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By Root 766 0

the soil we’d hauled in. We spread the dead soil we’d dug up across the living, so that leaves and bugs and grasses and so on would fall or crawl upon it and gradually reinvigorate it.

We planted the agave in the trench and had to satisfy ourselves with pouring a couple of bottles of water on it to help it make the transition and take root.

Oberon asked, sniffing at the plant.

“This is just the beginning, Oberon,” I said aloud so that Granuaile could hear. “It’s an important first step.”

“Maybe next time. That might be too much of a shock right now.”

“Eventually I can get the earth’s attention and help it along, but there’s nothing for it to work with right now. Life is its medium, and there’s no life in that area, not even bacteria. We need to keep bringing in the raw material.”

I laughed. “How would I get heavy equipment here? There are no roads to this place. You know what the trail is like. It’s too rough. And most of this land is wilderness—completely untamed bush.”

Oberon looked down the trail toward Tony Cabin, still some four miles distant, then considered the lone agave near his feet.

“Yeah, it’s a big job, but I won’t feel well again until it’s finished. When I stand here and call to the earth, nothing answers.”

Oberon looked up at me.

Thanks, buddy, I said silently as I tried to surreptitiously zip up my jeans.

Acknowledgments

I know not how it goes with other writers, but for me, five months to finish a novel is akin to Maximum Warp, and it would not have been possible without my primary readers: Alan O’Bryan, Andrea Taylor, and Tawnya Graham-Schoolitz took time out of their busy lives to read each chapter as it was produced and give me valuable feedback. Allen Rouser, Mike Ruggiero, and Nick Steinkemper also read the work as early fans and gave me their thumbs-up.

Katarzyna and Leszek Rosinski were invaluable as translators for the Polish and Russian passages, and Andrea Hümer helped me out with the German. Any mistakes are mine, of course, and the accuracies are theirs.

Detective Dana Packer of the Lincoln, Rhode Island, Police Department helped by discussing what police procedures would be in a case like Perry’s. If the fictional Detective Geffert strays in any way from what he should have done, it’s because I didn’t hear Detective Packer correctly.

Evan Goldfried is my agent extraordinaire at JGLM, and I’m always appreciative of his tireless efforts on my behalf.

My editor at Del Rey, Tricia Pasternak, is undeniably the hoopiest frood in North America—but that’s not all! She’s also brilliant and helpful and I trust her judgment utterly. Her assistant editor, Mike Braff, deserves a proper spangenhelm for enduring the many slings and arrows of my outrageous pranks, and I am thankful for his help as well.

My wife and daughter were extremely supportive during the process, and words cannot express the depths of my gratitude for their love, encouragement, and curiosity about what Atticus and Oberon would do next.

The three-story building described in this book’s climactic battle is actually located on a street in Gilbert called Germann, rather than Pecos. I changed the name of the street because the locals inexplicably pronounce it like the word germane, which bears no phonetic relationship to the spelling, and I also did not wish to suggest, even by implication, that the German witches had chosen it as a forward base because of its seemingly close ties to their