Hexed_ The Iron Druid Chronicles - Kevin Hearne [117]
A quarter mile east on Pecos, we found a charred and blackened Leif facedown on an empty expanse of gravel, next to a trench of violently churned earth. He’d obviously managed to quench the hellfire engulfing him and drag himself a short distance away, but now it appeared he’d reached the end of his strength.
“He’s not dead,” I said to the witches assembled around his body.
“Yes he is.” Berta begged to differ.
“Well, yes, you have a point, but I mean he’ll be okay. Still dead. But fine.”
“What about you?” Malina asked. “Your face looks like someone took a meat tenderizer to it.”
“I’ll be fine too,” I assured her. I was already feeling marginally better now that I had contact with the earth. “Just help me get Leif back to his car.”
Parts of Leif flaked off and blew away when we moved him. One of his fingers crumbled and fell like the tightly packed ash of a hand-rolled cigar.
“Eep!” Kazimiera cried when she saw this.
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’ll grow back. I think.”
We fished Leif’s keys out of his burned jeans and decided, for his own safety and mine, that he should make the return trip to Tempe in the trunk. Klaudia volunteered to run back and get his car. “Don’t ever tell him we did this, though,” I said as we stuffed him into the ass end of his Jaguar. “I don’t think he’d take it well.” Berta tittered.
I bade the witches farewell and expressed my hope they would prosper and grow strong again. It was the language of diplomacy and we all knew it, but it was the proper language in that time and place.
Dr. Snorri Jodursson was already at my house, watching The Fellowship of the Ring with my apprentice, so it wasn’t tough to find someone to take charge of Leif’s recovery. Snorri said he’d simply raid the blood bank, and he was nice enough to put my teeth back in place for me before I lay down to heal in the backyard. Said he wouldn’t even charge me this time.
As I stretched out gratefully on the familiar grass of my lawn with a worried Oberon nestled against my side, I hoped the near future would bring me a small portion of peace. I was tired of these constant distractions and the alarming rate at which I seemed to be losing my ears, and if the chaos would consent to desist for a while, I would heal and mourn and focus properly on what to do next.
There was a parcel of wilderness that needed my attention, which I had neglected for far too long.
Epilogue
It’s rare that I take the form of a stag. Though it’s the largest shape I can take, it’s still a bit lower on the food chain than I would like, and rare is the occasion when one of my other forms will not serve me better. But when the job at hand was lugging fifty-pound bags of topsoil miles across rugged terrain, it was the best option I had.
Granuaile and Oberon followed along and hauled a few things of their own as we hiked out to the blighted zone around Tony Cabin. They were carrying tools, our lunch, a set of clothes for me, and a five-gallon blue agave plant. I had a harness and travois hooked up to my shoulders so that I could drag 450 pounds of rich topsoil, teeming with all sorts of bacteria and nutrients, along the ground.
When we reached the edge of the blighted zone, my heart nearly broke; we were still four miles away from Tony Cabin, and there was so much to heal. If the cabin was at the center of a perfect circle, that meant we had fifty square miles to mend. The trees were little more than standing dead wood, and the cacti were lumps of desiccated tissue stretched over dry wooden ribs. The brush was all kindling now, lifeless and essentially petrified: There were no ants, no beetles, no bacteria or fungi to break down the plants and nourish new growth in the spring. But we had to start somewhere.
I unbound myself from the stag form and put on the clothes we’d brought along. Using the shovels Granuaile had carried, we dug up a few dead plants just off the trail and resolved to compost them. Then we excavated a small trench that led from living land into the drained area, much deeper than it was wide, and filled it with all