women at the time—and, two, none of those people would automatically report anything strange to me. Nobody knew who I was. But they would report to Sheriff Jack Coffee Hays, San Francisco’s first official sheriff, who had just been elected three and a half weeks earlier, a barkeep told me.

The barkeep was quick to add, as he poured me a shot of rye, that Jack Coffee Hays had seen some shit. He’d been a Texas Ranger and then a colonel in the Mexican-American War and had somehow survived more than his fair share of fights. He wasn’t easily impressed.

Approaching him for help in this matter would take some finesse. If I walked up to him as I was—barefoot, in homespun clothes I had made myself—he’d dismiss me immediately. To be taken seriously I’d need a new outfit, something that said I had plenty of money and therefore deserved respect. Nothing made one so respectable as the appearance of wealth, and in almost any country, in any century, clothes were the easiest way to achieve that appearance. Except finding such clothing in San Francisco at that moment would be problematic. I didn’t have time to wait for something bespoke. I needed something much sooner, and since I wanted someone else to find Pastore’s body and report it to the sheriff before I met him, I took the opportunity to return to the redwoods and shift planes into Central Park in New York City. New York had a ready-made clothing industry by then, and hundreds if not thousands of tailors were doing alterations in the city. Many of them were Irish immigrants, in fact, because the potato famine was in progress, and many of them were working out of their homes for next to nothing. Once I had my basics from a men’s shop and stopped at a barber’s to make myself presentable, I spent a lovely couple of hours with the Flanagan family while Mrs. Flanagan worked on my alterations. I paid her nine times the going rate to set aside her other work, and I brought in a week’s worth of groceries besides and a bottle of the Irish for when they needed some fortitude down the road. I traded stories and laughs with Mr. Flanagan and his wee boys, and every one of us was happier and richer for the experience when I bid them farewell.