Staked (The Iron Druid Chronicles, #8)(69)



“I probably could. And that’s something I need to keep in mind. I have a lot of options. Violence is a well-traveled road, and I’d rather take the one less traveled.”

Orlaith is not up to speed on her Robert Frost poetry, so she misses the reference. <I like well-traveled roads, though. Lots of smells to enjoy.>

“They do have their charms. Let’s dream about them.”

We snuggle up together in the grass, and I try counting llamas instead of sheep to get to sleep and continue healing my muscles from that encounter in Germany. When the morning comes, I shape-shift into a jaguar and give the llamas a friendly chase with Orlaith, just to get everyone’s blood pumping. Then I change back, get dressed, and we travel through Tír na nóg to get to Wichita, Kansas, where the offices of Beau Thatcher, my stepfather, can be found.

I charge up the silver storage of Scáthmhaide and use the bindings carved into it at Flidais’s instruction to make Orlaith and myself completely invisible. Then we enter the steel-and-glass tower of Thatcher Oil & Gas, travel up to the tenth floor, and stroll right past his secretary’s desk.

When I open the door to his office, he’s on the phone, red-faced and angry, practically shouting into the receiver. He’s hearing that his entire oil production is at a standstill and can’t be fixed. Customers will begin to get their oil elsewhere when they can’t fill orders. Good: He’s already having a bad day.

I haven’t seen him in the flesh for more than twelve years, and his flesh has suffered the ravages of time. He used to have very sharp features—bladed cheeks and a keen edge to the ridge of his nose—but the lines have softened and swelled now, there’s heavy luggage under his eyes, and his hair clings to his scalp like thin wavy patches of pond moss, if the moss were pale gray. His mouth still has the same cruel curl to it, though, and it frowns at the door when we walk through and close it behind us. His eyes drop away, seeing nothing, and he resumes his bilious shouting into the phone.

“Right now I don’t f*cking care how it happened; I care about getting it fixed, God damn it! Tell me when you’ll have it fixed!” He pauses to listen briefly and then interrupts. “Hey, are you a f*cking engineer or aren’t you? You’re supposed to know how shit works. You can’t tell me you don’t know how to fix it without me suspecting that you’re incompetent, you understand? Now, you’d better know how to fix it and tell me when it’ll be fixed before the hour’s up! Call me then!”

He slams down the phone and growls, “Shhhhit!” in his frustration. It makes all of yesterday’s work well worth it, and I smile.

That’s when I drop my invisibility and Orlaith’s and say, “Hello, Beau.”

He startles, his eyes going wide, and says, “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Granuaile. Don’t you remember? The stepdaughter you sent off to college in Arizona oh so long ago?”

“Bullshit. She’s dead. Tell me who you really are and how you got that big damn dog in here.”

I walk forward and seat myself in the plush leather chair opposite his mahogany desk. Orlaith sits next to me on the left.

“Come on, Beau. Believe your eyes. I’m Granuaile and I’m not dead. And, no, Mom doesn’t know. I’d appreciate it if you kept this between us.”

He takes a good long look at me and shakes his head. “I don’t believe it. Where the hell you been? Why’d you let us think you were dead?”

“That’s all secret stuff. The kind of thing where if I told you I’d have to kill you.”

“Whatever,” he says, waving my answer away. His hands drop below the desk after that and I almost comment but he continues to say, “I’m not really interested.”

“Oh, I know. You never were.” There would be no “Welcome home, Granuaile, I’m so glad you’re not dead!” coming from him.

He scowls at me. “What do you want? I’m busy.”

“No, you’re not. You have an oil empire that’s producing no oil right now, so you’re not busy at all. You have me to thank for that.”

“What?”

“Every well and refinery owned by TO and G stopped working yesterday, am I right?”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I made it happen.”

“How?”

“How is not the question you should be asking. You should be asking why. And it’s because enough is enough, or because of karma, or whatever you want to call it. I want you to stop. Reinvest in solar and wind, open a chain of hardware stores, I don’t care. Just stop being a blight on the earth.”

He sneers at me in disgust. “Oh, you’re a goddamn hippie, aren’t you?”

“I’m a Druid.”

“What you are is full of shit and about to be arrested,” he says.

The office doors burst open behind me, and four security guards rush in, presumably in response to a silent alarm he triggered behind his desk. They’re fit and well-paid professionals, not the slow and soggy kind. Orlaith spins and growls at them, and that makes them pull up for a second. I have Scáthmhaide in hand, and when they see that, along with the tomahawk I have at my hip, they pull out those hard-plastic police batons. The one closest to Orlaith looks like he’s going to use it on her, so I slide over there and poke him gently in the gut, forcing him back a couple of steps. “Let’s be kind to animals, sir.”

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