O N E

Could You Please Stop Killing My Goat?

LESSON LEARNED: If you take a Valkyrie out for coffee, you’ll get stuck with the check and a dead body. I hadn’t seen Samirah al-Abbas in almost six weeks, so when she called out of the blue and said we needed to talk about a matter of life and death, I agreed right away. (Technically I’m already dead, which means the whole

life-and-death

thing didn’t apply, but still . . . Sam sounded anxious.) She hadn’t yet arrived when I got to the Thinking Cup on Newbury Street. The place was packed as usual, so I queued up for coffee. A few seconds later, Sam ﬂew in—literally—right over the heads of the café patrons. Nobody batted an eye. Regular mortals aren’t good at pro- cessing magical stuff, which is fortunate, because otherwise Bostonians would spend most of their time running around in a panic from giants, trolls, ogres, and

einherjar