<Yeah! That’s right!>
I wondered how the hotel staff would explain to the police what had happened. I wondered if maybe I’d been caught on a security video, unbinding vampires—a distinct possibility and one I hadn’t worried about as I had in the past. If that encounter was recorded, it could prove problematic, but I doubted it would make the news. There were too many uncomfortable questions for police to answer: Did I have a new, horrifying weapon that liquefied or exploded people on contact, or were those victims not exactly human? Or both? They couldn’t let that get out until they had the answers. Governments have been in the habit of suppressing information “for the population’s own protection” for centuries now; it’s how gods and monsters can still walk the earth and the mass of humanity thinks of them as mere stories for their entertainment, an escape from a lifetime of toil to pay the bills. Maybe they would call in the real-life equivalent of Fox Mulder to investigate this. Or the authorities might be so desperate to catch me that I would find a screen cap of my face on every television in Germany.
Either way, the vampires who escaped wouldn’t remain in Berlin for long, and I figured I shouldn’t either. A hot shower, a real change of clothes, and a few hours of blissful slumber far away from sirens were what I needed. A reunion with Granuaile would be perfect, if I could catch up with her, but we had no home base until the place in Oregon was ready, and I doubted I’d be able to divine her location now if she’d secured a divination cloak from the Polish coven, as Perun had suggested. Not that I had my divination wands on me anyway.
“I’m up for sleeping someplace warm,” I told Oberon as we jogged back to Tiergarten in the rain. “We need to visit the Southern Hemisphere.”
<Fine by me. How about someplace dry in Australia? Alice Springs?>
“That sounds perfect right now.”
CHAPTER 20
Knowing that there’s something ye should be doing but can’t is like having an itchy arsehole ye want to scour clean but you’re at Court and that sort of thing is frowned upon. I should be helping Brighid hunt down Fand and Manannan Mac Lir, but I have apprentices to protect and teach. I suppose I should take comfort in the fact that this is something I can and should do. It should be fecking joyous. I think it would be, except for me itching.
I tried to tell Brighid what happened, but her gaggle of Fae chamberlains wouldn’t rouse her. She was excessively wearied after some trip to Svartálfheim, they said. She left explicit instructions not to be disturbed unless an actual physical attack was under way, and me wishing to speak to her didn’t qualify. So I wrote a note.
And I don’t try to see Flidais about the problem, because what if it really isn’t Flidais I’m talking to but Fand in a glamour? Best to let Brighid deal with it as she wishes, when she wishes, and bear the itching in the meantime.
Divination is no help. I cast wands, watch the birdies for some augury, and all I get is the vague idea that they’re hiding in a swamp. But no indication of where that swamp might be, not even if it’s on this plane or one of the Irish ones or somewhere else.
So it’s work for me now, instead of worry.
I’ve started the kids on both Latin and English. Nouns for the earth and sky and sun and adjectives to describe them, things like that. Verbs for things you can do outside, and we do those things, like run and eat lunch and smell pine needles. And I start them using Latin to talk to Colorado—phrases that they repeat verbatim but backed by thoughts and images, to begin the process of separating headspaces. I’ll start them on Irish in a couple of years.
The house has an unfinished basement, and the pack has been working on it during the day and I’ve begun working on it for a couple hours after dinner each night, warding it every way I know how. The promised help from Tír na nóg hasn’t arrived yet, but I hope it will soon. It’s going to be a sanctuary for the kids during full moons and all other emergencies, like troops of trolls barging through your land, smelling like exactly the wrong cheese. We’ve already coached them in what the full-moon drill is, after that troll business.