Anyone who’s had more than one child—or more than one pet, for that matter—knows all about the grief and stress that comes with having multiple demands on their time. Imagine being the only Druid that the world’s elementals can call on for the better part of two millennia. There would, admittedly, be long stretches where everything was just fine, followed by intense periods where everything happened at once. Training a new Druid in secret was like that—long stretches of peaceful routine interrupted by days of time-consuming errands. When our normal errands were compounded by requests from elementals in New Zealand and Zimbabwe and a sly, half-drawled demand from Coyote—all on the same day—Granuaile overheard me mutter that it was as bad as the Gold Rush and asked me about it later, when we had returned to our routine of mental and physical training followed by relaxed evenings in front of the fire pit.

“What happened during the Gold Rush, Atticus?” she asked, as the logs popped and sent orange sparks into brief arcs of glory. We were having barbecue, smoked brisket and baked beans washed down with some cold beers. I told Oberon to stay away from the beans, to save my nose later.

“A bunch of idiots were into summoning demons at the time, and I had to pop around the world to deal with them when I was supposed to be hiding.”

“You mean like covens summoning hordes of hellions, or what?”

“No, individuals in different places. And if they’re summoning them, trading their souls or whatever for a favor, and then banishing them, that’s usually fine and none of my business. Elementals inform me that something’s being pulled through the planes just in case it gets out of hand, and sometimes it does.”

“Out of hand how?”

“Well, you remember what happened in Kansas not so long ago?”

“I could hardly forget those ghouls and all those poor people. The smell of it still haunts me.”

Oberon, my Irish wolfhound, with whom I have a mental bond, paused briefly from devouring his barbecue to chime in. <Yeah! Ghouls and demons smell really bad! Like, way worse than mustard.>

“The danger to the earth wasn’t so much the ghouls—I mean, they were certainly a danger to the people they were killing, but not a danger to Gaia. The danger was the demon who’d opened that portal to hell and was draining the earth to keep it open. When the demons get loose, they almost always want to bring as many of their buddies along as they can to party with them, and that is without exception at Gaia’s expense.”

“So demons got loose in the mid-nineteenth century?”

“Just one. But a really old and powerful one.”

<Was it worse than Gozer the Gozerian, who took the form of the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man?>

“Yes, Oberon, much worse than Gozer the Gozerian.”

“Excellent. Do we get a story for dessert, then?” Granuaile asked. “It sounds like this will be most instructive.”

“All right. After we do the dishes and wrap up the leftovers.”

<I like how you assume there will be leftovers, Atticus. It’s so optimistic of you. I’m ready for my third plate of brisket. Or you could just plop the rest on my plate and I’ll gnaw on it at my leisure.>

The trouble began in Palermo, Sicily, in the middle of January 1848, when a Qabbalist summoned a demon to aid him in fomenting revolution against the Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies—

<Wait, Atticus, is the Bourbon king of the Two Sicilies like the Sausage King of Chicago?>

“No, Oberon. It means he was just one of several different kings from the House of Bourbon that ruled some European countries at the time. Monarchies were dying out and facing plenty of opposition in 1848—lots of people wanted constitutions and an end to feudal systems—but they weren’t entirely gone.”

<So his name is just Bourbon? He doesn’t have anything to do with manipulating the bourbon market, thumbing his nose at common decency, or destroying the livers of an entire nation?>

“Bourbon was his name, not his game.”

<Huh. Well, that’s a missed storytelling opportunity, Atticus. I’m not impressed. One star.>

“What? You didn’t even let me finish my first sentence!”

<That’s more than most books get these days. Lots of people post reviews before a book is even written.>

“What if there are poodles in this story, Oberon? You will have given one star to frolicsome, poufy poodles from another age.”

<You mean … vintage poodles? There are vintage Italian poodles in this story?>

“Let me continue without interruption and you’ll find out.”

As I was saying, the Sicilian rebellion had a bit of help from a demon summoning that allowed Sicily to remain free until May of 1849, when Ferdinand II—the Bourbon king in question—reconquered it. I never bothered to go there, because the demon had been dismissed successfully and I didn’t travel through Tír na nÓg unless I absolutely had to. But I traced the trouble back there later on, to a Qabbalist named Stefano Pastore, who fled Sicily in May and came to California, having heard about the discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada. Like so many others, he thought he’d find his fortune there, picking up gold nuggets off the ground as the first few prospectors in the area were able to do.

But by the time he got there in the fall of 1849, the easy grab-’n’-go gold was all gone. You had to dig a shaft or pan for it, and there was plenty of competition. Stefano Pastore didn’t have the patience for such labor. Once the snow fell in the Sierra Nevada, he spent the winter in San Francisco, watching the miners who struck it rich burn away their fortunes in gambling or grow them by investing in large chunks of real estate or business ventures. He didn’t think them particularly brilliant or deserving of their fortunes: They’d just been lucky enough to get there first. That thought festered and convinced him that working hard for his fortune was a sucker’s game. So when spring arrived in 1850 and the miners headed for the hills again with picks and pans, he stayed behind to make his own luck, with the help of a pet demon. He probably thought, What the hell, my last summoning gave Sicilians sixteen months of freedom under the rule of Ruggero Settimo, and I could use sixteen months or more of being ridiculously rich.

So he got his candles and salt and all the other paraphernalia he needed for a major summoning and carefully inscribed his circles and wards on the floor and waited for the proper phase of the moon to spin around on April 26. He completed the summoning just fine—I was chilling out at the southern tip of South America on that date and got the report from Sequoia, the elemental for that stretch of California coast from the Bay Area up to the Klamath Mountains.

But it wasn’t long before the report stating the simple fact of the summoning became an outright request for aid. Sequoia woke me in the dead of night, in fact. //Druid required now// the call came, shuddering up my body and filtering into my consciousness. //Large demon free//

I’d been staying out of North America as much as possible once the Old World discovered the New World, because it quite frankly depressed me. Gripped by the unshakable conviction that they were perfectly justified in doing so—that, in fact, it was all their god’s plan somehow and he’d be pleased by their behavior—Europeans were busy wiping out Native Americans and enslaving Africans and doing whatever they could to exclude all nonwhite people from sharing in the riches to be gained by exploiting the continent’s abundant natural resources. I would have been in a constant rage if I had to deal with that level of stupid cruelty on a daily basis—and there was nothing I could do about it if I didn’t want Aenghus Óg to find me and deprive the earth of its only protector or get myself killed some other way while trying to protect humanity from itself—so my best option for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to chill out where other people were not.

Sequoia’s call forced me to shift into the redwoods near San Francisco and witness the great American Gold Rush. Once I got into town, I noticed immediately that I wasn’t dressed properly, and so did everyone else: It was the rare individual who wore a sword instead of a six-shooter. But I’d worry about blending in later.

I made my way to the boardinghouse where Stefano Pastore had taken a room. Sequoia directed me to where the portal in the planes had been opened. She could tell me the equivalent spot on the earth where the drain on her resources had occurred, but I discovered that it was a three-story building and had to search the rooms on each level until I found the gory aftermath on the third floor.

Stefano Pastore’s body lay sprawled in a pool of his own blood, his throat crushed and his blue swollen tongue hanging out of his mouth, eyes staring at the ceiling. The blood originated from a bonus and unnecessary disembowelment, considering his crushed airway. It had congealed and darkened now, the oxygen all gone, and stained the ring of salt he lay in. There was another, smaller ring nearby, into which he had summoned the demon. This was the setup diagrammed in The Greater Key of Solomon, albeit with some minor changes. He was supposed to be protected in one ring of salt while the demon was supposed to be contained in the other, but both rings had been deliberately broken by the toe of someone’s boot. That spurred plenty of questions. Had it been Pastore’s own boot? If so, he’d win an award for one of the most elaborate ritual suicides in history. But if it hadn’t been Pastore, who had broken the rings and gotten away with it? There weren’t any other bodies in the room. So the demon either purposely let the person live or he possessed the person. I was betting on the latter, because so-called “large demons” are rarely up for buddy capers with a random human. Tying up victims with their own intestines is much more their idea of a good time. And besides, demons can’t walk around without people noticing the smell. The only way they can pass undetected is to do what we saw them do in Kansas: possess a human, or animate a person’s corpse, and let the human façade disguise the demon’s true nature. And as long as that possessed human wore boots or walked on a floor separated from the earth, Sequoia wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the demon’s location for me.

I needed more information, but there wasn’t a convenient journal lying around in Pastore’s hand to tell me which demon he’d summoned. Which meant I’d have to wait for the demon to start whipping up some chaos and try to catch up.

There were two problems with that plan: One, San Francisco was already pretty chaotic without demonic help—there were sixty thousand men and two thousand women at the time—and, two, none of those people would automatically report anything strange to me. Nobody knew who I was. But they would report to Sheriff Jack Coffee Hays, San Francisco’s first official sheriff, who had just been elected three and a half weeks earlier, a barkeep told me.

The barkeep was quick to add, as he poured me a shot of rye, that Jack Coffee Hays had seen some shit. He’d been a Texas Ranger and then a colonel in the Mexican-American War and had somehow survived more than his fair share of fights. He wasn’t easily impressed.

Approaching him for help in this matter would take some finesse. If I walked up to him as I was—barefoot, in homespun clothes I had made myself—he’d dismiss me immediately. To be taken seriously I’d need a new outfit, something that said I had plenty of money and therefore deserved respect. Nothing made one so respectable as the appearance of wealth, and in almost any country, in any century, clothes were the easiest way to achieve that appearance. Except finding such clothing in San Francisco at that moment would be problematic. I didn’t have time to wait for something bespoke. I needed something much sooner, and since I wanted someone else to find Pastore’s body and report it to the sheriff before I met him, I took the opportunity to return to the redwoods and shift planes into Central Park in New York City. New York had a ready-made clothing industry by then, and hundreds if not thousands of tailors were doing alterations in the city. Many of them were Irish immigrants, in fact, because the potato famine was in progress, and many of them were working out of their homes for next to nothing. Once I had my basics from a men’s shop and stopped at a barber’s to make myself presentable, I spent a lovely couple of hours with the Flanagan family while Mrs. Flanagan worked on my alterations. I paid her nine times the going rate to set aside her other work, and I brought in a week’s worth of groceries besides and a bottle of the Irish for when they needed some fortitude down the road. I traded stories and laughs with Mr. Flanagan and his wee boys, and every one of us was happier and richer for the experience when I bid them farewell.

“Time-out,” Granuaile said. “Wasn’t there something you could have done about the potato famine?”

“That was the first I’d heard of it, honestly, five years in progress by that time. It wasn’t something an elemental would have shared with me. The Irish had grown dependent on a monoculture of potatoes, a mold arrived to feast on that monoculture, and that’s why we should always grow a wide variety of cultivars. But of course Americans are ignoring that lesson now and growing a single potato for all of its French fries. French Frymageddon is coming, I promise you. It would have come already except for the tons of pesticides they’re using to keep the crop viable.”

<I’ve always appreciated that you feed me a wide variety of meats, Atticus,> Oberon said. <But now I understand that eating the same thing is not only boring, it’s dangerous. I’d better not have any more of this brisket tonight.>

“You’re full, aren’t you?”

<Yeah, that too.>

The first thing I did when I returned to San Francisco was visit the impressive bookstore of Mr. Still on Portsmouth Square to look up something, and then I took a room at the American Hotel for an indefinite stay. Fragarach was stowed in the manager’s tall floor safe, which contained quite a few rifles in addition to the expected collections of wealth. I was careful to wear my new pair of uncomfortable shoes to prevent any of the Fae from tracking me via the effervescent joys of happy plant life—normally not a consideration, but my plane shifts in and out and in again to San Francisco had probably alerted Aenghus Óg that I was interested in something near there. All he had to do was inquire of Sequoia if something was wrong and she’d tell him about the escaped demon. Either he or one of his minions could very well show up at Stefano Pastore’s murder scene and begin the hunt for me even as I hunted for this demon—which meant the quicker I resolved this, the better. But horrors loosed out of hell never behave in such a way as to make my life easier.

I arrived in gloves to hide my tattoos; a burgundy satin waistcoat with a gold pocket watch ticking away inside; a ridiculous tie with a sunburst pin; all covered by charcoal-gray pinstripe coat and pants and topped with a bowler. My hair was straightened and greased and combed into a reddish oil slick, and I made sure to wax my mustache and coo approvingly at my bristling sideburns. In lieu of my sword I carried a cane, which would do as a short stave if it came to fighting but which gave the appearance that I was nursing an old injury like a trick knee.

That’s what I looked like when I stepped into Pastore’s murder scene for the second time, but there were two men standing over the body, muttering about how damn strange it was. I froze in the doorway and gasped to draw their attention, but added, “Oh, bollocks,” to signal immediately that I wasn’t American. “I’m too late.”

The two men rounded on me, one of them dropping his hand to his gun. He relaxed when he saw one hand on my cane, the other clutched in a fist over my heart, as if I was shocked by the scene.

“Who are you?”

I dropped my left hand on top of my right over the handle of the cane and gave a name befitting my disguise as an English toff, voice stiff as if I’d been laundered with the queen’s own starch: “Algernon Percy, Fourth Duke of Northumberland, expert on the occult and much too late to stop Mr. Pastore there from doing something terminally stupid.” Algernon Percy really was the name of the Duke of Northumberland at the time, though I doubt he looked much like me beyond the fact that we were both rather pale, and he certainly was no expert on the occult. But should the sheriff take the trouble to verify the name of the current duke, at least he wouldn’t catch me that way. I’d lifted the name straight out of a recent history of England’s military exploits that I found in Mr. Still’s establishment, working on the theory that officers were often noblemen, and, sure enough, the good duke was an admiral or some such.

“You know this man?”

“I do. And who might you be, good sir?”

“Sheriff Jack Hays,” the man with a star on his coat said, his voice carrying a bit of a Texas drawl. He had a broad forehead and eyes like coal, which glittered with a hint of diamond in them. His hat was in his hand, and I noted a thick wave of dark hair sweeping about his ears and a square jaw to hang his beard on. He kept his neck shaven, though at this point he had a day or two’s growth on it and it looked as if it would fight with a square of sandpaper to see who was rougher. He nodded over to the other man, a clean-shaven, sunburned lad with straw-colored hair, who wore a star on his coat as well. “This here’s my deputy, Kasey Princell.”

“It’s my very good fortune to meet you both. I do hope I can be of some service to you, since I’ve traveled around the earth chasing after this fellow.”

“What can you tell us about him?” Deputy Princell asked. He wasn’t from Texas; the vowels and inflection were different, had more of a lilt than a drawl to them, and that was the beginning of my education in American Southern accents. I found out later that he was from eastern Kentucky, in the Appalachians.

“He’s an Italian occultist, and I don’t mind telling you I’ve had a devil of a time finding him—if you’ll excuse the pun.”

The lawmen squinted at me, which I supposed meant they hadn’t caught the pun at all. “I’m not exactly sure what you mean by that,” Hays said. “I’ve seen my share of dead men, y’understand, but I ain’t never seen nothin’ like this.” He looked down at the body. “Choked to death an’ then his guts pulled out. Or maybe it was t’other way around. Overkill either way. And then there’s all these things on the floor. Salt and candles and whatnot. Looks like some kinda magical fixin’s if I had to guess. I dunno. Would you know anythin’ about that?”

“I would. I would indeed. May I come in?”

“Sure. Just don’t step in any o’ this mess.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.” I moved forward and surveyed the scene, pretending to take it all in for the first time. “Hmm. Yes. A bit diabolical, eh?”

“I dunno. Who do y’think mighta had it in for Mr. Pastore?”

“Well, we are clearly looking for whoever broke the circles of binding and protection and gave the demon a free shot at the deceased.”

“What now?” Hays said.

“Did you just say ‘demon’ or—Jack, what the hell is going on?” Deputy Princell said.

“Hell is precisely what is going on here, Deputy,” I replied. “You see the evidence of it before your eyes.”

“Maybe you better explain what you’re seein’ that we’re not,” Hays said.

“These circles you see here, the Hebrew and the Greek, the black candles, the silver dagger—what you called ‘magical fixin’s’—all of it was used to summon a demon. And it was a successful summoning.”

“Are you bein’ serious right now?” Deputy Princell said. “An honest-to-God demon?”

“Typically, demons are neither honest nor of God, but, yes, Deputy, I am deadly serious. Mr. Pastore’s body can attest to how deadly serious this sort of magic is. And I would point out that I would hardly journey all the way from England at great expense for the thrill of playing a small joke on a pair of complete strangers. I am telling you the absolute truth as I know it, gentlemen. This man summoned a demon, which escaped when someone broke the circles there and there, allowing the demon to do precisely what you see before you.”

“Well,” Hays said, “if we assume that’s all true—which is a damn big chaw to fit in my mouth, Mr. Percy, I don’t mind tellin’ ya—then that leaves us with some questions.”

Deputy Princell snorted. “Yeah, questions like ‘Are you shitting me?’ and ‘Why would anyone think summoning a demon was a good idea?’ ”

A flicker of a smile passed across the sheriff’s face at the deputy’s comment, a brief meteor of amusement streaking across the sky. But then he focused on me, glittering dark eyes promising a reckoning if I couldn’t answer to his satisfaction.

“Who besides you would have known this guy was summoning demons, Mr. Percy? And where is that person now? And, more important, where is the damn demon you say we have runnin’ around?”

I liked what I saw in Jack Hays. Give him a problem and he wanted to solve it, not worry about whether it was impossible. He was going to try first to see if it really was impossible. Of course, his first question had an edge to it. I was already a suspect.

“I assure you I have no idea who was responsible. But the demon in question has probably possessed him, since you see only one body here and not two. That possessed person will, I guarantee, be sowing chaos in your city. And when you find him and confront him, the demon may fight, or it may leave that host and possess someone else, leaving his victim bewildered at why the sheriff wants to arrest him.”

Deputy Princell shook his head. “Psssh. Sheriff, I’ve heard some bullshit in my day, but this is the biggest pile I ever heard.”

The sheriff’s eyes slid sideways to his deputy for a moment, then back to me. “Maybe it is and maybe it ain’t. Look, Mr. Percy, I appreciate you comin’ by. We gotta clean this all up. Is there a place I can find you if I need you later?”

“Certainly. I’m staying at the American Hotel. If you arrest someone who can’t remember the recent past, please do let me know. By tracing their paths we may be able to figure out where the demon is heading next.”

“Right. Thank you.” He’d dismissed me at that point as a wealthy eccentric, a crackpot with nothing better to do than tilt at windmills; he was swayed not only by his deputy but by a general disbelief in the fantastic. That was fine. When the bodies started piling up, he’d come find me and point me in the right direction. That’s all I wanted. I lowered my head slightly and put my fingertips to the brim of my bowler.

“Good day, sir.” I returned to the hotel, ordered tea in the lobby like a proper Victorian subject of the queen, and opened up a copy of The Pickwick Papers, which I’d purchased from Mr. Still’s shop. Dickens’ turgid prose is often painful to read, but I was just beginning to be amused by the appearance of a cockney character in chapter ten when Deputy Princell came to fetch me, apparently against his will.

“The sheriff would like to see you, Mr. Percy,” he said, his face communicating that he thought the sheriff was making a mistake. I put Dickens down and grabbed my cane.

“I’m at your service.”

The deputy, grinding his jaw the whole way and deferring all my questions to the sheriff, led me a couple of blocks north to a saloon and gambling house, which proved to be the dominant business model in the city. Exactly the sort of place a demon would find delightful. I smelled the carnage before I saw it: that sickly coppery smell of spilled blood with a top note of sulfurous fumes. I wrinkled my nose and the deputy saw it.

“I know. Smells like somebody ripped the biggest ol’ fart this side of the Mississippi and it’s just gonna live there from now on like your nasty in-laws.”

It occurred to me that the deputy might have some domestic issues. “I know you’re a skeptic, Deputy Princell, but that is the smell of a demon.”

He didn’t reply, just shook his head and invited me to precede him into the saloon.

Overturned tables. Shattered mirror behind the bar and the bottoms of broken bottles of booze, their tops shot off. Five bodies sprawled on the floor, but only shot this time, not choked or disemboweled.

A bearded man, perhaps the proprietor, stood behind the bar, in a stained white shirt with black bands around his biceps. With a bleak expression he stared at one of the bodies, as will a young person who realizes at some point that his childhood has run away and if he ever sees it again it’ll only be from a distance. Sheriff Jack Hays stood on the other side of the bar and had just finished asking him a question when I stepped in, but he was getting no response. He called the man’s name and snapped his fingers at him to focus his attention: “Stafford? Stafford. Hey, Bill.” My arrival turned the sheriff’s head.

“Ah! Mr. Percy. Maybe you can tell me if this situation here has anything to do with, uh … with what we discussed earlier.”

“Perhaps.” I joined him at the bar, ignoring the bodies, and pointed at Bill Stafford. “Can he tell us what happened?”

“I was just trying to get him to go through it again. Stafford!”

The man startled and rounded on the sheriff. “Hmm? Yes?”

Using a small amount of power stored in my bear charm, I switched my vision to the magical spectrum and saw that Stafford’s aura was still entirely human. But the demon had been here, in the open; the smell attested to that.

“Tell us one more time what happened.”

“Oh. Sure.” He had a Texas drawl like the sheriff’s, helping me get the cadence down for later use. “Well, that feller over there—the one that smells real bad—he came in a little while ago and started winnin’ big on the faro table. So big, in fact, he’d drawn himself a crowd, and there were side bets goin’ on and all manner of stuff. All I knew was that he was cleanin’ me out and we were gonna go bust if he kept goin’ on. Had my man Collins go over and say all nice ’n’ polite that he oughtta take that amazing luck of his somewhere else because we couldn’t afford him no more. An’ that’s when things got violent. He pushed Collins and told him to go spit, Collins pushed back, and then that man just picked Collins up and threw him across the room like he was a rag doll. Collins crashed into a poker game, and those men all got up to tell the guy who threw him a thing or two. Then there were guns out, and the lucky man wasn’t a smart man. It was four against one, and he shoots one dead and the others unload on him. But even though he had three bullets in him and got some more besides, he kept firing, one shot in the heart to each poker player, and only then did he fall down and die.”

“I see. And the other people in the bar?” I asked.

“They all ran out when the shooting started. I notice they took a bunch of money with them.”

“When did it start to smell in here?”

Stafford frowned. “I think it was when the faro player died.”

“And who was the last to leave?”

“Collins.”

The sheriff spoke up. “Your man who got thrown across the room and crashed into a table?”

“Yeah. Thought he was unconscious or maybe even dead, but he kinda jerked awake and staggered out, laughing like it was all funny. Didn’t say a word to me. I guess he quit. Wouldn’t blame him for wanting a new job after that.”

“That’s him, Sheriff,” I said, and he raised an eyebrow at me. “We need to find this Collins. That’s who we want.”

“He didn’t do nothin’ except what I told him to,” Bill Stafford said.

“What does Collins look like, Bill?” the sheriff asked. “We just want to ask him some questions.”

“Tall. Six foot. Green waistcoat, brown hair, blue eyes, and one o’ them funny Irish caps, you know the kind I mean? The ones that are flat on top.”

“Does he have a gun?”

“Naw. He’d move in close if he had to throw somebody out, then punch him out cold before he could draw.”

“Did he go right or left out of the door?”

“Left, I think.”

“All right.” The sheriff turned to Kasey Princell. “Deputy, I’d appreciate it if you could round up some help and get these people sorted so Mr. Stafford can get his business going again as soon as possible. I’m going to look for Mr. Collins with Mr. Percy here.”

We found Mr. Collins in an alley not one block away, moaning and vomiting in a sulfurous miasma.

“Ah, Lord a’mighty,” he said, his Irish accent plain as he dragged himself to a sitting position. “I feel terrible. What’s that fecking smell?”

I checked his aura: no demonic presence, just that lingering smell. He’d jumped into someone else already.

“What’s the last thing you remember?” I asked him, squatting by his side.

“Sailing across the saloon when some cheeky bastard threw me. He didn’t look that strong. Ugh, me back feels like shite. D’ye know where I am and how I got here?”

“A block away from the saloon,” I told him, deciding it best not to tell him he’d been briefly possessed. “I don’t suppose you remember seeing anyone after you got thrown?”

“No, I don’t.”

“All right,” Sheriff Hays said, “let’s get you back to the saloon.” We helped Collins up and walked him back, which took some effort because he really wasn’t in good shape. He’d need some rest and maybe a doctor, though doctors at that time were often more harm than help. I let the sheriff do most of the talking and wondered if the demon had abandoned Collins because of his injuries or if he was really smart enough to switch hosts while no one was looking. If he was, then Pastore hadn’t summoned some low-level imp anxious for destruction but something truly dangerous. Which fit perfectly with Sequoia’s alarm, but it still gave me pause.

Once we had a moment to speak freely outside, I told the sheriff, “We will most likely suffer through a few more of these imbroglios before we catch up with the beast.”

He squinted at me. “Are you talkin’ ’bout fights and usin’ a five-dollar word?”

“Apologies. Yes. Dead people accompanied by the smell of sulfur nearby.”

“Huh.” Hays grimaced and spat into the street. “Somethin’s been botherin’ me, Mr. Percy. Still not sure I believe in all this, but just in case: Say we catch up to this demon. Then whadda we do? ’Specially if it can give a man super strength and jump from person to person?”

“We bind it and exorcise it.”

“Exorcise, not exercise? You mean like with a priest?”

“No, there are other methods I’ll employ.”

“Am I gonna get to use these methods?”

“Unfortunately not.”

“Shootin’ it won’t do anything?”

“As the testimony of Mr. Stafford revealed, it will do plenty to the person it’s possessed, but the demon will simply choose a new host like Mr. Collins.”

“Well, how are you gonna do anything to it?”

“I’ll use the utmost caution to protect others, Sheriff, but will otherwise need to keep the process a secret.”

“Figured you’d say that. Mystery and unknowable crap. It’s like goin’ to church.”

“Ha! Yes, I see what you mean. Except I won’t ask you for a donation, Sheriff.”

“Yeah, you’d better not. What are you going to do next?”

“I’m going to take in the city, I think. Search for the beast in some other saloons. Now that he’s caused the death of five souls, he’ll be hungry for more.”

“I’ll let you get to it, then. Let me know if you find anything.”

He ducked back into the saloon to help Bill and his deputy with the crime scene, and I spun on my heel to look for new saloons. My plan was to stroll the streets and poke my head into each saloon to survey the auras of the crowd, in hopes of finding something unusual. It wasn’t much of a drain on my reserves and at least I’d get to know the town that way.

Unfortunately, I found something unusual in the very first place I visited, which was so packed that I had to step inside to do a thorough job: Across the room, a faery wearing the glamour of a surly, dusty miner glowered at the other patrons, doing the same thing as I was: Searching for someone. Searching for me.

The face underneath the glamour was a familiar one. He was one of Aenghus Óg’s boys, and, remarkably, he had a gun and wore gloves so that he could handle the iron. I exited with alacrity and prayed to the Morrigan that he hadn’t seen me. Then I prayed there weren’t any more faeries in town, or, if there were, they’d take care of the demon for me and I could simply leave.

In the meantime, I needed to hide and not do anything to draw attention. I retreated to my room with The Pickwick Papers, after first retrieving Fragarach from the hotel safe, and told myself it was a perfectly logical course of action to lay low for a small while. This demon was clearly a threat to humans but not, at the moment, a threat to Gaia, and I could afford to wait out the Fae and let them believe I wasn’t in San Francisco. Give them a day or two or five and they’d move on.

The demon didn’t move on, however. Sheriff Hays banged on my door in the middle of the night to report a new massacre in another saloon, which followed the same pattern: An incredibly lucky gambler drew plenty of attention until, suddenly, violence erupted and people died. That was food for thought, but I doubted I’d learn anything more by visiting in person, and I didn’t want to leave my room yet.

“I can’t help unless you know precisely where the demon is this instant, Sheriff,” I told him, which earned me a clenched jaw and a glare.

Once he left, I thought about the similarity of the incidents. The greater demons found it amusing to hunt via the seven deadly sins, and this demon appeared to have a pattern: He began by appealing to greed. The anger and violence necessary to harvest the souls was a necessary end but not the means by which he led them into temptation.

I remember sitting in my room on a rather uncomfortable chair at that point and saying out loud, “Oh, shit,” and putting Dickens aside. “What if it’s Mammon? What if Pastore was crazy enough to summon the biblical manifestation of greed?”

And once I framed my thinking that way, I knew what I had to do. Get out of town for a few days to throw off the Fae, sure, but I also needed to beat Mammon at his own game. I inquired at the front desk where I might be able to purchase a horse, and by dawn I was negotiating the sale of a recently captured mustang named Sally, about a hundred years before the song or the sports car came along. After breakfast I was outfitted and galloping south to round the San Francisco Bay. Once I got there on Sally’s own power, I dismounted, took off my shoe, and had a brief conversation with Sequoia, letting her know what I was up to and asking her to give Sally energy. With the elemental’s agreement and help, I remounted Sally and we headed west faster than Gandalf on Shadowfax, completely hidden from the awareness of Aenghus Óg and the Fae.

<Wait, Atticus, wait. I’m trying to picture this. You were wearing some kind of special hat as you rode Mustang Sally, right? Please tell me it was pointy.>

“It was a bowler hat, Oberon, which has a rounded top. Not a pointy wizard hat.”

<Yet again you fail your audience! The embellishment was there, waiting to be plucked like a Thanksgiving turkey, and you passed it by. And I haven’t heard about any vintage poodles either! One star.>

• • •

Leaving a demon behind me didn’t come without a good measure of guilt. In all likelihood I was dooming who knew how many men to die as a result of their own greed. But if I stayed in town, I may well have spent the days I’d be traveling trying to catch up to the demon anyway and they still would have died. And if the demon truly started to drain Gaia, Sequoia would tell me and I could shift back. In the meantime, it was important for me to ditch the Fae and fetch some demon bait.

We rode for a couple of days until we got to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Calaveras County, a good while before Mark Twain wrote about its celebrated jumping frog. By that time, Sequoia had communicated to the Sierra elemental what I needed, and it was waiting for me in a crevice of a granite cliff face that expanded into a small cave. It was an impressive pile of pure gold nuggets, the sort that dust-covered miners dreamed about, coaxed from the volcanic geology and collected for me in a shallow basin, ready to be stowed in my saddlebags. Just a small fraction of what would eventually be pulled out of those mountains, but it represented a fortune and the key to solving the problem of Mammon.

There was a mountain snake guarding the hoard like a miniature dragon, though he wasn’t particularly motivated. He gave me a desultory flick of his tongue but otherwise ignored me.

“Hold on,” Granuaile said. “You had Colorado move all that gold here so that Coyote could use it. Why didn’t you do the same thing back then?”

“Well, Coyote wasn’t there to force me to do it, I guess. And I had to get out of town anyway. Plus, this was my first experience of any kind with mining. I’d never bothered with it before, preferring to let the earth keep her treasures.”

I got back to San Francisco near the close of business on the third of May, confident that the Fae would have given up and moved elsewhere by then. South of town, I dismounted from Mustang Sally and removed my right shoe so that I could draw upon the earth’s energy. I took the tiniest sip, just enough to unbind a gold nugget into gold dust and then re-bind it to my coat and hat and even my pants, with a few flecks on my face and in my mustache for good measure. I was no longer a drab English nobleman: I was a shiny rich young man, quite literally covered in wealth.

It was not a plan without risk, but at that time in San Francisco, the only way to inspire more greed than winning big at gambling was to walk in with a huge haul of gold. Every new strike was cause for feverish excitement, and word got around fast when miners came in with their ore. My load of nearly pure nuggets and the gold dust on my clothes would cause instant excitement, and it did. I made it to the bank of Henry M. Naglee on Portsmouth Square just before close of business, and I had a significant crowd following me by that time, walking alongside Sally, eyeing the saddlebags, and licking their lips with thoughts of what must be in there. Their auras all churned with the angry orange tones of avarice, but none was a demon walking around in a meat suit. I didn’t give the name of Algernon Percy to the man who asked, “What’s your name, mister?”

“Silas Makepeace,” I told him in a drawl I hoped sounded like the sheriff’s, making the name up on the spot, because you could still do that back then. Nobody in the crowd knew me as Algernon Percy, the Duke of Northumberland, so there was no reason to wear that mask.

“You’re probably wearing a hundred dollars of gold dust on your coat. That must be some claim you have.”

“I’d say it is,” I allowed, giving him a grin, even though I wasn’t too sure what he meant.

“Where’s your claim?” someone else asked.

“Same place as everyone else’s. In the Sierra Nevada.”

“Yeah, but is it your claim or someone else’s?”

“Mine, of course.”

“So where is it?”

“That’s my business.”

“You gotta have it filed with the county anyway. Might as well tell us.”

That was alarming news. I had not filed any claim or even known that was something I was supposed to do. That’s the danger of living away from the world: You’re going to have to come back to it sometime, and customs and laws seem to always change to your disadvantage. I’d expected and prepared for someone to try to take my gold by force, but the idea that someone could use a legal maneuver to take it had never occurred to me. But it sounded as if I had at least a delaying tactic at my disposal. “You might as well go look up the file, because I ain’t tellin’.”

The man grumbled at that, but others laughed at him and said I was under no obligation to do anything but file my claim within thirty days of staking it out.

Once the bank was in sight, I reached out to Sally and told her to run for it, leaving the crowd behind. If I let them walk with me all the way there, it wouldn’t end well. One or more of them would offer to help me carry all that gold in. And when I refused, they’d find a way to escalate. There’d be a fight, and my gold would be stolen by one or more of them. So this was my chance to leave them behind, and they had no warning of it since I’d given no audible command to Sally. A couple of them were knocked down, having drawn far too close.

They shouted and chased after me, and in truth I had only fifty yards on them once I reached the hitching post, but it was enough to dismount and sling the saddlebags over my left shoulder, slip inside the bank, and close the door in some angry faces, shooting home a sliding bolt. Their shouts of dismay and fists hammering the door made me smile.

“Hey now,” a querulous voice said. “You can’t just bar the door like that. This is a business, and these are business hours.”

I turned my head and beheld a man with epic swaths of dark mustache sweeping down to billowy muttonchops on either side of his face. His chin was shorn clean, but his mouth would have been invisible under that mustache except that it was currently frowning at me, giving me a peek at a drawn lower lip. Predatory eyes glared at me over a long, straight nose, giving him the appearance of a hairy eagle. That was Henry Naglee, who eventually got out of the banking business and went on to be a vintner and a Union Army general in the Civil War.

“I’ve got a whole lot of gold here, mister,” I hollered over the pounding on the door, shrugging my shoulder once to indicate the heavy saddlebags, “and these gentlemen were fixin’ to take it off me. If I could sell it to you first, I’d sure feel a lot better about opening the door.”

Despite his insistence that the door remain open for business, there weren’t any customers besides me. He rose from his chair, which was situated behind a counter with a locked entrance, and emerged moments later with the jangling of a key, calling to someone unseen to come forward and help. Two men shortly appeared from the back, both impressively armed and bearded and ready to defend the riches inside the building. The three of them loomed behind me and shouted at the men outside to cut it out, the bank was closed. My pursuers gave up eventually but promised they’d see me later. That’s precisely what I wanted, so I taunted them and said through the door, “You do that.”

Word would get around now: Some punk named Silas Makepeace brought in one hell of a haul, and they were going to find out where he got it. They’d be loud about it, and their collective greed would draw the attention of the demon for sure. One way or another, we’d run into each other. There was no chance he’d go anywhere else when so much greed was concentrated in this city.

Satisfied that no one would be busting into the bank now, Henry Naglee pointed to my saddlebags. “May I?”

“Sure.” I flipped open one of them and watched his eyes as he peered inside at the nuggets. They widened, but only a bit, before he confined himself to a short nod.

“Very well, I see we have business to conduct, Mr….”

“Makepeace.”

“Welcome, sir.” He asked one of the armed men to remain at the door and told the other to watch the back door. “If you’ll meet me at that window, Mr. Makepeace, we can begin to assay your find.”

It was a lot of waiting around after that as Henry Naglee weighed my nuggets on his scales, but I had thirty pounds of solid stuff there and then another few ounces of gold dust on my clothes, which we laboriously brushed off once I surreptitiously unbound it from the material.

“Where you from, Mr. Makepeace?” Naglee asked me as he worked. “Sounds like you might be from the South.”

“Middle of nowhere, Texas.” I hoped my accent sounded convincing. Mr. Naglee, being from the North, might not be able to tell the difference between Southern accents very well, and I only needed the identity to hold up a little while longer. “Got tired of cows and decided to come west and see what all the fuss is about.”

“Looks like you’ve found the fuss.”

“I sure did. Don’t know much about this claim business, though.”

The banker paused and looked up at me. “You didn’t mine this from your own claim?”

“Well, what if I didn’t?”

“Then you must first prove that it wasn’t from someone else’s claim, and if it’s from unclaimed land, then you can file claim to it to prevent others from mining on it.”

“Oh. And how do I claim land?”

“First you must mark the boundaries of your claim with stakes—”

• • •

<Whoa, Atticus, wait. Steaks? You would just claim land by leaving delicious steaks around to rot?>

“No, Oberon, stakes, as in a wooden stake you drive into the ground. It’s a homophone.”

<Oh, good. I was going to say I’d never claim any land if I have to give up steaks to do it. And also? English is stupid. And I’m still waiting on a vintage poodle.>

“And you’ve been so patient too.”

Naglee continued, “And once you’ve finished staking your claim, you have thirty days to file the boundaries with the county and pay associated fees and so on. I assume you’re an American citizen?”

“Yeah,” I said, though of course I wasn’t. He didn’t question me, though, since I didn’t sound like I was from Europe.

“That’s very good. The city passed a foreign miners’ tax a couple weeks ago that comes to twenty dollars a month.”

I made no comment but learned later that that law was the first measure of many designed to discriminate against the Chinese, though of course it also would have affected men like Stefano Pastore. That might have been what pushed him to summon a demon rather than try to make a living at mining. Twenty dollars back then was like five hundred now.

Once I’d satisfied him that I hadn’t jumped someone else’s claim, Naglee eventually named a figure, and I didn’t argue but just took what he gave me. It was plenty for my purposes, which was to draw greedy eyes in my direction. A certain pair in particular. And I’d thought of how to use the claim laws in my favor.

When I emerged from the bank, clothes all clean of dust, saddlebags empty, but flush with disposable wealth, some of the unwashed men who’d followed me were waiting nearby. The sun was setting and I saw them silhouetted against the sky.

“There he is,” one said, and another said, “Let’s go.” I was still a target. The wealth had changed from gold to various coins and bills, but I was a newcomer who didn’t have any friends or even a gun. And they had come to California thinking they’d get rich quick but didn’t, which meant I was the best opportunity they would have for a while. All they had to do was roll me. But I still had my sword, and once I threw the saddlebags over Sally’s back, I drew it. That slowed them down. They weren’t all wearing guns: Only two of the five approaching me had them.

“If y’all wanna talk, talk from a distance, or I’ll open you up.”

“Sure,” one of them said. “That’s all we wanna do. Talk.” Their body language said different, but I pretended he was being sincere.

“Fine. I don’t know about you, but I’m thirsty. First round’s on me, gentlemen. Where’s can a body get somethin’ good to drink in this town?”

“The U.S. Exchange is pretty good,” one of the figures said. “They only water down their whiskey a little bit.”

“Sounds good. Maybe they’ll have a bottle hidden somewhere that isn’t watered down at all. Lead the way.”

It was only a couple of blocks or so to the U.S. Exchange, which sounded like a bank or a financial institution but was really a gambling hall that served liquor. Like everyplace else in San Francisco at the time, it had been hastily constructed out of wood, because when a boomtown is booming, you don’t want to miss a night of profit by building to last—the booms only last so long, and then the wooden structures are easily abandoned when the money dries up.

It was at least making pretentions of being fancy: They had a piano player, and I could only imagine where they’d shipped that piano in from. Surely not over land.

They had a couple of blackjack tables, faro tables, a roulette wheel, and plenty of other tables for poker or other card games. There were three women pouring whiskey and flirting with the miners. One of them came around to our table with a tray of glasses, and I bought one round to shoot and then another to sip.

I’d describe these men for you, except that I don’t remember their names. I was simply using them as a source of focused greed, hoping it would draw the demon to this particular building.

I slung them a fabricated story about my claim’s location, how I’d stumbled across it by accident, how there was so much more gold just lying around, no tunnels to be dug or anything, and I was sure it was the same all through that stretch of mountains, and they ate it up. They kept drinking. They were practically unconscious after an hour, but I was fine, because I kept breaking down the alcohol internally to prevent getting drunk. I didn’t have to fight them, and I gradually got the attention of everyone in the place, because word quickly spread throughout the hall, courtesy of the whiskey server, that I had found quite the strike somewhere and was rolling in it. Buying a round for everyone also got me some attention.

Leaving my would-be assailants behind in a drunken stupor, barely able to sit up, I performed what might be called an amateur mosey toward the roulette table. I took some time to understand the game and to chat, then I began placing bets. And cheating.

Not for any personal gain, of course: It was merely to attract my target. I would lose some but win a bit more so that, over time, I was amassing more and more money and others were riding along, placing their side bets.

“Time-out,” Granuaile said. “How did you cheat?”

“Whenever I wanted a sure win, I bound the surface of the roulette ball to the number I’d chosen, just long enough for it to stay in its little slot.”

“They never caught on?”

“I’d lose enough that they didn’t suspect. And I kept buying drinks and giving wads of money away to others, who would promptly lose it. The house was doing fine. I was winning enough to basically stay even with what I’d brought in. In the meantime, the atmosphere of greed kept rising.”

<Yeah, but what was the food like?> my hound asked.

“I was just getting to that, Oberon,” I said.

I took a break for dinner; the U.S. Exchange provided some sliced beef in a sugary barbecue sauce, pinto beans in the same glaze, and a mountain of cornbread. It allowed me time to tell some jokes and ingratiate myself with the staff. I couldn’t finish my meal—the portion was huge—so I asked if they might have a hound who’d enjoy it.

“We surely do,” said the bartender, who gave his name as Perkins and informed me that he was also the proprietor. He had curled his mustache with wax on the tips and had a cleft chin jutting out beneath it.

“What breed?”

“Standard poodle. The tall ones, you know, not the miniature kind.”

“Name?”

“Felicity, because our meeting was felicitous. Found her out on the Oregon Trail; she was near starved to death. She’d lost her people, and I’d lost mine, and we kept each other going.”

“Sorry to hear about your troubles,” I said. “I don’t suppose I could say hi to Felicity? I haven’t seen a dog for a long time. Maybe she’ll bring me enough luck to maintain a winning streak.”

He grinned at me. “Sure, why not. I’ll have Lucy take you back.”

Lucy was one of the women serving whiskey, and at Perkins’ request she took me back into the kitchen past the cook, where the poodle was bedded down. Felicity had a fine curly white coat and looked well fed. Her tail thumped the bed a couple of times and then she rose to say hello. She got some scritches and beef from me, and I learned from her that she thought Perkins was much nicer than most humans she’d met. That was good to know.

• • •

<Did she pee on the ones who weren’t nice to her?>

“What? Oberon, no.”

<Did you ask her?>

“It’s not something I would think to ask.”

<Well, I’ll give you one extra star for finally including a poodle and feeding her but then subtract it for pandering to me. So you’re still at one star.>

“It’s not pandering! Felicity still has a part to play in this. I said at the start there would be vintage poodles. Would you just let me finish?”

Granuaile did a poor job of stifling a laugh when she heard me protest the pandering charge.

<All right, go on,> Oberon said, all high and mighty as if he were doing me a favor.

When I returned to the saloon, I hoped that the mood would have noticeably shifted and my quarry would have appeared. A scan of the hall’s auras revealed nothing unusual, so it was back to work. I gambled and caroused and laughed. I got asked about my sword a lot and why I wore gloves. They were lucky, I said, and left it at that.

Gambling halls back then didn’t have closing times as long as there was money to be made. And since there was quite a bit of money changing hands—I was making sure of it—Perkins didn’t go to bed at a sensible hour. He had someone come in to take over but he stayed on, keeping an eye on things. There were several fights that broke out at the poker tables, but I kept everything cooking along nicely at the roulette table. Like the king in Hamlet, I took my rouse and kept wassail. But even with breaking down the alcohol and taking breaks every so often, I was getting tired and thinking about giving up. It was long past midnight—three A.M., if I’m not mistaken—before something shifted in the air.

A man with a slight beer gut strode into the hall then, wide-brimmed hat pulled low, his full dark beard kept trimmed, and a slim cigar smoldering at one corner of his mouth. Two guns hung low at his hips, and he had pointy steel-toed boots that were meant to be seen as much as worn; he wasn’t a working cowboy or a miner. He was something else.

Checking him out in the magical spectrum, I saw the black roiling stain in his aura that meant he was possessed. A demon was riding this man around like a meat limousine.

I finished up my roll at the roulette table, hoping to lose that round, and I did. I excused myself for a break and opted for a saunter instead of a mosey, beckoning to Perkins.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Makepeace, what can I get for you?” he said. I crooked a finger at him so that he would come closer and no one would overhear me.

“I’m not really Silas Makepeace,” I said, letting the Texas drawl go and returning to my English accent. “My name’s Algernon Percy and I’m working undercover for the sheriff. A man we’ve been looking for just walked in the door. Could you send someone to fetch Sheriff Hays here immediately? Tell him Percy’s found our man.”

“Okay. Is there going to be trouble?”

“Quite likely, but I hope we’ll be able to take care of it without anyone getting hurt. The faster the sheriff gets here, the less likely it is you’ll suffer any damages.”

“Which man?”

“Slim cigar, wide hat, fancy boots, string tie around his neck.” I bobbed my head in the general direction of the front door.

Perkins’ eyes shifted, stopped, and narrowed. “Never seen him before. But that doesn’t mean anything. All right, I’m on it.”

The piano player from earlier in the evening had gone home, and the new one was playing so ecstatically he might have been floating in a haze of laudanum, which is a hell of a drug.

The possessed man’s eyes fixed on the roulette table, where the largest concentration of greed was centered. If he followed the pattern he’d established elsewhere, he’d start betting there and keep winning until Perkins asked him to quit. Then things would get violent. And he would take as many people down as he could before slipping out of this body and finding a new host.

While Perkins sent his extra barkeep out to find the sheriff, I turned around and focused on those holsters. I used some energy in my bear charm to bind the iron to the leather so he’d never be able to draw. The iron resistance, both on my end and on the part of the gun itself, meant it took more energy than I would have liked. For good measure I fused the hammers down so he wouldn’t be able to shoot through the holster. It didn’t leave me with a whole lot of magic to draw on, but I hoped I wouldn’t need much more. Drawing power now would bring the wrong kind of attention.

The demon took his time scoping out the hall before moving to the roulette table, and I left the bar before his eyes got to me. I circled to the far side of the table and hid myself behind a couple of hangers-on. It wasn’t a long wait before he appeared at the table and started to manipulate things. Cheating, in other words, as I did. I watched in the magical spectrum. He made sure the main bettor lost while his side bet won. He would become the main bettor soon, and that would put us all on a dangerous path. I needed to get him away from the others before he seduced them with greed and killed them, claiming their souls for himself.

Upgrading to a brisk walk and carrying Fragarach in its scabbard in my left hand, I flanked the demon and tapped him on the shoulder before he could place his next bet.

“Say, partner, don’t I recognize you? What’s your name again?” I smiled at him as he turned to face me. He deliberately puffed a toxic cloud of cigar smoke my way before answering.

“Stephen Blackmoore.”

“Naw, that’s not your name. You’re Mammon, aren’t you?”

I did not expect the fist that plowed into my gut at that point, nor did I expect its speed or power. I thought I’d get a squint and a raspy Clint Eastwood challenge along the lines of “What’d you call me, punk?” before we got into trading fisticuffs, but, nope, I got a pile driver into my diaphragm. Doubling over was instinctive and I couldn’t help that, but I staggered back so he couldn’t follow up easily. He clipped me anyway on the shoulder, and the force of it caught me off-balance and drove me to the floor. I rolled, gasping for air, to avoid the stomp or kick I was sure would follow. He took a couple of pointy kicks at my head and missed; my tumbling took out a fun-sized man, who wasn’t aware that a fight had broken out and fell over me, cursing. That slowed down the demon long enough for me to regain my feet.

I was just in time to see another fist coming at me, and considering the power of his other punches, if I let it land I’d have my nose driven into my brain. I swept my left forearm in front of my face, knocking his fist to the left, and struck a couple of stiff fingers into his throat a split second later. The demon might not care about air or much else, but the meat wagon he was riding had reflexes. He reeled back and the cigar fell from his lips. I caught it, flipped the lit end toward him, and shoved it right down that gasping mouth. That gave him something more to think about. He might even be thinking about leaving the body of Stephen Blackmoore a bit early, since demons aren’t that great at healing.

Given enough space and time to breathe, I drew Fragarach from its scabbard and pointed it at him. “Freagroidh tu,” I said, activating the enchantment worked into the blade, and that bound him in place as well as any ward or ring of salt could. I let him spit out the cigar, but then I followed up in Old Irish: “You may neither move nor speak without my permission.” It didn’t matter if he understood me: Fragarach did. He froze up, glaring at me, and then I was faced with the old proverb about what to do when you catch a tiger by the tail. You’d better not let go.

The problem was that I had just done this in front of a whole bunch of witnesses. They might not have understood right then that they were witnessing a Druid squaring off against a demon from hell, but they knew something was weird, because a man with two guns wasn’t even trying to face down a guy with a sword, and the guy with the sword talked funny.

“Sorry, everybody,” I said in my uncertain Texas drawl. “We’ll take this elsewhere and let you carry on with your evenin’.” To the demon I said, “Let’s move over by the door and talk, real nice.”

By moving the tip of Fragarach, I could give him a bit of a nudge in the right direction but not really force him to move. The enchantment was designed to prevent movement more than to push or pull people around. And the demon inside Stephen Blackmoore really did not want to cooperate.

His hands dropped to his guns and he attempted to pull them out, only to find that he couldn’t. He shook and trembled all over, trying to break free of the enchantment, perhaps even to escape his host and possess someone else, but he was well contained. His eyes turned the color of boiled lobsters as his frustration and rage grew; his mouth dropped open, and the sound that erupted from it wasn’t the sort of thing a healthy person ever makes: It was pitched low, as if he ate a bad burrito an hour ago, but it was unmistakably a battle cry filled with a berserker’s promise of doom.

The saloon fell silent as everyone turned to stare. The piano player even stopped his mad tinkling of the keys.

“This man ain’t well,” I said. “Don’t touch him, please, just give us some space. He knows he needs to do what I say, but he doesn’t want to. Sorry, y’all. We’ll get out of your way as soon as we can.”

Stephen Blackmoore kept trying to shuck his guns free. “They’re not coming loose. I made sure of it. So let’s go talk, all right? It’s the only way to be rid of me.”

That was as much for the crowd as for the demon. Satisfied that there wouldn’t be any gunfire, they murmured and some of them politely turned their backs to resume their games. The piano player took his cue and pounded the keys once more.

“Go on,” I told the demon. “Walk toward the door.” The red glow in the eyes faded and the tremors in the limbs subsided as the demon decided not to fight it anymore. He walked toward the door with clenched fists and I kept the sword pointed at him, asking people not to get between us. There was a table with a few down-at-the-heels miners chatting over drinks. I asked them if we could sit there and threw some uncashed chips at them as a naked bribe. One of them asked for more, but the other two told him not to be an asshole; they’d just come out ahead on what was otherwise a shit night.

I had him sit across from me, his back to the door, and Lucy came over to ask if we wanted drinks. I ordered two shots of rye, but neither of us had any intention of actually drinking.

It was time to use the other power of Fragarach: compelling the truth. “Let’s get to it, shall we? I’m asking the demon possessing this human right now: What is your name?”

At first the demon was amused and a low chuckle burbled forth from Blackmoore’s burned throat, but then “Mammon” escaped his lips, and the flaming eyes returned as the demon realized he didn’t have a choice about answering.

“I thought so. Stefano Pastore was a fool to summon you. But what I want to know is this: Who helped you escape the summoning circle and kill Pastore?”

Blackmoore’s face twisted into a nasty grin. Mammon was delighted to answer that question. “Some other fool entered the room shortly after I was summoned, because I bellowed. Pastore didn’t protect against my influence on others. I promised the man incredible wealth and all he had to do was kick a bit of salt aside for me. Pastore begged him not to do it, but he was helpless to stop him. The man broke the circle and I possessed him. Then I used him to break Pastore’s circle of protection and pay him properly for his arrogance. Who are you?”

“I’ll ask the questions. Did you keep your promise to the man you possessed?”

“Yes. He had a fine run at faro and acquired more money than he’d ever seen, before someone tried to stop me and guns came out. But I took four more souls before I left his body.”

That sounded like that first night, when Mr. Collins got thrown across the room.

“And you’ve been doing something similar to that every night since?”

Another smile from the demon. He approved of these questions. “Yes. This is my kind of town.”

“Well, not anymore. I need you to go back to hell.” He simply stared at me, and I realized I hadn’t asked him a question. “You may speak freely so long as it is in English.”

“You cannot send me back,” he spat.

“Sure I can.”

“You are no priest. You are not one of the host either.”

“That’s true enough. But your spiritual opposites are not the only ones with an interest in keeping demons from roaming around this plane.”

“This weapon you have used to bind me,” he said, sneering at it, “cannot do any lasting harm to me.”

That was also true. I didn’t have a nice set of arrows blessed by the Virgin Mary, like that time in Mesa when we had to go after the fallen angel. Fragarach could dispatch most lesser demons, who had only a tenuous grip on their manifestations here, but Mammon was one of the true badasses. How do you destroy a pure manifestation of greed?

“I never said I was going to stab you with it,” I told him. “It’s doing what it needs to do, which is keep you in place while I get hold of something or someone that can harm you. You’ve heard of Brighid, First among the Fae, who can cast Cold Fire?”

The confidence and condescension melted away. “Yes.”

“She’s a friend. So it’s your call: Go back to hell of your own free will, where you will remain powerful and wind up paying no price for this little spree of yours, or stick around and be torn apart on this plane. You’ll be scattered and weak for centuries, and your influence will wane—and actually, now that I think about it, that might be best for everyone but you. I probably shouldn’t give you a choice, but I did say it would be your call.”

Looking back on that now, I think that might have been one of my greatest cock-ups. What would this country—and, by extension, the whole world—look like now if greed had taken a backseat to other vices in 1850? So many implications I should have thought through. But I wasn’t prioritizing the long term right then. I just wanted Mammon out of there and the short-term threat to the earth neutralized so that I could get back to hiding in Argentina.

“What’s it going to be, Mammon? Go back whole, or get blown to pieces?”

He trembled and shook again and the red rage eyes returned, but he had to make a decision and answer. “I’ll go back.”

I awarded him a smile. “Thank you. Very cooperative. But I have to press you on the matter of when, because this isn’t my first negotiation with folks who like to hide behind nonspecifics. So, will you go back to hell when I open a portal to the plane?”

“Yes,” he said through a clenched jaw. “But I swear I will—”

“Shut up now,” I said, and Fragarach cut him off.

Sheriff Jack Hays strode through the saloon doors and I hailed him. He looked less than pleased to see me.

“Where the hell you been, Percy?” he said, and that reminded me to switch accents. “We’ve had men dropping dead every night for—Jesus Christ.” He stopped once he took in the shaking form of Stephen Blackmoore. “Is this him?”

“That’s him, Sheriff,” I said. “And he’s agreed to return to hell.”

“Well, let’s get him out of here, then.”

“It would be better, I think, to get everyone out of here. Which is why I needed you. If we take him outside, there are too many things that can go wrong. We could be interrupted by most anyone—or witnessed by most anyone. We don’t want that.”

“Huh.” Hays glanced around at the busy gambling hall. “It’s gonna be a job to get them out of here when they’re havin’ such a high time.”

I began pulling chips and coins and cash out of my pockets and put them on the table. “Pay them all off. The proprietor too. Greed is a powerful motivator.” I smirked at Mammon as I said this, and he seethed.

“Jesus,” Hays said again, and Blackmoore’s body twitched as the sheriff began to gather up the money. He wisely began by visiting Perkins at the bar, then he told the piano player to leave off. He hollered until he could be heard, and once he had everyone’s attention, he told them to finish their current round or hand in their games and then move along, the U.S. Exchange was closing for the night. The loudest grumbling came from the poker players who were currently down in their personal counts. The sheriff went over to them and quietly used my money to take the sting out of it.

Once everyone was out but Blackmoore, Perkins, the sheriff, and me, the lawman shrugged his shoulders at me. “Now what?”

“Now I need two things,” I said. “I need a container or two of salt from the kitchen, Perkins. And, Sheriff, I hate to ask, but there’s no helping it because I have to keep this sword holding the demon still. I need you to take off my boots.”

Sheriff Hays’s lip curled, and he looked like he’d rather dine on hog slop. “Why do you need that?”

“I need a solid connection to the earth. Again, I apologize. Please keep whatever money you have left as payment.”

“Think I will,” he said, shoving it into his coat pockets as he stomped over. “Don’t tell nobody I did this.”

Perkins disappeared into the kitchen while the sheriff pulled my boots off. “Ain’t no earth in here, in case you didn’t notice,” he said.

“There will be.” I addressed the demon. “All right, Mammon, get up. Walk straight backward until I tell you to stop.” I wanted to do this away from the door in case someone came in, but to prevent that I asked the sheriff to stand guard and keep everyone out.

When Perkins returned from the kitchen, I used my left hand to sprinkle a generous line of salt underneath my sword hand, extending to either side, then gave the container back to Perkins. “I need you to continue to make a circle around this man, but stay out of arm’s reach the whole way around him, okay?”

Perkins developed a crease between his eyes. “You been drinkin’ my piano player’s laudanum?” he said.

“No, I’d never do that. Laudanum’s a hell of a drug.”

“What’s really going on here? Y’all told me this was a wanted man. Why don’t the sheriff just take him away?”

“Because, Perkins, there’s a demon inside this man, and we need to get him out.”

Perkins stared for a few seconds, then turned to Hays. “Sheriff?”

Hays nodded at him. “Just do what he says.”

“This is a damn crazy waste of salt,” he said, but he did as I asked while I kept close watch on Blackmoore.

“Thanks,” I said when he was finished. “Best get back behind the bar now.” As he turned, shaking his head, I used the last of the energy in my bear charm to access more: I unbound the cellulose of the floorboards beneath me so that I could sink through the wood and make contact with the earth. Buildings back then didn’t have cement foundations underneath them. They had stone and mortar foundations around the edges but just wood laid on top of earth in the middle.

With a fresh supply of energy from Gaia and contact with the elemental Sequoia, I told her I had captured the demon and needed to open a portal to return it to hell. Permission granted, I crafted a ward of containment around the ring of salt as a backup before I got to the really tricky part.

I had no idea what kind of person Stephen Blackmoore was when he wasn’t possessed, but I couldn’t simply toss him into hell while still alive. He should have his shot at life and a chance at redemption if he wanted to seek it. But to get Mammon out of Blackmoore, I would necessarily need to release him from the binding of Fragarach—and the demon knew it. He couldn’t talk, but he winked and grinned at me. The chances of him meekly slinking back to hell were nil.

I checked my ward, which was stronger than the salt anyway. I’d create the portal inside it. Nothing for it but to proceed: The longer I delayed, the greater the chance that someone would come along to interrupt—as someone had interrupted Stefano Pastore.

“When I release the binding, Mammon, you will exit Mr. Blackmoore as promised.”

“I never promised that. I only said I would go back to hell when you opened a portal.”

“You can’t take Mr. Blackmoore with you.”

“Oh, but that’s precisely what I’m going to do. He belongs to me every bit as much as that sword belongs to you.”

“Not now he doesn’t. He deserves to live his natural life first, and you can have his soul later.”

“Ha! You have no idea what this man deserves. But what are you going to do? Destroy him to destroy me? You would damn yourself in the process.”

“No, I’m not going to hell when I die. I belong to the Morrigan.”

The demon cocked Blackmoore’s head to one side. “The Morrigan? … Oh. You’re one of them. A Druid. I thought they were all dead.”

“Clearly not.”

Blackmoore closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled. When he opened his eyes again, he smiled at me. Or, rather, Mammon did. “Very well, Druid. I will leave Mr. Blackmoore when you release the binding and let him live his life.”

That was a bit too accommodating. “His natural life?” I pressed.

“Yes.”

“Fine. Do it.” I released Blackmoore from Fragarach’s grip, and oily orange smoke began to pour out of his ears, nostrils, and mouth. It swirled and coalesced behind him into a humanoid form, and when the smell hit me I threw up a little bit in my mouth.

Eventually the smoke stopped coming out of him, and Mammon manifested in his true shape—a grotesque starved thing of stringy muscles, like an Egon Schiele painting, except that he had a distended belly, pitiless barren eye sockets like mine shafts, and rows of serrated teeth in an unhinged jaw like some nightmare from the Marianas Trench.

His host wobbled and blinked as he came back to himself. “Stephen, come here,” I called to him. All he had to do was step out of the circle and he’d be safe. “Stephen!”

“Huh? Gah! Damn, why does my asshole feel like it’s on fire?”

Those were not, as last words go, particularly inspirational or profound. Mammon reached out from behind him, gripped his left shoulder, and then wrapped his long bony fingers around Blackmoore’s neck, ripping off his head, hat and all. This he threw unerringly at a kerosene lantern resting on the bar, which shattered and immediately ignited the cherrywood. Blackmoore’s head disappeared behind the bar and Perkins cried out in alarm, though I don’t know whether it was at the fire or at the appearance of a demon in his place of business.

But Mammon wasn’t done. He tore Blackmoore’s corpse apart limb by limb and chucked them at other lanterns in the hall, setting fires elsewhere.

“You promised him a natural life!” I shouted as he dismembered his victim.

“And he got one. I killed him quite naturally, with my bare hands,” Mammon said. “And it is natural for predators to tear apart their prey. Step into the circle, Druid, and I’ll show you how natural it is.”

“What the hell?” Deputy Kasey Princell stepped in to gape at the spectacle just then, and Sheriff Hays drew his gun and thunked the butt of it into Princell’s shoulder.

“Damn it, the whole place is going to burn down! Go get help or the town could go!”

I turned and saw that he was right. There were so many fires now and there was nothing but wood in the place. The U.S. Exchange was done for. But Perkins plainly did not want to believe that. He was trying to contain the fire on the bar with a towel while the rest of the hall flared up.

“Perkins!” I shouted as Princell exited. “Get out of here! You can’t save it!”

“We can stop it!” he replied. “Help me!”

“Perkins, we can’t!” I struggled to think of something he loved more than the business he’d built from scratch and gambled on a guess: “Think of Felicity, Perkins! You have to save Felicity! Get her out of here!”

He ceased his flailing and looked up from his immediate area, seeing that it was true. The building would burn down no matter what we did at that point. The volunteer firemen and bucket brigade would never get there in time. We were both already sweating, and it was a cool early morning.

“I hope you all go to hell!” he said, throwing down his bar towel and dashing back to the kitchen to fetch Felicity. I think that poodle saved him just by being there; if she hadn’t been, I believe he would have gladly burned with his saloon.

That, at least, was a silver lining to an otherwise legendary cock-up. As the flames popped and crackled and the heat and smoke grew, I realized what Mammon was trying to do: distract and delay until I had no choice but to leave myself. If I never opened that portal to hell, he never had to step through it.

The sheriff wasn’t distracted. He had something to kill and a fully functional firearm in his hand, and he’d just seen Mammon tear a man apart and toss his bits around the room. There was really no quibbling over the demon’s guilt. Hays stepped forward into the room to get a better angle and started firing. The bullets were on target but simply passed through. Mammon had taken a shape but was not really flesh occupying space. He just laughed as the sheriff poured bullets into him and the flames grew higher.

Focusing on the space where Blackmoore used to stand, I chanted the words to first bind that space to its equivalent space in hell, then to unbind the veil separating the planes. Mammon responded to this by plunging his clawed hand into Blackmoore’s headless, limbless torso, ripping out bloody ropes of intestine, and throwing them at me.

Such situations are a perfect example of why Druids must develop, at minimum, two different headspaces for battle. One must deal with the demands of the physical fight, while the other must remain undistracted to craft bindings.

I merely held up Fragarach with the flat of the blade presented to Mammon, so that nothing would hit me in the face, and continued. Stephen Blackmoore’s digestive system smacked wetly against either the blade or my body before dropping to the floor, and I was splattered with his blood and shit, but it could hardly be worse than the smell of Mammon himself.

When the binding was complete and hell yawned before Mammon’s feet, he roared and tossed Blackmoore’s torso at me. I took the trouble to duck under that one.

“Má ithis, nar chacair!” I told him in Gaeilge, a fantastic curse for one such as Mammon, who always wants more: It means, “May you eat but not defecate.”

He slid down through the portal as much as jumped into it, pulled by the strength of his own word, and I closed it up behind him. Sequoia would feel that and know that I’d done my duty.

//Harmony restored// I sent to her, and she replied in kind.

“I thought I’d seen everything,” Hays shouted past the roar of the inferno, “but I reckon I better rethink that. Come on, Percy, let’s go.”

“I’m headed out back to make sure Perkins really left,” I told him, pointing at the kitchen door, and he held my gaze for a moment, far too smart to accept that at face value, knowing he’d never see me again. Then a beam cracked above, and we nodded and parted ways. I escaped out the back door through the kitchen, making sure Perkins and Felicity were gone, and remembered to fetch Mustang Sally from where I had her stabled. I headed for the bound trees north of town, hoping I’d be able to shift out before my activity there drew a new batch of faeries from Aenghus Óg.

That episode turned out to be the second Great Fire of San Francisco, quite literally started by greed, which eventually consumed three city blocks and cost four million dollars in damages. Thanks to Deputy Princell’s quick work, the alarm was spread in time to prevent any deaths other than Stephen Blackmoore’s. And I was able to enjoy a year of peace with Mustang Sally in Argentina before she passed away of truly natural causes.

<You didn’t give her Immortali-Tea?> Oberon asked.

No, Oberon, I told him via our mental link. You’re only the second companion I’ve done that with.

<Why?>

Some people—and some creatures—don’t handle long lives very well. It changes them for the worse. But you just keep getting better, buddy.

<Oh. Thanks. I would give you a snack for that if I had one. Hey, would you like some brisket? I still have some here.>

I briefly glanced at the slobbery hunk of beef underneath Oberon’s paw. No thanks; I’m full.

<Who was the first companion you gave Immortali-Tea to?>

I’ll tell you some other night, okay? It’s a story in itself.

“That was quite a tale, Atticus,” Granuaile said. “I’ll be thinking about a world without greed for a while now. I think you might be right: Letting Mammon go back to hell might have been one of your worst cock-ups ever. It’s greed that makes us destroy Gaia bit by bit.”

I sighed and shrugged. “You won’t get any argument from me. I could have done better, no doubt. But as the world’s only Druid for so long, I’ve been living a life besieged. It’s why Gaia could use more of us.”

A slow grin spread across Granuaile’s face, and her eyes reflected the light of the fire. “Yes. I’ll be happy to help as soon as I’m able.”