“Well, Talvi’s basically a Finnish wizard-shaman,” Bob said. “Back in the day, before they mostly signed on to the White Council, their mojo was kinda based on boasting.”
“Boasting?” I said.
“Like you’ve never done that before a fight,” Bob complained.
I bobbed my head to one side. He wasn’t wrong. Occasionally it was important to let the bad guys know who they were dealing with. Or maybe it was important to remindmyselfwho they were dealing with. Either way, I’d been known to lay out who I was before a fight to ground myself in my identity. “Okay,” I said.
“Their enemies were the Lapland witches,” Bob said. “Not like mortal women. Hags, scions of Loviatar, breeding amongst the human population. They hated the Finns, like pathologically, did all kinds of horrible stuff to them whenever they could.”
“So, Ms. Lapland is likely a hag--that wasn’t her true form I was seeing,” I said.
“Probably not, boss,” Bob said cheerfully. “My guess? She’s a Lapland witch who lost her bid to sex-enslave a demigod-level sorcerer, got her own spell turned back on her, and she’s likely a pretty damned tough practitioner herself. She probably resents her fate and I expect she doesn’t like men in general, and wizards in particular.”
“Fun,” I said. “How tough?”
“The Wardens took them on at least three to one, back when they were fighting them in the fifteenth century.”
“Ouch,” I said. “How come Lapland and Inverno are working for freaking Marcone?”
“Take that up with Mab,” Bob said. “But based on Inverno’s court records, it looks like she stuck the pair of them out in the mortal world not too long after Arctis Tor got slagged.”
I frowned. “She doesn’t trust them.”
“Guy’s ademigodof strife and division,” Bob said. “Could be it just hangs around him like a toxic cloud of radiation. Maybe she wanted him stored somewhere that wasn’t in her own back yard. Or maybe she did it to see if Marcone could handle it. I mean, you gotta admit… look at Chicago, boss. Strife and division are pretty much order of the day.”
“Point,” I muttered. I blew out a breath. “How tough is this nameless son likely to be?”
“Well,” Bob hedged. “Not Titan tough. But he isn’t a problem you can solve by punching.”
“I punched the Titan pretty hard.”
“Yeah, after she’d mopped the ring with every heavyweight around for several hours, wrecked a city, and was wobbling on her feet, and you came at her with a baseball bat,” Bob said. “Come on, boss.”
I frowned. “If he was so tough,” I said, “how come Mab didn’t have him in the ring, too?”
“What, you guys didn’t have enough strife and division on your team already?” Bob asked.
I grunted. “Point. Again.”
“I’m good with those.”
“What’s his weakness?”
“Boss?”
“Every one of these folklore yahoos has a weakness of some kind.”
“Well,” Bob said with a delicate cough, “his weakness is kind of the same as yours.”
“Eh?”
“He’s living under Mab’s aegis,” Bob explained. “Without that, he’ll have trouble, you know, continuing to breathe, due to all the enemies he’s made. Probably makes sense that he’s living pretty low profile.” Bob cleared his throat. “Boss. Maybe you should think about dropping this one.”
“Eh?” I asked.
“Look. I know you wanna help the hot teacher—”
“Tutor.”
