Grimoire of the Lamb Read Free Page B

growled.
    “He just stole one of my rare books. One of the really evil ones.”
    “Not one of those summoning ones where you can call up something to eat Utah for breakfast?”
    “No, it’s the kind where you can kill anyone you want. Ideal for political assassinations.”
    “Shit. He swiped it from under your nose?”
    “He’s a serious magic user. He’s got something that can dissolve my bindings. I need to go after him in Egypt, and I need some help tracking him down.”
    “You want me to contact a pack there?”
    “Is there a pack in Cairo?”
    “Sure is. Guy named Yusuf is the alpha.”
    “That would be wonderful. I only need their tracking services. You know I’m good for whatever they charge. And please email to me whatever info you dig up and I’ll check it when I get to Egypt.”
    “What are you going to do when you find him?”
    “He wasted his chance at mercy when he stole the book. And he told me what he’s going to do with it.” He’d also told me who had written it, and that made the grimoire itself something I should have burned long ago. “So I think I’ll be applying Druidic law.”
    “Going to kill him, eh?”
    “Old school.”

    About five thousand years ago, the Sahara Desert was a lot more lush than it is today. It was still a desert, but more like the Sonoran Desert—plenty of plants and animals around, instead of miles of sand dunes and a few weak clumps of sharply bladed grass. It wasn’t all that bad a place, until the sorcerer Nebwenenef bound the Saharan elemental and tried to take its power for his own. He died trying to contain it, and the elemental died as well, its magic spreading up the Nile river valley, lying around for other wizards and Egyptian gods to feast on. The desert became an überdesert, and Gaia decided that sort of thing should never happen again. That’s why she created Druids.
    The primary responsibility of Druids is to protect the earth’s elementals from any sort ofmagical attack. Mundane attacks—like stopping industries from polluting the environment—are not really our business, but people tend to think that’s the sort of thing Druids would be worried about. I do worry about it, of course, but those attacks happen on such a vast scale that there’s very little I can do—and those sorts of threats to the earth didn’t exist when Druids were first conceived.
    Guys like Elkhashab, who desire power over men, sometimes try to harness the power of the earth to do it, however, and in those rare cases there’s quite a lot I can do. Elkhashab’s counter to my bindings indicated that he had a trump card for the earth’s magic, and as such I was quite literally bound to destroy him. Plus, you know, anyone following in the footsteps of Nebwenenef demanded all my attention. And he’d also punched me.
    I wouldn’t underestimate him again; this might go quickly, or it might not. If the latter were to be the case, I needed to make arrangements.
    The current girlfriend was first: Since I couldn’t tell her that she was dating a man who was thirty times as old as her grandfather and who sometimes had to deal with shady warlocks, a text message that I had a family emergency and I’d be gone for a week would have to suffice. We traded texts for a bit; she offered condolences, wondered if she could help, hoped it would work out for the best, and that was that.
    Oberon was a little harder to convince.
     he said.
    It’s going to be extremely dangerous, Oberon
.
    
    How many cats do you think you could handle at once, Oberon?
    
    There’s a cat goddess there named Bast. She doesn’t like me at all and has forbidden me to return to