Epilogue
I am unsure why modern men are so reluctant to admit that they enjoy snuggling. When they scoff at it or claim to despise it, they’re lying, of course, trying to conform to some bullshit code of machismo. Regardless of one’s lifespan, there are few pleasures in it like a lazy morning under comfy blankets with someone you love. Granuaile’s soft smile and the early beams of sunlight on her freckled cheeks, all healed now, were so beautiful that I suspected that my day had already been made. In fact, odds were that it wouldn’t get any better, so I enjoyed the view while I could and felt grateful to be alive. Moments like that never grow old.
The moment ended, however, when the hounds demanded attention after completing their morning stretches and suggested with the force of command that we should all go running in the forest. When we didn’t respond with sufficient eagerness, they leapt onto the bed and delivered a punitive slobbering.
“Gah!” Granuaile spat. “All right, Orlaith, I’m getting up! Or I will if you let me! Let’s go.”
We tiptoed out of the cabin together so as not to disturb Owen, who had returned from Tír na nóg last night after a week of service to Brighid and Manannan, then gone into town and gotten hammered before crashing on our couch. The chill air of a November dawn felt bracing, and I relished a carefree romp after weeks of stress and uncertainty.
“I’m feeling a bit of Touchstone this morning,” I said to Granuaile as the hounds bounded forth in a playful lope, knowing we’d catch up. She grinned at me.
“Are you, now? The clown from As You Like It? Go on, then, let’s hear it.”
I cleared my throat, placed one hand over my heart and raised the other in front of me in the likeness of a terrible actor, and pronounced with suitable melodrama: “We that are true lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly.”
“Ah, well done,” Granuaile said. “Let me see.” Her eyes smiled at Oberon and Orlaith nipping at each other under the trees. “I think I am in a slightly different mood. I’m looking forward to the four of us running together again, now that we are all fully recovered. And so I answer you with Whitman: I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain’d, / I stand and look at them long and long.”
Such perfection of thought and sentiment passing over shining lips had to be acknowledged. “I love you,” I said.
“I know,” she replied, and then laughed because she got to deliver the Han Solo line. “Catch me if you can.” She shifted to a jaguar and shot into the forest, purposely plowing between Oberon and Orlaith to trigger their instinct to give chase. I shifted to a wolfhound and joined in the fun, our tails wagging and tongues lolling as we wove through the pine and spruce and white-barked trees and our paws stirred drifts of fallen aspen leaves.
That was one of my finer mornings in recent memory. That we lived it under the threat of Loki showing up at any time did not diminish it in the slightest.
In fact, in one sense, that may have made it even better. I have spent so much of the past few hundred years running away whenever I sensed a threat that I forgot how good it feels to be rooted. And to be rooted is not the same thing at all as being tied down. To be rooted is to say, here am I nourished and here will I grow, for I have found a place where every sunrise shows me how to be more than what I was yesterday, and I need not wander to feel the wonder of my blessing. And when you are rooted, defending that space ceases to be an obligation or a duty and becomes more of a desire. I was feeling that way about our cabin in Colorado. Snow would fall soon, vast white blankets of it, and we probably needed to find a different place to winter, but I would lay down plenty of wards on the cabin before we left. I wanted to enjoy more mornings like that one.
Even Owen, when we returned, had nothing negative to say over breakfast. I was reluctant to broach the subject of settling him elsewhere, because the pleasantness would evaporate when I did. It turned out the evaporation was to come from another source entirely: a call from Hal Hauk.
“We need to talk,” he said. “The Tempe police are asking about your past again.”
“Aren’t I supposed to be dead to them?” I said. “Atticus O’Sullivan died years ago according to the American authorities.”
“Yeah, that’s why they’re talking to me, because they’ve heard from another source that you’re still alive, and they’re kind of curious as to whether it’s true and, if so, where you are.”
“Oh, splendid,” I said. “All right, give me three hours.”
“How about you give me three hours instead? It’s a full moon tonight and we have to get out of town anyway. Thought I’d bring my people up to join with Sam and Ty in Flagstaff. Meet you at their place?”
“All right, that sounds good.”
Owen was as anxious to see Sam and Ty again as we were to leave him there. Almost as soon as we arrived, he went out to the forest with much of the Tempe pack and all of the Flagstaff pack for another round of friendly brawling with Ty. I noticed that Greta went with them, and I believe I saw her smile for the first time: It was when she laid eyes on Owen. I privately bet that he would decide to settle in Arizona somewhere and hoped that harmony had finally found them both.
Hal and Farid remained behind in the house with Granuaile, the hounds, and me. Granuaile and I sat across the kitchen table from Hal, who slapped a manila folder down on the table between us. Farid was keeping the hounds’ attention in the food-prep area by marinating a massive amount of tri-tip and whipping up sundry side dishes for two hungry werewolf packs. Regardless of what news Hal had for me, at least lunch would be brilliant.
“Remember that accountant you told me about, Craig Black?” Hal growled. “The guy who’s in charge of the bulk of your fortune?”
Something in my gut twisted and made a tiny noise. This wasn’t going to be good. “Yes?” I said, reaching for the folder.
“Well, I tried to contact him like you said. And when I did so, I suddenly found detectives crawling up my ass.”
“Why?”
“Because Mr. Black is dead, and he found a unique way to die that has the police all kinds of curious.” He chucked his chin at the folder. “Go on and look. Picture’s on top.”
I flipped open the folder and let my eyes fall on the glossy photo of my old friend in a close-up. Kodiak Black’s corpse looked creepy but no more so than most bodies; I couldn’t discern from the picture what made his manner of passing unique. His eyes were open and he was fully clothed in flannel shirt and jeans; his face was slick and puffy and unnaturally pasty, with tiny blue capillaries tracing spidery paths underneath the eyes. His dark hair looked freeze-dried and brittle, as if it could crumble and blow away with a puff of wind.
“Some kind of new disease?” I ventured.
“No, it was murder. We just don’t know what killed him.”
“How do you know it was murder?”
“Because the witnesses all say so. This was a few days ago up in Anchorage. He was leaving an alehouse, all smiles, when he was ambushed outside. Place called Humpy’s.”
That was enough to draw Oberon’s attention. "Humpy’s? That sounds like it’s hound-friendly! Can we visit?"
The name probably has something to do with salmon, Oberon. Some types of salmon grow humps on their backs right before they spawn.
"Are you really going to crush my beautiful dream with a boring fish fact?"
“I don’t understand, Hal. You’re saying he was killed in public but you don’t know how?”
He shrugged. “I wasn’t there. Report says about ten people saw him die, not least of whom was his girlfriend, who stated he was perfectly fine one minute—he looked healthy and hadn’t complained of any problems—and then he began to convulse. After three seconds of that, he fell over onto the sidewalk, his face swelled, and he stopped breathing. Total time from onset of symptoms to death was less than ten seconds. We don’t know of any diseases that can do that.”
“Toxicology?” Granuaile asked.
Hal gave a tight shake of his head. “It’s too early to have the results back yet. They do those tests in five to ten minutes of screen time on TV, but in real life those tests take weeks to months to complete. I know the police are counting on something showing up so they can say he was poisoned, but I’ve never heard of a poison that turns on violent convulsions like a switch. Only thing like that I’ve ever heard of is epilepsy. Mr. Black wasn’t epileptic, was he?”
“No,” I said. “Witnesses said his face swelled up. Is this what he looked like right afterward? Because his skin looks as if he’s been at the bottom of a river for a few days.”
“That photo was taken at the scene, within an hour of his death. No wounds, which is why they’re hanging their hat on the poison theory.”
“I don’t get it. Why were the police so interested in you?”
“Because I’m the counselor of record for one Atticus O’Sullivan, deceased. And when I emailed Mr. Black in the interest of starting a dialogue, I referred to a Mr. O’Sullivan, and the Anchorage police saw that when they went through his in-box in an attempt to get a clue. They asked the Tempe police to speak to me about it, and you can imagine how surprised they were to hear your name associated with a mysterious murder out of state.”
“Detective Kyle Geffert is still on the force, eh?”
“Indeed.”
“How did they connect Kodiak to me? He never kept any of my accounts under the O’Sullivan name, and when I emailed him myself I used an alias account.”
“They made the connection because, right after Mr. Black died, a man with strange tattoos on his head and wearing a ‘hideous cravat’—that’s a direct quote—approached the girlfriend, one Ayesha Salcedo, and he said to her, ‘Mr. Black is dead because of Atticus O’Sullivan. Please make sure he gets this.’ Then he gave her a note. She looked down to read it, and when she looked back up, he was gone.”
I could almost feel the color draining from my face; the room grew unaccountably cold and I felt sick. I knew who the murderer was by the description. “What did the note say?”
Hal flicked a finger at the folder. “It’s the next picture.”
I looked at the next photo and saw a square of paper printed in block letters with purple ink. It said, Atticus. We must talk. Find me. Werner.
“Auugh! I knew it! I had this guy under my sword, Hal, and I let him go!” The mysterious cause of death for Kodiak Black wasn’t a mystery at all. The very essence of his life had been drained from a distance. He had been murdered by Werner Drasche, the arcane lifeleech I had set free in France. Oh, I’d find him, all right, but we weren’t going to have a friendly chat. When you kill a friend of mine just to get my attention, there’s nothing left to say.