Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(33)
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.
“Time-out,” Granuaile said. “Wasn’t there something you could have done about the potato famine?”
“That was the first I’d heard of it, honestly, five years in progress by that time. It wasn’t something an elemental would have shared with me. The Irish had grown dependent on a monoculture of potatoes, a mold arrived to feast on that monoculture, and that’s why we should always grow a wide variety of cultivars. But of course Americans are ignoring that lesson now and growing a single potato for all of its French fries. French Frymageddon is coming, I promise you. It would have come already except for the tons of pesticides they’re using to keep the crop viable.”
<I’ve always appreciated that you feed me a wide variety of meats, Atticus,> Oberon said. <But now I understand that eating the same thing is not only boring, it’s dangerous. I’d better not have any more of this brisket tonight.>
“You’re full, aren’t you?”
<Yeah, that too.>
The first thing I did when I returned to San Francisco was visit the impressive bookstore of Mr. Still on Portsmouth Square to look up something, and then I took a room at the American Hotel for an indefinite stay. Fragarach was stowed in the manager’s tall floor safe, which contained quite a few rifles in addition to the expected collections of wealth. I was careful to wear my new pair of uncomfortable shoes to prevent any of the Fae from tracking me via the effervescent joys of happy plant life—normally not a consideration, but my plane shifts in and out and in again to San Francisco had probably alerted Aenghus óg that I was interested in something near there. All he had to do was inquire of Sequoia if something was wrong and she’d tell him about the escaped demon. Either he or one of his minions could very well show up at Stefano Pastore’s murder scene and begin the hunt for me even as I hunted for this demon—which meant the quicker I resolved this, the better. But horrors loosed out of hell never behave in such a way as to make my life easier.