Red hair dyed black and shoved underneath a Colorado Rockies cap pulled low, Granuaile had already taken care of her most distinguishable feature in one go. Hard to sneak up on anything in flat land like this. Sure, buddy, I replied through our mental link. We brought my Irish wolfhound, Oberon, along with us and promised him that we’d go hunting. Granuaile said I could look at it as a vacation from the rigors of training her, and since I’d recently escaped death in Oslo by the breadth of a whisker, I hadn’t needed much convincing to take a break for my mental health.
I hadn’t been able to fully persuade her that it was a bad idea to visit people who thought you were dead, so I tagged along in case she managed to get into trouble. For the past few years she’d been satisfied by updates from private investigators willing to do some long-distance stalking, but an overwhelming urge to lay eyes on her mother in person had overtaken her. We’d faked Granuaile’s death a few years ago-for very good reasons-but now she was worried about how her mom was coping. We were visiting in disguise because she wanted to check up on her mother. Said Wheat Festival was in Wellington, Kansas, the hometown of my apprentice, Granuaile MacTiernan. I’d fit right in on a beach in California with my surfer dude façade, but at the Kansas Wheat Festival, not so much. Or maybe they stare because I don’t look like a local. As a result, I look uncomfortable whenever I visit and people wonder if I’m suffering from dyspepsia. Sometimes my bindings fizzle for no apparent reason, and I know it’s just Amber messing with me. The magic doesn’t flow as well for me there anymore. The elemental-whom I’ve thought of as “Amber” since the early twentieth century, thanks to the “amber waves of grain” thing-heard me and I’ve been paying for it ever since. But once-and all it takes is once-I let slip the opinion that I thought the American central plains were a bit boring. I am usually quite careful to shield my thoughts and think strictly business in my Latin headspace, because that’s the one I use to talk with the elementals who grant me my powers as a Druid. My anxiety stems from impolitic thinking a long time ago. But I hear lots of nice things about it from other people. It’s like the dread you feel when going to meet a girl’s father: Though it’s probably going to be just fine, you’re aware that no matter how broadly he smiles, part of him wants you to be a eunuch and he wouldn’t mind performing the operation himself. It’s not a toe-curling type of fear, where shoulders tense with an incipient cringe it’s more of a vague apprehension, an expectation that something will go pear shaped and cause me great inconvenience. (This story takes place six years after Tricked, the fourth book of the Iron Druid Chronicles, and two weeks after the events of the novella Two Ravens and One Crow.) “The Demon Barker of Wheat Street” An Iron Druid Chronicles Short Story Kevin Hearne Carniepunk: The Demon Barker of Wheat Street
0 kommentar(er)
