Death & Honey Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Death and Honey

  Also by Delilah S. Dawson and Kevin Hearne

  Also by Delilah S. Dawson

  Also by Kevin Hearne

  Also by Chuck Wendig

  The Buzz Kill

  Chapter 1: Bee Alert

  Chapter 2: Now I’m a Bee Leaver

  Chapter 3: The Honey Badgely Don’t Care

  Chapter 4: Bee-wildered

  Chapter 5: A Rose by Any Other Name

  Chapter 6: Bad Bee-havior

  Chapter 7: Abuzz with Contradictions

  Chapter 8: Hive Had Enough Isolation

  Chapter 9: Setting Up the Sting

  Chapter 10: Hark! The Herald Wolfhound Sings

  Chapter 11: All Will Bee Well

  Grist of Bees

  Interlude: Tanager

  1. That Was Then…

  2. …This Is Now

  3. Memory, All Alone in the Moonlight

  4. Or Maybe Not Alone, After All

  5. Succor

  6. A Wayward’s Choice

  7. The Farm

  8. The Tree

  9. Kill or Bee Killed, Get It, Bee Killed, Shut Up, Never Mind

  10. Forgive Us Our Trespasses

  11. But First, Coffee

  12. Smoke Rose

  13. Burnt Ends

  14. The Meat Man Cometh

  15. Revelations of the Meat Man

  16. Monster Mission

  17. Mistakes Were Made

  18. Jane Coleman

  19. Eschatology

  20. Thunder Rumbles and the Craft Store Looms

  21. The Nature of Masks

  22. Shouting at the Dead

  23. Miles to Go

  24. The Drawer

  25. A Life of Reparation and Repentance

  26. The Left Coast

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright Notice

  The Buzz Kill by Kevin Hearne

  Grist of Bees by Delilah S. Dawson (writing as Lila Bowen)

  Interlude: Tanager by Chuck Wendig

  The Tales of Pell

  Kill the Farm Boy

  No Country for Old Gnomes

  Star Wars

  Phasma

  The Perfect Weapon (e-novella)

  The Shadow Series (as Lila Bowen)

  Wake of Vultures

  Conspiracy of Ravens

  Malice of Crows

  Treason of Hawks

  The Blud Series

  Wicked as They Come

  Wicked as She Wants

  Wicked After Midnight

  Wicked Ever After

  The Mysterious Madam Morpho (e-novella)

  The Peculiar Pets of Miss Pleasance (e-novella)

  The Damsel and the Daggerman (e-novella)

  Servants of the Storm

  Ladycastle

  Sparrowhawk

  Tie-in comics including: Marvel Action Spider-Man, Adventure Time #66-69, The X-Files Case Files: Florida Man #1-2, Rick and Morty: Pickle Rick, Star Wars Adventures #5-6, Star Wars Forces of Destiny: Rose and Paige

  The Seven Kennings

  A Plague of Giants

  The Iron Druid Chronicles

  Hounded

  Hexed

  Hammered

  Tricked

  Trapped

  Hunted

  Shattered

  Staked

  Besieged

  Scourged

  Oberon’s Meaty Mysteries

  The Purloined Poodle

  The Squirrel on the Train

  The Iron Druid Chronicles Short Stories

  The Chapel Perilous

  Two Tales of the Iron Druid Chronicles

  Star Wars

  Heir to the Jedi

  Star Wars

  Star Wars: Aftermath

  Star Wars: Life Debt

  Star Wars: Empire’s End

  Miriam Black

  Blackbirds

  Mockingbird

  The Cormorant

  Thunderbird

  The Raptor and the Wren

  Vultures

  The Heartland Trilogy

  Under the Empyrean Sky

  Blightborn

  The Harvest

  Mookie Pearl

  The Blue Blazes

  The Hellsblood Bride

  Zer0es

  Invasive

  Wanderers

  Writing Wisdom

  The Kick-Ass Writer: 1001 Ways to Write Great Fiction, Get Published, and Earn Your Audience

  Damn Fine Story: Mastering the Tools of a Powerful Narrative

  Bee Alert

  THE TRUE DANGER of trotting around Tasmania with a Druid is that there are so many interesting animals to bark at. It’s difficult to stay focused, honestly, because in the course of chasing a wombat, for example, you might startle a tiger quoll or a barred bandicoot. Or you might run into a bunch of wallabies and they’re loads of fun. Nothing on the island is really ready for me and Starbuck, however, and Atticus said it’s not fair, so we don’t hunt them seriously. It’s all just exercise for me and my Boston terrier buddy.

  Atticus has been healing Tasmanian devils every day for like five trillion days, I don’t know, but it seems like a long time and it’s not very interesting even if it’s super important, so Starbuck and I have to entertain ourselves somehow since we don’t have cable in the wild and can’t watch cooking shows anymore. Atticus says we can play around as we like while he’s busy healing as long as we follow the rules:

  Stay in mental shouting range

  Don’t kill anything

  Don’t dump on anyone’s lawn but go ahead on golf courses because they’re not technically lawns and maybe a rich guy will step in it

  Stay away from people and cars

  Sometimes that last one is tough when we are near a city. Right now we’re near one called Launceston, and you never know when you’ll run into hikers who immediately cluck their tongues and loudly condemn Atticus for letting us run around off the leash. Not that they know him. They just say things like “Some idiot’s dogs are loose,” or “I wish people would take better care of their pets,” or “Bloody hell, that’s a big dog!”

  Comments like that get my hackles up sometimes and I get tempted to go bark at them and tell them their socks are stupid or something else really damaging to human psyches, but Atticus said they might have pepper spray or cauliflower or other horrible weapons that could hurt us and we should just stay away no matter what they say—especially if they offer us food. “That’s going to be a trap every time,” he warned us.

  Ha! He didn’t need to tell me. I’m no puppy meeting his first cat! Besides, they usually offer things like dry dog biscuits and I have no interest in those. Atticus feeds us really well and someone would need to produce a saucier capable of whipping up some kind of hipster gravy before I’d even consider coming over for a look. And a sniff!

  Mmm. Rosemary sausage gravy. That’s the stuff. Uh…what was I talking about?

  Oh yeah! The danger of chasing things in Tasmania. Once Atticus found a den of devils to heal outside of Launceston, he let us go explore and we soon found a butterfly called a Tasmanian hairstreak, a brown-and-yellow fellow we’d seen before, and we followed him for a bit and snapped in the air beneath his wings. Chasing butterflies is kind of like playing with a balloon, except you never know where they’re going to land. But they have a thing for flowers the way we hounds have a thing for asses. They can smell things other creatures can’t.

  Starbuck said, distracting me from the hairstreak.

  I hoped it wasn’t a mean old wasp. But as soon as I asked, I had my answer as the buzz of wings reached my ears and I found the source: It was a honeybee, flitting among the white-petaled flowers of a leatherwood tree.

  I told Starbuck, who was much better now with his language but still needed plenty of help.

  he asked.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Starbuck said.

 

  It was nice to have a purpose to the day’s wanderings. I had learned all about bees from a nature documentary plus some additional things Atticus told me, and I was happy to tell Starbuck all about them as we waited for the honeybee to load up on nectar before heading back to the hive.

  Eventually, her legs were weighted down with a payload of vomit catalysts, and we followed her, crashing through underbrush for probably half a mile or something. I’m not sure, honestly, but I called out mentally to my Druid to make sure we weren’t breaking rule #1.

 

  Sure can, buddy, his voice replied in my head, and I was still getting used

to the fact that it had an Irish accent now. He’d been depressed for a while when we got here and then kinda snapped out of it when he realized that he no longer had to pretend to be anything but himself, that he could just serve Gaia from now on as the Irish lad he was. No gods were after him and he didn’t owe anyone any favors after this big fight he called Ragnarok. He had lost his right arm in that fight and said he was lucky that was all he lost, and the considerable upside was that he was free for the first time in eons, or epochs, or something like that. What are you up to? he asked.

 

  Okay, but try not to disturb it. It might be a commercial hive. Launceston is one of the hubs of the Tasmanian honey industry.

 

  We kept following the bee and came to an abrupt halt when she flew up a tree where a feral hive was wedged between the trunk and a lower branch. I only noted that briefly, however, as something else grabbed our attention.

  Starbuck noted.

  I added. At the base of the bee’s tree, sprawled on the ground face up, was a dead human white man. His face was swollen and red with bee stings, and he hadn’t been dead all that long. I’m not one of those fancy doctors they bring in on all the crime shows to talk about morbidity and body temperature and DNA evidence, but I’m a hound who can smell blood. That man had been bleeding quite a bit. There was a pool of it underneath him.

  His hands and forearms had pale, waxy skin and his hair was thick, dark, and styled somewhat wavy and poufy. He had been fond of product, I suppose. He had a rugby shirt on, blue jeans, and some chunky tan-colored hiking boots, all of which made it difficult to see where he’d been injured, but my guess was it had been in the back and somehow he wound up falling on top of it.

  So, he’d been perforated by bullets or ventilated with a knife and then the bees stung him. Or maybe the bees stung him first and then someone ventilated him for making the bees mad. Whatever it was, he had been bleeding and stung at nearly the same time. Hard to tell which killed him, but the bees ultimately didn’t matter. All that blood meant someone had murdered the dude, because bee stings don’t cause people to bleed out.

 

  Well, uh, is this a hypothetical question in which you’re suggesting we search for a crime scene and try to help the police?

 

  Oh, bollocks. I was afraid you were going to say that. What’s the crime?

 

  Wait, so the murderer might still be nearby? Oberon, be careful!

  We heard some rustling in the bushes off to our left. Starbuck turned his head, his bat-like ears on alert, and growled.

  he said.

  I gave a warning woof but the rustling only grew louder. Whatever was causing it wasn’t easily scared off.

 

  Start barking now and don’t stop until I get there, he said.

  Now I’m a Bee Leaver

  THE THING MAKING all the noise turned out to be a woman. She sounded like a happy person and probably was one until she came out of the bushes and saw us. She heard us barking and said, “Is that a puppy?”

  I am not a puppy and neither is Starbuck. She realized her error when she emerged from the undergrowth and laid eyes on us. She was a middle-aged white lady with yellow hair underneath a wide bonnet thing wrapped in flowers and feathers. She had khaki pants tucked into knee-high brown leather boots that looked and smelled new. The rest of her smelled like she’d sprayed most of a perfume bottle on herself before she went outside. Her right hand carried a cell phone and her left carried a water bottle, and she had a backpack on that looked full of stuff.

  Her pleasant smile melted away and her eyes widened in shock when focused on me. “Gah! You’re bloody huge!” Her gaze then shifted to the dead guy underneath the leatherwood tree, and her jaw dropped open and a small whine leaked out as she processed what she was seeing. Then she took a deep breath and belted out an impressive scream, supporting well from the diaphragm like a trained singer. She held it for three years or so before turning and diving back into the bushes.

  We were still barking like Atticus told us to but he heard the scream too.

  Oberon, who is that?

 

  Well, the good news is that she’ll probably call the police. The bad news is she’ll probably call the police.

 

  Police occasionally serve justice, yes. But sometimes what they do is an injustice.

 

  If you’re trying to be subtle about being fed soon, you’re failing.

 

  Not at being subtle.

 

  We heard Atticus coming a few weeks before he arrived.

  Okay, you can stop barking, he said in our heads. Then he saw the dead guy and said, “Oh, shit,” out loud.

 

  “Yes, the police need to get involved. But I don’t want to get involved, and now I don’t have a choice.”

 

  “Because that woman saw you. She will describe an Irish wolfhound and a Boston terrier standing next to the body. The police will trace you to me and then I’ll be a suspect—or at least questioned as to why I didn’t report the murder. So, now I have to report it.”

  He pulled out his cell phone and dialed 000, which is easier to remember than 90210 or whatever the emergency number is in the US. “And they’re going to be asking questions and my current passport is American, so I have to return to that accent now.” He grimaced as a tinny voice picked up the phone and asked him what his emergency was.

  “Yes, hello? I need to report a murder.”

 

  He switched back to mental conversation with me as he spoke out loud into his phone.

  Give me a minute here, Oberon. He gave his name as Connor Molloy, his best guess at the location, and no, he hadn’t touched the body, and yes, he’d wait nearby until officers arrived. Once he hung up and pocketed his phone, he looked at the body again.

  “Did you go anywhere near him? Sniff him up close, step in any of that blood?”

 

  “Starbuck? What about you?”

  Starbuck replied.

  “Good. I need you both to stay away from him. However, before the police arrive, I think it would be wise to see if we can figure out how he got here. Which way did the woman come from?”

  I lifted a paw and pointed across from us.

  “She was alone?”

 

  “Any blood on her?”

 

  “Okay. Without getting closer to the body, and trying not to disturb the ground at all, can the two of you use your noses and pick up his path to that tree? If you find it, then I want you to carefully follow it backwards, looking down to make sure you do not put your paws in any blood or footprints that might help the police.”

 

  Starbuck added. We put our noses to the ground and started snuffling but maybe holding back just a little bit. Starbuck found the trail before I did.