curled and she had a perfect pouf on the end of her tail like a tennis ball. I saw her for maybe five seconds, until she hopped into a Honda and her human drove her away. And now I can’t see a Honda without seeing her.>
But that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Kind of romantic? A vision of perfection you can treasure forever, unspoiled by reality
.
Look, Oberon, that man is lonely. He’s too skinny and sweaty, and I’m willing to bet you five cows that he’s socially awkward or he wouldn’t be staggering drunk at this hour. But now, for the rest of his life, he will remember the naked woman on the street who looked at him with desire. When people treat him like something untouchable, he will have that memory to comfort him
.
Then he’s misunderstood the nature of beauty. It doesn’t stay, except in our minds
.
We left the man and hurried to the sporting goods store, a place called Wojownika, which turned out to be only a few blocks away. I toyed with the idea of snagging some other weapons, but they were impractical inthis situation. We had no way to carry them, and cinching me up with saddlebags would be a terrible idea once I shape-shifted to anything else. Our best bet was to stay fast and unencumbered.
I didn’t like stealing, but I didn’t see an alternative. No one offers traveler’s checks for Druids on the run. I would prevail upon Atticus to send the targeted store an anonymous windfall later, if there was a later.
Oberon bellyached a bit about carrying knives in his mouth again—a pointless complaint since Gaia’s strength ensures our jaws never cramp or ache—but he has been uniformly delightful otherwise. I think his ability to live in the present keeps Atticus from panicking.
he said at one point.
My theory is that Oberon might be a master of Tao. He always sees what we filter out. The wind and the grass and something in the sky, sun or moon, shining on our backs as we run: They are gifts that humans toss away like socks on Christmas morning, because we see them every day and don’t think of them as gifts anymore. But new socks are always better than old socks. And the wind and grass and sky, I think, are better seen with new eyes than jaded ones. I hope my eyes will never grow old.
Chapter 7
I really wish castles had never become passé. I didn’t shed a tear at the passing of the feudal system or the chamber pot, but I’ve always loved the castles themselves. They’re so much fun to invade and take down from within, and they often have secret passages and catacombs and a tower, ivory or not, in which Someone Important usually lives and rarely comes down. Sometimes they have libraries with old tomes written in a crabbed Latin script full of alchemical recipes or musings on the mysteries of magical arts, complete with idiosyncratic spellings. I get nostalgic for the old days whenever I see European architecture that evokes the age of castles, and Poland is liberally peppered with those sorts of buildings. Perhaps it was nostalgia, along with a gnawing rumble of hunger, that encouraged me to stray from the fields and enter a small town in search of food. Well, that and the insistence of my hound. Aside from a side trip into Katowice to snag some knives for Granuaile, we had run all through the night, and Malina’s coven—presumably with Loki—was more than two hundred miles behind us. Around midmorning, my hound snapped us out of the running zone we were in.
Oberon said.
I immediately felt guilty. With Gaia replenishing ourstrength and with so much else on my mind, I hadn’t thought much of food. Our ability to snag three squares a day had been destroyed. We had become opportunists, snatching melons or whatever we could along the way, and once we scarfed it down, even though it was never enough, we kept thinking we’d run across something else soon. Too often we didn’t.
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