Hounded

too, and I didn’t know what those were for, though I assumed they weren’t friendly by their design—fail-safes, perhaps, or magical booby traps, or merely something for me to waste my time on.
    The other officers, I noted quickly, had nothing about them beyond their normal human auras—all tinged with aggression and stress, but that was only to be expected after being schooled by a lawyer. Hal followed Jimenez and the other cops as they spread out through the store, which meant I could safely focus all my attention on Fagles. He remained by the door, transfixed by something he saw on my counter shelves.
    » What’s that? « Fagles said, jerking his chin vaguely in my direction.
    » What’s what? «
    » That, « he said, removing his sunglasses and pointing, » That looks like a scabbard. You have a sword behind your counter? « He folded his sunglasses and slipped them into his shirt pocket before looking at me expectantly.
    » Nope. «
    » Don’t lie to me, I can see it! « Right. That told me quite a bit. If he could see the sword and not Oberon, who truly was sitting in plain sight on a table across the room, then Aenghus had given him a very selective ability: It wasn’t the ability to see through camouflage, which would have instantly revealed to him the purported target of his search; rather, it was the specific ability to see Fragarach, which was supposed to be magically cloaked. That cloak had worked very well on Bres, so it should work equally well on Fagles—except that he seemed attuned to it. How does one get attuned to a cloaked item? You need to have a lot of help from the person who cast the cloak in the first place. That meant Radomila, leader of the Sisters of the Three Auroras. Fagles was walking, talking evidence they were working against me with Aenghus Óg.
    » Is it a dog, Detective? « Hal asked, swinging around from surveying Jimenez’s progress to confront Fagles. He stopped a couple of paces away from the detective, far enough into the shop that he wouldn’t see what Fagles was looking at. » Because if it’s not, then it’s none of your business. «
    The detective ignored him and said to me, » That’s a deadly weapon you’re hiding, and you need a permit for that. Do you have a concealed-weapons permit? «
    » Don’t answer, « Hal told me, and pointed his cell phone at Fagles. » I am recording this, Detective. According to Arizona Revised Statute 13-3102, Subsection G, a permit is not necessary for weapons carried in a belt holster that is wholly or partially visible, or carried in a scabbard or case designed for carrying weapons that is wholly or partially visible. «
    Whoa. That’s why Hal gets $350 an hour. Quoting Arizona statutes, complete with their soul-destroying legalistic sentence structure? That’s Druidic.
    » That is not a concealed weapon, « Hal continued, » nor is it a dog, which is all you are authorized to search for. «
    I tuned the two of them out as they continued to wrangle over whether the scabbard was concealed or not on my shelf and turned my attention to the bindings floating about Fagles’s impeccably coiffed dome.
    My hunch was that the blue knots represented the binding that allowed him to see the cloak—which was, in turn, allowing him to penetrate the camouflage—so if I unraveled that particular binding, the problem of my sword would quite literally disappear. The trouble was that breaking the blue knots would snap the red ones too, and while I could appreciate the craft that went into these particular bindings, I still had no way of telling precisely what Aenghus had wrought there. Perhaps the Morrigan or Brighid could tell me precisely what spells the knots represented and how to deal with them safely, but the best I could figure was that the red knots were bad juju. If I took time to deal with it, it might » go off « in response to my tampering anyway, and I would still need to deal with the blue knot afterward, because I could tell Fagles wouldn’t give up until he tried taking the sword from me—Aenghus wouldn’t have it any other way. And the green knot? That would be a direct magical battle with Aenghus Óg for control of Fagles, during the course of which he would learn quite a bit about my abilities, and I didn’t want to tip my hand quite that much yet.
    Here, then, would be a true test of my wards and bindings: I decided to activate all the magic dampening I could from my shop’s wards, then go after the blue knots