Hexed_ The Iron Druid Chronicles - Kevin Hearne [50]
“Good evening, sir,” an officer called out. I nodded back to him and returned my gaze to the club, cursing my stupidity. I should have learned my lesson back at Target, but I’d been too focused on accomplishing the night’s objective to worry about doing it surreptitiously. Wearing a sword was second nature to a man from the Iron Age, but to modern eyes it indicated a need for therapy.
“What are you doing there?” the officer said. I heard the patrol-car door whump closed. I didn’t have the time or patience for this. If these guys hung around, they might wind up in trouble or seriously complicate my ability to deal with trouble if it came boiling out of the club.
“Just waiting for a friend,” I said.
“With a sword and a couple of bats? You sure it’s a friend you’re waiting for?”
Regretting the necessity to use some of my stored power, I quietly cast camouflage on Fragarach and then responded more loudly, “What sword?”
“The sword that’s—hey, what’d you do with it?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Officer. I don’t have a sword.” I heard the driver’s-side door whump as his partner got out to join him, no doubt moving to flank me to my left.
“All right, tell you what—why don’t you drop the bats and show me some ID.”
I cast camouflage on the bats and said, “What bats?” Of course my hands were still curled around them, but now it looked as if I was just standing there with my fists at my sides. I should have done this in the first place, and then these lads would never have gotten a call about me. But I knew they wouldn’t just leave me alone now. The man with the disappearing weapons was far too curious a creature for them to ignore, and, besides, I’d made them look stupid. They’d want some payback, sure.
“Show me some ID,” the cop demanded again. He was far too peremptory for my taste. Honestly, I was trying to be one of the good guys here. There were times in my past when I probably deserved to be harassed, but this wasn’t one of them.
I cast camouflage on myself and asked, “Who are you talking to?” before silently stepping forward a couple of paces. That freaked their shit right out. They both put their hands to their guns and asked each other where I went. My camouflage isn’t perfect invisibility, but at night it might as well be. I stepped off to the right about ten yards or so as they looked all around them and called out for me to come back. The driver suggested that they call for backup.
“Backup for what, Frank?” the first officer said. “We’ve got nothing here.”
“Maybe he ran into the club,” Frank suggested.
“You want to check it out?” I didn’t like where this was going. Put a couple of guns into a bacchanalian setting and eventually those guns are going to be used.
“Yeah,” Frank said, “let’s go. That guy looked pretty dangerous.”
I looked pretty dangerous? There was something dangerous in the club, all right, but it wasn’t me. I had to do something quickly, so I decided to go the Three Stooges route, since the two cops had moved next to each other before tackling a club full of horny twenty-somethings. A Druid’s ability to see the connections between all natural things and bind them together encourages mischief at times, and while I usually did this sort of thing for an immature laugh, now I would be saving their lives. I muttered a binding between two sets of skin cells so that they couldn’t bear to be parted a second longer—specifically, the skin cells on the first officer’s right palm and the cells on Frank’s left cheek. I broke the binding as soon as it was consummated, and the effect was that the first officer gave Frank a beauty of a bitch slap.
Frank reacted as any American might to being slapped unexpectedly