Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(58)

If I say it’s just personal, they feel like I’m blowing them off. If I tell them the truth—that I’m a Druid and the tattoos bind me to Gaia—they kind of smile uncertainly, nod, and then very carefully order their next round from Oliwia. Same reaction if I tell them I got inked in prison—though one guy does ask what I did time for.

“I killed a man … with this thumb!” He doesn’t get the reference to Ratatouille. He thinks I’m being serious and squints at me.

“You were in for murder and you’re already out?”

“Shh. They didn’t let me go. I escaped. But don’t tell anyone, okay?”

He finally understands I’m kidding at that point but isn’t amused, and apparently he’s a regular. “Hey, Oliwia, who is this new girl?” he says.

“Just another American hiding from all the other Americans with guns,” she tells him, and he cracks a smile at that.

“Well, she kills people with her thumb!”

After that particular shift I head to Malina Soko?owska’s house, across the river in the Rado?? neighborhood, to continue my Polish-language studies with the coven. I work mostly with Anna, who enjoys Szymborska’s poetry so much, but I make a point of posing a question to Agnieszka, who’s very accomplished at wards and took the lead in cloaking me from divination.

“Do you think it would be possible to put some kind of cloak on my tattoos?” I ask. “People keep asking me about them at the brewery and it’s annoying.”

“This is merely a visual cloak, yes? Not something that would cloak the powers or the bindings in any way?”

“Right.”

“Hmm.” She taps her chin as she considers, and Roksana pokes her head around the corner to speak up, her curls spilling free for once instead of bound up behind her head.

“Not to eavesdrop, but I overheard your question. What if we did a reverse charm instead of a cloak?”

“What? Encourage the eye to look elsewhere instead of ‘look specifically here’? I’m afraid that would make people look away from her altogether. And what about the part of that charm that affects desire? If we reverse that, then we could be encouraging people to be revolted.”

“Well, obviously I don’t have it all figured out,” Roksana replies, blinking rapidly through her glasses. “I’m just offering a starting point.”

“Oh, yes, I understand. There’s certainly plenty to consider.” Agnieszka turns to me and asks, “Give us some time to think about it?”

“Of course.” It’s only a couple of days before they come back with something, and they try it only on my healing circle to make sure they don’t mess up anything on my forearm, which is what allows me to shift planes and go home.

“This isn’t going to be a charm or a reverse charm or anything,” Agnieszka explains. “It was a fascinating conversation and we might use some of the ideas elsewhere, but for you, we think we’ve come up with a cloak.”

Berta first smears a clear but smelly goo on my hand. “Cooked it up myself,” she says, though I’d already assumed as much. It wasn’t the sort of thing one finds at CVS.

I thought Berta just enjoyed cooking when I first met her but it turns out that she and Martyna are the coven’s experts at potions and ritual ingredients. They cook and bake in the mundane sense as a way to one-up each other and often make me judge the results.

“What is it?”

“That’s a binder for the cloak. The cloak will attach to that binder, not your tattoos, but then that binder is being absorbed into your skin, so the cloak should stay there and conceal your tattoos without affecting your actual binding to the earth.”

“In theory?”

“Yes, in theory.”

The rest of the coven arrives and Agnieszka leads them in attaching the cloak. It’s much faster than the ritual for shielding me from divination, and when they’re finished, the healing circle on my hand fades from view.

“Oh, that is wicked cool,” I say, grinning at them.

“But you need to test it,” Malina says, handing me a knife. “We need to know if you can still heal.”

“Right.” I give myself a small cut on my left forearm, just enough to start the blood flowing a wee bit, then command my body to knit up the skin. The cut closes and you’d never know there was a wound. It works.

“Victory! Fist bumps all around! And mandatory preening at this evidence of your awesome skills!”

Success confirmed, the coven cloaks my forearm too, but I leave the shape-shifting bands on my biceps alone. I really like those. I give everyone hugs and have to judge two celebratory chocolate cakes before my shift begins at the brewery.

A couple of hours into it, around eight o’clock, a handsome man with a long-distance-runner’s physique approaches the bar, his cheeks falling away like the white cliffs of Dover and his jaw sharp as the edge of an anvil. Hair and clothes look like he has a date with a catalog photo shoot in a couple of hours. He’s crisp and clean and might not mind going shopping for a few hours. Pretty dreamy, if I’m being honest.

I ask him in Polish what I can get for him. His eyes flash down—not to my chest, which would be typical male behavior, but to my arms, which I have stretched out, leaning my weight on the bar. He’s looking in particular at my right arm.