The part of her divination that truly bothered me was the Heather wand, which suggested that the soon-to-be-dead warrior would be surprised before he bit the dust. I didn’t think Aenghus could do much to surprise me at this point, but that coven of witches certainly could. They had already surprised me several times, first with the runaround about making Aenghus impotent, then lying to my face about their alliance with him, and even giving me their leader’s blood with confidence that they could either steal it back or that I would never use it against them. And all of that was accomplished by only three of the witches in their coven: What would they surprise me with when the whole lot of them focused on me?
And now here, in Rula Bula, in Granuaile’s head, was another witch who claimed she could take on the whole Polish coven by herself, provided she had a certain ruby necklace-which obviously was a potent magical item or none of the cool witches would want to kill one another for it. Did I want to let someone that powerful off the leash?
Granuaile stopped in front of me and leaned over to get my attention before I could answer the question.
“Okay, Atticus, I’m going to let Laksha come out. Play nice.” She grinned impishly at me, and then her head lolled to one side as she relinquished control. When her head came back up, her expression was inscrutable, though a sense of old age was conveyed by a tightening around the eyes and mouth. Her accented voice greeted me with clipped consonants and vowels and the lilting intonation of Tamil speakers. “I have been looking forward to our conversation, Druid,” she said. “I am Laksha Kulasekaran, greeting you in peace.”
The transformation from a young, sunny Irish American girl to an ancient Indian witch was absolutely creepy, no matter how many words of peace came flowing out of Granuaile’s mouth. It gave me what Samuel Clemens used to call a shivering case of the fan-tods.