Staked (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #8)(67)
“O’Sullivan!” he called, and I peeked back around the corner to confirm it was him. Werner Drasche stood among his vampire entourage, looking up and down the intersection, plainly not in custody in Toronto anymore. And while he was no longer an arcane lifeleech, he was still a gigantic thorn in my side and showed a disturbing talent for outfoxing me. He must have been waiting out of sight, perhaps in the bar somewhere, and that was who the goggled vampire had called when he spotted me. I really should have killed him when I had the chance.
Well, Drasche could have this round; I was so extremely outgunned that there was no use in trying to tilt a lopsided battleground in my favor. I should count avoiding the ambush as a win.
Oberon, let’s go, I said to him through our mental link. Don’t wait to stop anyone. I’m going to fly out of here, and you follow along on the streets, okay? Try not to knock any tourists over.
<Okay.>
I shifted directly from otter to owl, since my arms were in good shape and I wouldn’t have to depend on that damaged left leg. I’d worry about healing it later. As I took wing in the direction of the Vltava River, I heard Drasche launch into a series of taunts.
“You can’t win this war, O’Sullivan! One way or another, we’ll get to you!”
He made a good point: My goal was still a good one, but I couldn’t win using current methods. I’d have to try another way to get to Theophilus, because they had been waiting for me at the Grand Hotel Bohemia with guns and infrared and Drasche’s personal force of undead Austrian muscle. Which meant that Leif had betrayed me again.
CHAPTER 18
There is a certain freedom granted in privacy—a sense of fulfillment and ease that comes with the simple knowledge that no one is watching. It’s why we feel all right about singing in the shower. And in this modern world, where we are constantly under surveillance of one kind or another, I suppose a compelling argument could be made that both our privacy and our freedom are illusions. Atticus and I don’t worry about conventional surveillance too much; stay off the Internet, use burner phones, and pay cash for everything you can, and that will at least make them work to find you. Using assumed identities is a huge help as well. But I haven’t had true privacy—true freedom—until now, with a divination cloak shielding me from the prying eyes of gods and seers of all kinds. And I know just how I want to celebrate that freedom.
I want to pluck out the metaphorical thorn that’s been embedded in my psyche for years and then see if I can’t find my way back to a happy place. Laksha’s question about where I am on my own spiritual journey has lingered in my mind, and I’ve been thinking about it—there was a rebuke there, and a well-deserved one. It put me in mind of Whitman’s rhetorical question about judgment in I Sing the Body Electric: Do you know so much yourself that you call the meanest ignorant?
Nope. I certainly do not. And the primary problem is that I do not know enough of myself. I have old wounds that have never fully healed, and I need to address them before I can move to help others. And in truth there is no balance that I can achieve but my own.
I have long delayed seeking that balance, in favor of more-pressing business, but I feel that it’s finally time to take care of it. Being able to take care of it was one of the primary reasons I became a Druid, but I have purposely waited since becoming bound to Gaia, to ensure that I would not act rashly. Instead, I have coolly planned a course of action that will serve Gaia and also serve my personal need to give my stepfather the finger.
As a child, when I came to live at his place in Kansas—the slightly smaller one, not the sprawling monstrosity he bought my senior year—I quickly saw that my mother was a prize instead of a person to him, and I was a burden he had to tolerate if he wanted the prize. He never laid a finger on me—I’m more fortunate than so many others in that regard—but the most love I was able to ever wring out of his face was a look of mild disgust. Never a kind word. Maybe it was because I was a tangible reminder that he had not always possessed my mother. Any interest he gave me was feigned, and that was only in the presence of others. I know my mom must have seen something good in him besides his bank account; her regard for him, at least, wasn’t feigned. I think she admires single-minded determination. My real dad had it and so does Beau—and I suppose I possess a fair measure of it myself.
The only time I think I ever saw him smile at me was when he was waving goodbye as I left Kansas for Arizona State.
So, yes: I have hurt feelings, which I probably should have sought to address long ago. His aggressive disdain, heaped on my real father’s distracted abandonment, did nothing good for my psyche. It’s why I took to playing alone outside as much as possible, enjoying an area that wasn’t so firmly under Beau’s control. Later it wasn’t playing but reading in a tree house that my mother had hired someone to build for me—Beau certainly wouldn’t do it. I stayed out past dark and burned through a whole lot of batteries for my flashlight. I felt more at home there than in the bedroom he allowed me to sleep in.
But there again, Beau Thatcher found a way to be hurtful. He has long regarded the whole world, including the people on it, as resources that exist for him and his cronies to exploit so that they may have their sprawling estates and luxury cars and congressmen in their pockets. His moral compass always points to himself; he is his own true north. He helped fund three or four corrupt scientists who denied the reality of climate change, giving his company a thin shield of shady science to protect his short-term profits.